Alfie Kohn asserts that when kids fail, instead of telling them to get used to it, parents need help to them develop positive responses. Dean Deborah Stipek explains the research behind it.
It isn't usually spelled out quite so bluntly, but an awful lot of parenting practices are based on the belief that the best way to get kids ready for the painful things that may happen to them later is to make sure they experience plenty of pain while they're young.
I call this BGUTI (rhymes with duty), which is the acronym of Better Get Used To It.
If adults allow—or perhaps even require—children to play a game in which the point is to slam a ball at someone before he or she can get out of the way, or hand out zeroes to underscore a child's academic failure, or demand that most young athletes go home without even a consolation prize (in order to impress upon them the difference between them and the winners), well, sure, the kids might feel lousy—about themselves, about the people around them, and about life itself—but that's the point. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the sooner they learn that, the better they’ll be at dealing with it.
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... Here’s what we learn from psychology: What’s most reliably associated with success are prior experiences with success, not with failure. Although there are exceptions, the most likely consequence of having failed at something is that a child will come to see himself as lacking competence. And the result of that belief is apt to be more failure. All else being equal, a student who gets a zero is far more likely to give up (and perhaps act up) than to try harder.
We may wish that a child who can’t seem to get on base, or spit out a list of facts from memory during a test, or coax anything more than a hideous shriek from his violin will react by squaring his shoulders, reciting the mantra of The Little Engine That Could, and redoubling his efforts until, gosh darn it, he turns things around. But wishing doesn’t make it true. That turn of events remains the exception rather than the rule. It’s true that kids learn from failure, but what they’re likely to learn is that they’re failures.
In a typical experiment, children are asked to solve problems that are rigged to ensure failure. After that, they’re asked to solve problems that are clearly within their capabilities. What happens? Even the latter problems now tend to paralyze them because a spiral of failure has been set into motion. This doesn’t happen in every case, of course, but for at least half a century researchers have been documenting the same basic effect with children of various ages.
Failure often proves damaging in part, as Deborah Stipek of Stanford University explains, because it changes children’s understanding of why they succeed and why they fail. Specifically, those who have learned to see themselves as failures are “more likely to attribute success [when it does happen] to external causes, and [to attribute] failure to a lack of ability” as compared to “children who have a history of good performance.” A kid who doesn’t do well assumes that if he does succeed, he must have just gotten lucky—or that the task was easy. And he assumes that if he fails again, which he regards as more likely, it’s because he doesn’t have what it takes: intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent, whatever.
Watch a video with Deborah Stipek, Claude Steele, Carol Dweck and Geoff Cohen on identity, motivation and stereotype threat.
