Failure Is a Great Tutor—Don’t Fire Him

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

It is a common myth that educating boys is mainly about telling them the right things. Effective parenting or teaching, many think, is about formulating the right lecture and delivering it with skill. Experienced educators will recognize this as misguided—having learned the lesson firsthand through the frustration of thinking all depended on them.

Boys, rather, learn when they want to learn—or when, in some way, they need to learn. Necessity is the great mother of virtues, including the intellectual virtues. Teaching, therefore, is not about what the educator says but about what the boy hears. And what the boy hears is a product of what he feels he needs to hear. Nothing promotes a willingness to learn like the realization that one is not as good at something as he wishes he were. To this end, failure can be a friend.

In fact, failure is a great tutor. If a boy is open to learning from him, he can be one of the most powerful teachers a boy may ever have. And unlike other tutors, he does not demand payment when he teaches—at least not an ordinary form of payment. He also does not need to be invited to show up in a boy’s life. All that failure asks is that you do not keep him out. 

How Does Failure Work?

Throughout life, opportunities for growth present themselves to boys. These could be of an academic, athletic, extracurricular, social, or moral nature. In each of these instances, a boy has the chance to grow. He may succeed in learning a math concept and, consequently, do well on the exam. He may stick with the morning routine he has set himself, or succeed in the goal of keeping his room tidy. He may be patient with a sibling. As parents and educators, it is normal and good that we hope he succeeds in all these areas. That said, we should not restrict the scope of our vision to simply moments of triumph. 

Here comes the challenge for parents and educators. When we see success as attaining a definite, often quantifiable, goal—an A on the chemistry exam, a starting spot on the soccer team—and failure as not attaining that goal, we may easily be tempted to intervene in our son’s life in whatever way necessary to avoid the boy’s failure.

Parents and educators should, however, widen the lens through which they view success and failure. Real success goes beyond attaining the immediate goal of an exercise. Ultimately, success consists of going through a process in which the boy himself practices applying certain skills and habits in the pursuit of a goal. He learns from the application of his own effort and ability far more than from the actual attainment of the outcome, per se. Indeed, the outcome benefits his learning primarily as an indicator of his input.

If the experience is to have any educational value, the boy must be allowed to stand or fall on his own. True success is learning from the experience, not simply attaining the specific product. A boy will learn more from reacting well to failure than by attaining a victory not fully deserved because it has been attained through the excessive intervention of others in his life.

Practical Suggestions

Let me offer a few practical suggestions for what to do and what not to do as parents:

1. Don’t interfere with your son’s attempts to succeed: he is the one who has to get the good grades; he is the one who has to make the team; he is the one who has to work out his social challenges.

2. Guide him. Make sure he is the one choosing and acting, and that his choices and actions are mostly from his own convictions, not from a rigid fear of failing to follow your script.

3. Don’t become your son’s advocate before his teachers or coaches. Let your son advocate for himself. Even if the outcome of his advocacy is less favorable to him than if you advocated for him, the process of self-advocating will help him grow as a man more than by being a passive recipient of the fruits of your advocacy.

4. When he fails, remind him that he is a second-half player, and that you are his half-time coach. Life is a series of games. In the first half, he may find himself losing: he got a bad grade, he failed to keep his commitment to working out each day, he had a bad social interaction. The first half, however, only matters so much. What dictates how the game ends up is what happens in the second half. How does he respond to the apparent failure? It is this reaction that offers the greater opportunity for growth. Just as it is the case in sports where overcoming a huge first half deficit to win a game is most memorable and most conducive to growth as a team, your son may grow most by how he reacts to those negative events in his life. Getting a poor grade is not a failure; true failure is not learning from it.

Understandably, parents have a hard time seeing their sons fail. This is partly because parents don’t want to see their sons suffer, and failure always brings along its little brother, pain. But reframing the experience as a way to build success in the long term will replace disappointment with hope—and sons will notice that. 

Parents who endure the pain of letting their sons suffer failure, and who become half-time coaches that help their sons respond well to such failures, will value letting that peculiar tutor called failure work with their sons. Those who do not have, in effect, fired him—and firing him may end up being the greatest failure of all.