Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

Failure
     
    Many parents send the painful message to their children: “If you fail, I won’t love you.” In receiving this message, children come to see failure not only as a threat of loss of love from their parents, but even worse, a fundamental attack on their value as people. Research has shown that parents with a high fear of failure punish failure, but don’t reward success. Other studies have found that parents who set unrealistic expectations and withdraw love when those expectations aren’t met produce fear of failure in children.The bottom line is that children who fear failure are taught by their parents to do so.
Popular Culture Makes Things Worse
     
    Unhealthy messages about failure are ubiquitous in our popular culture—on television, in the movies, on the Web, in magazines. And these messages reinforce those communicated by parents. The basic message that children receive these days through all the different forms of media is that “if you fail, you are a loser” who will be demeaned and rejected by all. This message of failure creates a culture of fear and avoidance of failure that prevents children from developing a vital sense of competence that, ironically enough, would reduce the chances of failure.
Avoiding Failure
     
    When children absorb this message of failure being unacceptable, they are driven to avoid failure and the specter of incompetence at all costs. There are three ways in which children can prevent themselves from failing. First, children can simply not engage in an activity in which they fear failure. If children don’t even try, they can’t fail. Young children will simply tell their parents that they don’t want to do it. I have seen children as young as three years old who were unwilling to even try to do something as seemingly unthreatening as walking on a beam at a playground or putting together a simple puzzle.
    When children get older, they manufacture reasons why they can’t participate, for example, injury, illness, damaged equipment, forgotten or lost materials, apparent lack of interest or motivation, or just plain refusal to take part. Unfortunately, when children avoid even the remotest chance of failure, they deprive themselves of vital opportunities to gain competence. And their reluctance to even try hurts their sense of competence even more, making them more resistant to trying in the future.
    Second, children can avoid failure by engaging in what is called self-defeating behavior in which, paradoxically, they cause themselves to fail, but have an excuse that protects them from the stigma of failure—“I would have done well, but I just didn’t feel like trying my hardest” or “I would have done just fine, but the teacher was totally unfair.” Because these failures are not their fault, children can’t be held responsible, and they can’t be labeled as failures with the associated personal and social repercussions that they believe accompany such failure.
    Third, many older children don’t have the luxury of not taking part or coming up with excuses, for example, children can’t just not go to school. So another way that children can avoid failure is to get as far away from failure as possible by becoming competent and successful. But children who are driven to avoid failure (rather than pursue success) are stuck in limbo between failure and real competence and success, a place I call the “safety zone,” in which the threat of failure is removed, for example, they have a B+ average or finish in the top 10 in their sport. They are far from failure, so no one can call them incompetent. But they are unwilling to intensify their efforts and take risks to fully demonstrate their competence and achieve real success because doing so would increase their chances of failure, which they must avoid at all costs.
The Value of Failure
     
    For those children afflicted with a fear of failure, failure is a ravenous beast that pursues them every moment of every day. There is no rest from the approaching specter of failure, and their primary motivation is to avoid failure no matter what, because the perceived consequences of failure are devastating.
    The problem is that children who suffer from a fear of failure have a skewed view of failure. The reality is that failure is an inevitable—and essential—part of life that offers far more benefits than costs. Failure can bolster children’s motivation in the future to overcomethe obstacles that caused the