Unison Parenting Blog: Teaching Kids about Failure

With Spring arriving soon, the smell in the air reminds me of early season Little League baseball practice. I loved being a baseball coach for all three of my kids, spanning more than a decade, and I miss it every spring.

I specialized in the under-12 age groups, teaching kids good fundamentals while making it fun and sharing life lessons. In fact, when I retired from coaching, parents didn't praise me for how their kids learned baseball and had winning seasons. They instead pointed to the life lessons their kids had learned from me.

One of the biggest lessons involved failure. I told my players that baseball is a game of failure. The best players in the Hall of Fame only get three hits every ten times they bat. That means they fail most of the time. But I told them baseball is also a game of opportunity. You always get another turn at bat, whether it's the same game, next game, or next season. The ball will be hit to you again. You'll throw another pitch. There's always another chance.

Then I told them life is the same way. You will most certainly fail at times. But you'll always have another opportunity to get it right.

I had one player who was scared of the baseball hitting him. For two seasons, he struck out practically every time because he would wildly swing while ducking out of the batter's box. Through patience and encouragement, he eventually was able to hit the ball and become an average hitter.

Teaching your kids about failure and letting them fail is so important. Failure is shown to make people resilient. While constant failure is discouraging, some failure is still necessary to inoculate your kids, in a manner of speaking. I've seen kids that didn't know failure until they became adults, and it was hard on them; they had been sheltered from failure by their parents and were thrown off when confronted with real world failures.

Let your kids fail. Let life happen. Don't orchestrate success for them. If you're looking for an opportunity to teach them about failure and resiliency, baseball is a good option.