My Children Deserve to Fail

It’s curious how much energy we deploy to save our children from their own failures. It’s an open secret that we mostly want our children to be better than we are and not repeat our failures. Sometimes we go to great lengths to prevent this from happening and are so blinded by this imperative that we fail to notice when our medicine becomes worse than the poison. Repeated fighting over homework, tidiness, manners or personal hygiene can, and often does, slowly spiral out of control and into unhealthy and harmful territory. Plenty enough of that at Seleborg Mansion.

I was a mediocre student at school. I just wasn’t very interested. I managed to get by and make it to the next grade every year, but barely. And then one day, once I knew I wanted to go into IT and I needed to attend a good school to get the interesting jobs, I made my own decision to repeat a year and to get kranking. I turned into one of the best students in the class and passed my Baccalauréat two years later with flying colours.

But then my daughter started school and I’ve already lost count of how many times we’ve yelled at each other over homework. How many fights have I had with my children over things I would do routinely myself at that age? I turned out quite fine, so why all the fuss?

Back around 2011, I had the thrilling honour of stepping in as acting Product Owner for our biggest (and back then only) product, Ableton Live, while the actual PO was on holiday for a few weeks. An important release was on the horizon, so I started walking around asking people where they were at and whether their respective features and projects were on schedule.

This led me to ask Bernd Roggendorf, co-founder and CTO of Ableton at the time, how his project was going. He gave me the info that I needed and I moved on. A few days later, not seeing much progress, I asked him again, and what he said turned out to be not just great management advice, but a true life lesson.

“Carl, you already asked me, and I said I’m on it. When you come back like this, you’re taking my responsibility away for me. If I’ve taken responsibility for something, it’s important you allow me to fail at it.”

Now that I have children of my own, I’m rediscovering the importance of that lesson.

Here’s the thing: I am the person I am today not despite, but because of, all my failures. They make up for at least half of what I know. Each one has made me a little wiser.

So why am I trying to rob my children of their own failures? I constantly have to remind myself that, once I’ve made sure nothing really bad can happen, the kindest, most generous thing I can do is often to just let them fail.

They deserve it so very much!