Let Them Fail: How Safe Failures Build Resilient Brains

While it is painful to watch our children struggle, immediately rescuing them robs them of the opportunity to develop persistence. Stepping back to allow safe failures is the only way they learn to keep trying despite failure and challenge.

Our instinct is to avoid risk for ourselves and our children but a frictionless life leaves children more fragile. In the same way that we build muscle strength through low-level stress, resilient brains are built by being in control of our own low-level stressors. It isn't the stress you force on your child that builds a persistent child, it's the stresses they move through by choice that builds that long term resilience. So, giving our children the opportunity to choose their own challenges, like this one, has a much more meaningful impact on their long term persistence than the challenges we give them.

Humans need the natural consequences that come from inexperience to learn and grow. Yes, your child needs a coach, and they absolutely need you to keep them safe, but when the stakes are low, you can step back and allow them to move through their frustration and figure things out on their own.

Trial and error is how children learn and create the maps in their mind that explain how the world works. We've all been there - You're sitting on the floor watching your child build a block tower or stack their figurines. We can see its unbalanced. We know from experience that it's going to fall. We anticipate the screaming, the tears, the frustration our little ones are going to feel and we jump in with a suggestion or a gentle correction. But every time we jump in, we take away an experience from our children. We want to avoid our own discomfort at our child's potential failure by teaching them what we've learned. That, however, isn't how young children learn.

Building resilience isn't just important for their future academic lives - research papers, chemistry labs, and soccer practice. Even at a young age, we can help our children learn that their emotions are temporary. Every time we help our child avoid an emotion, we take away their opportunity to experience, work through, and move past that emotion. We can be there to support them, but we don't need to be the keeper of their emotions. In fact, when we do, we rob them of the opportunity to recognize that feelings are just that - feelings. Feelings are not the stress. Feelings are not the failure. Feelings are just feelings, and they ALWAYS change.

Child psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Bruce Perry says "Children’s brains are shaped by what they do slowly and repeatedly over time. If they don’t have the chance to practice coping with small risks and dealing with the consequences of those choices, they won’t be well prepared for making larger and far more consequential decisions." We have to give our children the opportunity to take small risks or we risk stealing the opportunity from them in the future when they need it most.

The next time your child's block tower starts to wobble, take a deep breath, stay seated, and let it fall.