
Parents: let your kids fail. You’ll be doing them a favor (2015) - devy
https://qz.com/527652/parents-let-your-kids-fail-youll-be-doing-them-a-favor/
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ocdtrekkie
My mother is a helicopter parent. She's one of those who, I swear, pioneered
the habit of emailing each teacher daily to check in over a decade ago.
Watching it with my much younger brother, it's very clear that it can
definitely negatively impact your drive to do things, if you know your parents
will fix it for you later. She won't even allow her kids to fail at
extracurricular activities, so it can be hard to really develop a sense of
urgency for getting stuff done that you need to do.

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SerLava
The effects of helicopter parenting are even worse than just not having a
sense of urgency.

When my wife was in high school, her mother would find out the results of
every single assignment before she did, using a tool on the school's website.

Ever seen those little 4 point pop quizzes to keep kids awake for class? 3 out
of 4 points is a fine result and barely impacts grades one iota... but that
individual assignment shows up as a 75%... a C grade. Which would trigger fits
of rage.

It was a living hell of unending anxiety.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yup, my mother hovers over that website constantly for my younger brother. I
feel like schools are hurting more than they help by making that website
available.

Especially since teachers are prone to do goofy things with their gradebooks.
I've seen a lot of teachers mark assignments as 0 until they're turned in,
even if they aren't due yet, for instance. Parents go into panic mode about
their kids getting "Fs" when the assignments aren't even due yet.

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SSH007
How do I go about using this advice? I feel like if I don't help my kids with
their work, and make them do it, then they would not care at all and it would
not get done. My parents were busy working and didn't care about me doing my
school work and now I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunities, if my
habits were better and if I had done well in school.

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mcgrath_sh
In general, I think that this is good advice. However, there are some things
that a parent shouldn't just let a child fail at if it is outside a known
pattern of behavior. For instance, if a kid is a good athlete and suddenly is
horrible at baseball, it shouldn't be chalked up to "he is a kid, he needs to
learn to overcome." To be fair though, I feel like a lot of parents are far
too quick to intervene. Intervention in "failure" should only come when it is
clear similar effort isn't producing similar results and there may be other
factors at play.

An example from my own life. I graduated high school with a very good GPA. I
was always a good student, did my homework, etc, etc. However, my Sophomore
year I ran into a horrible Spanish teacher. I tried consistently, studied
nightly (reviewing vocab with my mom, etc) and got Cs and Ds in the class. I
worked hard. My mom had no issues with the resulting grades. She did take
umbrage at my teacher's belittling of me. I was continually accused of not
caring, not studying, being lazy, and being stupid. Nothing could have been
further from the truth.

My mom knew I struggled with this, but it was not due to a lack of effort. She
intervened with the school multiple times due to my teaher's treatment of me.
I don't think that was a bad thing.

We later discovered that I have (what qualifies as) a learning disability when
it comes to language and auditory processing. Basically, it is exponentially
more difficult for me to hear the differences in how things are pronounced,
tone, accent, etc. This is most likely from my dozens of ear infections and
two ear surgeries as a child. I actually was exempt from language requirements
in University due to this.

Again, I was a very good student in other aspects and I was trying. Sometimes,
I wish my mother had intervened more and maybe said, "this is odd. She doesn't
fail like this. Something else is wrong here. With this effort, she shouldn't
be failing." But, it was a slight blip with an otherwise above average
student. I see why she didn't worry all that much.

As an aside, I can't really blame parents all that much for quickly
intervening. The cost of failure as a 14 year old is much higher than it was
even 14 years ago when I was that age. Kids cannot eascape one bad semester
when applying for college. It doesn't matter if grades and activities the
followings years were markedly improved. Even getting into good state schools
is quite competitive. If you had 2 good years, there will always be someone
who has 3.

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imranshariff
Haha, that do you thing, it will be smart to shout at the kid. NOO.. Offcourse
i will favor them..

