let them fail ...

excuse me while i step up onto my soapbox for a few minutes. within a 24-hour period, i had two conversations and watched one movie that highlighted our society’s increasing desire to make life easy for its children. this sounds like a noble cause. but at what cost?

the trend was just beginning to grow in popularity when i was in high school. my graduating class was the first without a valedictorian speech, a decision that irked my friends and i to no end. and it’s only gotten worse since then. heaven forbid we acknowledge extraordinary achievement at the risk of making the rest of us feel less able.

we don’t use red pens. we don’t cross out wrong answers. and zeroes definitely aren’t permissible. everyone gets as many chances as it takes to avoid looking like a failure. everyone makes the team. and parents are ever-ready to come to their child’s rescue at the slightest hint of difficulty.

because, of course, we know that in the real world no one ever fails. everyone always wins. everyone is the same. and life is definitely fair.

the movie i watched was about the life of helen keller. after she went deaf and blind, her parents felt so bad for her that they didn’t enforce any limits or discipline. her father just couldn’t handle seeing his daughter cry. then they hired annie sullivan. she knew that it would take hard work - and a lot of tears - for helen to learn. to grow. to become an adult.

what disservice are we doing our children when we shield them from the inevitable pain of life. they’re going to learn that life is not fair. we can only protect them for so long. and the longer we try to protect them, the more harsh the wake-up call is going to be.

james 1:2-4 says that we should “consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

it says when, not if, we face trials. if we teach our children to avoid, instead of embrace, the trials that WILL come their way, then they’re not going to develop perseverance. when they go out into the world, they will be immature and incomplete, lacking the tools they need to fend for themselves.

just think about all the things that helen keller never would have accomplished if she had never been allowed to experience pain - never challenged to learn and function as a member of society. just think about all the things that our children will never accomplish if we don’t allow them to experience the pain of failure and unfairness.

the thing about learning from your mistakes, is that you have to actually make them in order to learn from them. do we believe our children are strong enough ... are we strong enough ... to let them make their own mistakes?