It was with great excitement that we recently welcomed Jessica Lahey to Lake Forest Country Day School. Her book The Gift of Failure is an insightful and timely child development book. She eloquently describes the pressure that parents and children face along the path to college and how the fear of failure can cripple even the most adventurous and inquisitive children.

Twenty years ago, the idea of teaching children the importance of failure and how to bounce back from it was a radical one. It was commonly accepted that the path to school success, and success in later life, was dictated by a student's ability to know a lot of facts and consistently get things right. This paradigm has drastically shifted, and now we are actively teaching our children how to be persistent, develop grit, and how to prototype or iterate.

It is our hope that by teaching students grit and concepts like design thinking, they will be able to manage the inevitable hurdles and disappointments that come their way. We tell our children, “Everyone makes mistakes,” “Failure leads to success,” and “We learn from our mistakes.” Despite this encouragement, children do not always feel as though the adults in their lives are telling them the truth when it comes to failure.

Children often seem to learn more from what we do than what we say. As an educator and parent, I have devoted myself to helping children accept mistakes, embrace the unknown, and face the imposters of success and failure similarly. Unfortunately, I have not always managed to hide how I feel when I fail. As a child, I thought that when I made a mistake it was because I was a failure and mistakes were to be avoided at all costs. Even though I now know intellectually, “Failing does not mean I am a failure,” it can still be challenging for me when I fail.

I ask that you reflect on how you treat yourself when you fail and what your students observe. Are you kind to yourself and dust yourself off quickly or are you, at times like me, more hard on yourself than you would be to anyone else?

Talk to your students about your failures; how you feel when you make mistakes, and how you recover from them. Share with them the unhelpful beliefs you may have developed about mistakes and failure. Also, give yourself a break when things do go wrong. By doing this, you will show your students that failure is not to be feared and that it can truly be a gift.