This is an article from The Atlantic that my Dad sent me a few weeks back, you may have seen it floating around Facebook. For those of you who don’t know my Dad is a high school teacher in the Lansing area. From the stories I have heard from him and other friends who work in education this article speaks the truth, we refuse to let our kids fail, we severely over-parent. I am not sure why we don’t allow our kids to fail. Perhaps we have invested so much time and money in them that failure isn’t an option. It could be that our pride gets in the way, when our children fail it reflects poorly on us. Or could it be we are worried about our child’s future and fear that any little hiccup will turn it a major setback.
But what if we use these setbacks as moments to teach, what if we use them as time to show our child grace.
As read this article I thought of the story of Peter. Jesus told Peter that he knew Peter was going deny knowing him three times. Jesus knew ahead of time that one of his closest followers was going to fail him. He didn’t stop it from happening, he let Peter fail. What Jesus did was offer Peter grace, he offered him grace, showed him love, albeit tough love, and gave him a job to do, he told Peter to “feed my sheep”.
What if we did the same with our children, what if we allowed them to fail even when we saw failure coming from a mile away. What if when they failed we told them we loved them, offered them grace and gave them a directive, we told them they have a job to do, even if that job is simply trying harder or cleaning up the mess their failure made.
Failure is good for our kids, it will help them in the long run. So I ask are you willing to let your kids fail?
Standale Reformed Parents 