a guest post from Rabbi Dr. Roger Herst
Nobody I know thinks that sheltering kids from their mistakes is a good idea. But ironically, parents who strongly affirm that children can only grow by learning not to make the same mistake twice, fall into a terrible trap. Ask yourself why they end up not practicing what they preach.
First, it’s a matter of time management. To let kids fail and learn from the experience requires much parental time and patience. Time and patience most hard-pressed parents believe (quite rightly) they don’t have. Becoming parents occurs in the life-cycle just when we are the busiest with occupation, our own parents, establishing new homes, worrying about money and a host of other things sapping our time. If you find a parent with any surplus time, let me know.
So, it’s easy to say, let the kid learn through their mistakes. That presumes a parent can watch a kid waste time when to get through the day requires a fairly rigid schedule. It presumes we can sit by and watch a dangerous action occur, or let a kid fail to do homework. Parental hands off sounds good, but isn’t always practical.
That said, kids learn best through trial and error. We’ve forgotten that’s how we learned. In my generation parents practiced laissez faire parenthood. We were released on our own (with restrictions of course) and had to make our own way without intrusive parental guidance. And we became a generation of self-starters, comfortable with taking the initiative and oozing with self-confidence.
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So good parents must find a balance between letting their kids fail and stepping in early to ensure they will not. To my mind, it is a question of promoting decision making, figuring out what decisions a child can reasonably make for itself and letting him/her make that decision. Naturally, no parent can withdraw to allow a child to do injury or to make an egregious error that will be either unacceptably expensive or cause long-term harm. But that does not mean continuously managing a child’s choices. You know parents who do, resulting in long term damaged or their children—a lost of self-confidence and self-esteem and a long-term reliance upon others making decisions for them.
My axiom is: never make a decision for a child that the child can reasonably make for itself. And of course, the emphasis is on “reasonable.”
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About Roger E. Herst
Roger E. Herst, author of “A Simple Formula for Raising Happy Children”, is an ordained Reform rabbi with MBA and doctorate degrees. A father and grandfather, Herst regularly engages with parents in the form of Platonic dialogue – a cooperative Q-&-A approach meant to stimulate critical thinking – to yield logic-based solutions for raising happy children.
