The Importance Of Successure: What Is Failure?

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What is failure? Failure can mean different things to different people, but it’s generally seen as something negative. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines failure as “a lack of success”. In a culture so focused on winning, being successful, and being the best, we can often overlook the importance of failure. Experiencing failure is usually difficult, but it is one of life’s best teachers, allowing people to learn from their mistakes, rewarding them with wisdom for their efforts, and encouraging them to try again. With the rise of “helicopter” parenting, the valuable lessons to be learned from failure are being denied to many children. Parents, not wanting to see their kids struggle, swoop in like superheroes ready to save the day …show more content…

In a study conducted by Psychologists in Europe conducted a study that showed that children who were not allowed to play outside and experience the skinned knees that often happen, frequently have phobias as adults (Caprino). People, especially children, need to learn that it’s a normal part of the learning process to fall sometimes. For a parent, watching their child struggle or fail in front of them can be painful, nevertheless when their child is faced with a possible failure in a school or extracurricular setting they should view it as a learning opportunity for their child, a take a step back and allow their child to fail and learn resilience or succeed and learn they can do it on their own. In addition to always trying to “fix” everything for their child, many parents are also guilty of incessant praises, which the psychological community contends works against the parents’ intentions (Ozment). “You don’t gain self-esteem first, then achieve great things. You work hard, fail, pick yourself up, try again, accomplish something new, and then feel pretty good about yourself “(Ozment). Furthermore, children that are told that failure is a normal part of the learning process, rather than being told they must always succeed may perform better in school according to a separate study published by the American Psychological Association (Autin and Croizet). The experiment, conducted by Dr. Frédérique Autin, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Poitiers in Poitiers under the supervision of his psychology professor, Jean-Claude Croizet, PhD, divided sixth-grade students into three groups with two of the groups being given an impossibly hard anagram to try and solve (611). After failing to solve the anagram, one group of the students was told that learning is difficult and failure is common, while the second

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