The problems and pitfalls of telling our adult children what to do
We do our best to keep our children from making mistakes but what happens when they are grown up?
There’s a lot of talk recently about letting children fail so they can learn how to live. But what happens when you have adult “kids” and you’re a perennial parent like me?
It is our strongest instinct as parents to rescue our children. But we shouldn’t always do so, says author and teacher, Jessica Lahey in her recent, thoughtful book The Gift of Failure. Parents of growing children do them no favours by scooping them up from the playground of life to save them from every slip and fall. When our children are young, Lahey explains, they learn from failure so we must let them experience it rather than rush in to protect them from the consequences.
This is a concept I well knew in theory years ago when my son left his biology textbook in his locker at school one evening before a big exam.
But what happens when our growing children are grown?
If our young child falls off of a playground slide, his scraped knee heals. If our teenager doesn’t get accepted into the college of his choice, he’ll probably do well at another school.