Journal No. 2

The Canadian Child Care Federation

The Journal of The Canadian Child Care Federation

Summer 2018

Volume 32, No. 1

http://www.cccf-fcsge.ca/

Chosen article: The value in letting children fail

The core of true play

Author: Marie Poss

When I was scanning through all of the different articles from the CCCF website, this one really stood out for me because I am one to tell my own children to remember what they have learned from their mistakes rather than dwelling on them. I have an “instructions for life” Dalia Lama’s poster, and one of his messages is…” when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”.

Marie Poss is a Fanshawe College Professor, and her roles are Early Childhood Education faculty- Adventure Expedition and Interpretive Leadership faculty- Program development.  https://advancinglearning2018.sched.com/marieposs

Marie talks about the importance of allowing children to make mistakes and for us as parents and educators to allow for them to fail rather than shielding them from failing. In this article she explains how people like “Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Vera Wang, Thomas Edison, JK Rowling and Albert Einstein”. They all succeeded in spite of their failures and how failure is a natural way of learning. (cccf, 2018, p. 17).

Marie mentions Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. Where children can work with challenges that they can learn to master. When presented with hard activities where they need to use their problem-solving skills and self regulation. Children benefit from the rewards of achieving their goals. Not giving up when they make mistakes the first few times of trying the challenging activity, gives them great satisfaction of finishing the activity successfully.

The article also explains how no one is perfect, but yet we expect perfection from children. Marie mentions that we must allow children to make choices and learn from their choices. This will not only teach them self-regulation, but also resilience. “Giving children the independence to explore and learn from trail and error is essential for their success”. (cccf, 2018, p. 19).

One of the important key points in this article is to not try to protect children from failure.

I had to do some reflecting while reading this article because even though I tell my own kids to learn from their mistakes, I have to admit that I do protect the day care children from failing by organizing games where they all win and by offering activities that I know they are able to do without too much help. In some occasions when I see children doing something that is going to be challenging and that there may be a potential for failure, I try to help so they succeed and avoid disappointment that often ends up in a melt down.

Reading this article was a good reminder that it is okay to allow children try challenging things. I am making a commitment to stop myself from interfering when seeing children try something that I know will disappoint them if they fail. Making mistakes is part of life and a good way of learning.

In conclusion, the best thing we as parents and educators can do is to celebrate our children’s successes and encourage them to keep trying when they get discourage. Protecting them from failure is the biggest barrier we can put in front of them.