How to Teach Your Teens by Letting Them Make Mistakes

When your children are still babies, you can't help but protect them from the outside world. It is your job, sure, but it is also an instinct, a primal paternal urge to shield your offspring from danger. As they get older, however, your job as a father and guardian changes. It becomes your duty not only to protect them from harm, but also to allow them to become familiar with pain. If you overprotect them, they won't be able to handle adversity outside the nest.

Jeff Foxworthy may have put it most succinctly: "When I was a kid, my parents had a 900-pound television on top of a TV tray. My dad's theory was, 'Let him pull it over his head a few times. He'll learn.'"

Although Jeff's father's parenting style may be a touch more rough than your own (or may not), his message is a good one. Kids need to fall down once in a while, otherwise they'll never learn how to pick themselves up. Children are brand new people, and they have a lot of heartache and stress and misery they're going to have to live through once they become adults. They have to learn how to handle those burdens in a healthy manner while they're still young.

It may be hard, but once in a while you have to let your kids fail. It takes a lot of self-control to reign in emotions like anger and depression, and they need to learn how to do that while they still have a support system in place. Essentially, your job is not to protect them from harm, but to support them and help them recover from harm.

But where do you draw the line? When do you allow your children to fail, and when do you decide to cut the lesson short and step in? It's a very fine line, and for the most part you have to rely on your own good judgment. If you think your child will come to serious emotional or physical harm, you obviously have to intrude. You don't want to be jumping in all the time, however, or you're going to have the opposite effect; i.e. you're going to make your child want to take larger and larger risks.

Here are a few examples of when you should - and when you shouldn't - let your kid fail.

1. Let your daughter date the wrong boy - She inevitably will; it's just a matter of time. There will come a day when, despite your years of setting a good example, she brings home a punk. Punks come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from layabouts to delinquents to bullies, but they all share a common denominator: they're no good for your daughter, and you know it. She doesn't know it, though, and trying to wedge yourself between them will only drive her away from you. But rather than seeing it as your daughter's horrible mistake, look at it as an opportunity for her to learn a valuable lesson. He's a bad seed, and eventually he's going to hurt her. When she recovers, she'll understand not just how to spot a good man (you), but also how to avoid the bad ones.
   
   
2. Don't let your kid drop out of school - An education is essential for competing in today's global marketplace. You cannot let your children fail in this department. Doing so will only be a disservice to them. Do everything you can, from the moment they are very young, to encourage learning and foster a love for knowledge. If they have trouble in school, help them hash out the work on their own with a little guidance from you, but don't take over. Let them do the work, no matter how hard it may be for the both of you. If your kid is still having trouble, check out these SavvyDaddy stories here and here for some helpful advice on kids and school.
   
   
3. Let them lose their first job - When they turn 16 and they get their first car, let them get a job at McDonald's or Blockbuster. And when they start slipping, let them fall. If your kid turns out to be a great employee, so much the better. But if she doesn't, then getting canned will give her a little dose of perspective. And, thankfully, it's McDonald's. Her resume isn't going to go down the tubes because of a red mark from her dweeby teenage manager. Beware, however, of letting them take jobs from friends, relatives or the like. Those can end on sour notes and cause drama within the family.
   
   
4. Don't let them fall into drugs - This is someplace they just don't need to be experimenting. If they choose to get into it, there won't be much that you can do about it - teenagers will do what they want to do, ultimately. But you should do everything in your power to discourage them from drugs when they're children, and punish drug use in your teens. Keep an eye on your prescriptions, as well as close family member prescriptions like your mom's and dad's. Pills are the drug of choice among today's teens, probably due to their harmless appearance as "medication." Failing here could ruin a life, or the life of an entire family. That's not something anyone needs to be risking.

If your kids never fall, they'll never learn to pick themselves back up again. On the other hand, there's no sense in throwing them off a cliff. All you have to do is walk along beside them, because eventually they'll manage to trip on something. They may be indignant that you let them fall, but that's part of life, too. They'll appreciate the extended hand, and years from now they'll be walking along with their own kids, watching them fall and helping them back up.