Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure and storied educator, shares the secrets of what makes teens successful in academics, at home, and in the world. If your teen does fail, Lahey knows where to look to find the silver lining.

Full show notes

Picture the scene: your teen sends you a frantic message from school, telling you that they left an important piece of weekly vocab homework behind. You walk to their room, check their desk, and immediately spot their homework sitting off to the side of their desk, buried under an empty glass of water and their video game system. What is the right thing to do in this situation?

1. Should you answer your kids wishes and bail them out?
2. Or do you leave the homework behind and resume your day in order to make the daily briefing at your job on time?

This is no easy dilemma for a parent to solve, and an even greater question is how to improve your life as a teenager to not make these mistakes.

On one hand, you would allow your child to fail by not bringing their work to them. On the other hand, is it totally right to fix every problem for you child? The idea of failure so often challenges the deepest motivations of a person, and how one responds to failure is a defining aspect of character. Improvement from failure demonstrates a person’s fortitude and drive for success.

Culturally, the idea of failure for children has been sometimes rejected by parents, as one of the core goals of parenthood is to raise your child to be successful. The mentality of “my kids are always right” can be exemplified as a parent meeting with their kid’s teacher in order to advocate for their child’s work, replacing a bad grade with one that the parent deems appropriate.

How to improve your life as a teenager is a problem that I’ve had on my mind lately. We all know that failure is human because nobody is perfect. But how do we help teens learn how to improve your life as a teenager through failure?

Failure has been on my mind because children who, say, always forget their homework but have Mom or Dad to save the day never learn the lesson of forgetting their homework. The lesson parents are telling their children is that they will always have someone to cover for their mistakes. This is not how to improve your life as a teenager. How is it possible for children and teens to improve into the best version of themselves if they are never forced to confront failure even once in their lives?

With me this week on Talking to Teens is Jessica Lahey. Jessica is an astounding woman who has taught for years in middle school and high school, written the New York Times parent-teacher advice column, the Atlantic and Washington Post. Her book, The Gift of Failure, is a NYT bestseller and can be found in bookstores across the world, from Argentina to the United States and everywhere in between. Jessica is an expert on the idea of failure and how it should be used by parents to encourage teens on how to improve your life as a teenager, and I am so excited to have her with me this week!

Solving the Dilemma

The product of steering kids away from failure makes them unable to cope with the idea of failure, and therefore are unable to find an angle to improve from their failure. By coincidence, Jessica had encountered the same conundrum of whether or not she should bring her child’s homework to school for them. Jessica was going to her son’s school that day for an unrelated reason, but she was faced with the dilemma of bringing her son’s homework to school, or leave it at home and force him to confront his mistake?

Jessica decided to leave her son’s work at home, reasoning that she wanted to give him the chance to prove that he could adapt to his mistakes and learn how to improve your life as a teenager. When her son came home that day, he had already spent some time thinking about what had happened with his teacher. He told Jessica that he wanted to create a checklist so that he could practice remembering his homework every day. For the past couple years, Jessica’s son has made a checklist every year for the things he needs before he goes to school.

This is a perfect demonstration of the positive learning and improvement that can arise from situations when teens are forced to confront the idea of failure. Moments of failure can be some of the strongest lessons for parents to use because the way teens respond to adversary is a core function of a human being. By being placed into situations where teens will be forced to confront their shortcomings, they will be able to learn how to improve your life as a teenager. For this reason, it is important that parents don’t maintain the façade of perfection with their children.

Identifying Failure as Growth

It could be difficult for a parent to understand how to improve your life as a teenager and when they can use failure as a moment to grow. One example of how to use a moment for growth is when your teen doesn’t complete a chore in the right manner. As a parent, your impulse might be to redo the chore in a manner that you are satisfied with, but this overrides the potential for your teen to grow in the situation.

A good method to demonstrate how to improve your life as a teenager would be to bring your kid back in to the situation and explain to them why you aren’t satisfied with their chore. Asking them to fix the chore so that its done in an efficient and productive manner gives your child the chance to learn from their mistakes and practice methods to remember how to do it properly when they are asked again. Doing things right the first time can save teens a lifetime of stress.

Additionally, it is good to remember that teens are teens, and nobody is perfect! They are still developing all the time, and it should be easy to forgive your young adult if they do make a mistake. Feeling afraid to fail is not how to improve your life as a teenager.

Sometimes teens will totally forget how to load the dishwasher correctly, or where the broom is kept in the house. Forgiveness for instances of forgetfulness is a wonderful skill to assist parents when teaching their children failure. Kids become more and more competent with each passing day, and to expect them to be completely perfect is absurd. They’re absolutely better at emptying the dishwasher today than they were a year ago. Keeping a mindset over long-term growth can help parents be more comfortable in teaching failure, because you know that teens are always improving.

In addition to how to improve your life as a teenager, Jessica and I discuss…

• “Learned Helplessness”
• Failure and the education system
• The fine line between “social jostling” and bullying
• Identifying your teens signals
• How to institute a routine “clean out”

Thank you so much for tuning in! I hope that you have been able to take away some of this wonderful information Jessica Lahey shared about how to improve your life as a teenager. If you’re interested in learning more tips from Jessica on the art of failure, check out her book The Gift of Failure, available wherever books are sold. Have a great day!