The gift of failure: how to step back and let your child succeed

Failure is too often characterised as a negative; an F in maths or a suspension from school. And in our desperation to protect our children from tripping up, we are over-parenting to an alarming degree – rushing to school at the whim of a phone call to deliver forgotten lunches or forgotten homework, or worse, doing that homework in order to ensure they gain top grades.
As a result, we are depriving our children of the most important lessons of childhood. Indeed, this level of over-protectiveness has the potential to ruin a child's confidence and undermine their education.
In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey offers a fascinating and eye-opening appraisal of how we came to be so risk-averse, and presents a series of steps to reeducate modern parents: to get them to step back and embrace their children's failures.
As Lahey has discovered, disappointments, rejections and criticisms are all actually opportunities in disguise. Again and again, the students from her...