Why Your College Freshman Needs to Fail
“Failure is not an option” or is it? The concept of failure means different things to different people. To you as a parent, failure may look like losing your job or your children becoming lazy, unfulfilled adults. The thought of failing may cause you anxiety throughout the day or keep you up at night.
To your college freshman, failure means something different. Rachel Simmons, leadership development specialist at Smith College shares that today’s college students feel more and more stress about failure of any kind. “We’re not talking about flunking out of pre-med or getting kicked out of college,” Smith explains in an article for the New York Times. “We’re talking about students showing up in residential life offices distraught and inconsolable when they score less than an A-minus.”
As a teacher, I’ve heard parents say again and again, “we don’t get Bs in our family” or “that’s not an acceptable grade in our family.” I’ve tutored students, who didn’t really need or want tutoring merely because their parents were dissatisfied with their children earning grades lower than an A or a B on a few assignments. This stress over grades and earning As have unhealthy long-term effects on college students.
With a rise in mental illness issues, colleges are rethinking ways in which they can redefine failure. One such college, Smith College, revamped their fall orientation to emphasize the value of failing. Carrie Lee Lancaster, a rising junior at Smith, shares that this new approach to failure shared in orientation “was almost jarring . . . [because] everything can feel like such a competition [on campus.] I think we get caught up in this idea of presenting an image of perfection.”
With tremendous pressure to get into these schools by having nearly perfect GPAs, students miss that failing and coping with failure should be the cornerstone of learning. Simmons states, “what we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning, it’s the feature . . . It’s not something that should be locked out of the learning experience.”
The core concept of what it means to be well-educated has shifted. In the past, being well educated may have looked like numerical accuracy, intellectual capability, or a discerning taste for quality. Increasingly the mark of being well-educated is what may have once been thought common-sense skills: knowing how to interact with coworkers in a respectful manner, being open-minded, being willing to have dialogue with those with which you disagree, being consistent and reliable, etc. Learning is no longer as much about knowing how to do tasks as how to live well. Being well-educated has transitioned from being a book skill to a life skill.
As a college parent, your temptation might be to say “well I tried” and shrug in dismay. Even though your freshman is now in college, there are ways in which you can still guide her through facing failure. So how can you help your students learn to cope with the setbacks of normal life?
#1. Share your own failures.
Transparency is powerful. Your freshman may have the impression that you’ve never failed. You have it all together. Life was easy for you. Everything just fell into place for you.
The reality is that you probably made many regrettable mistakes. You barely passed a class. You self-destructed in a relationship. Even today, you still face failure. You don’t handle disagreements as well as you should. You snap at a coworker. You fail to plan ahead for family time.
Modeling how to face failure well may be one of the most effective ways in which you can help your freshman learn. Sharing your failures and demonstrating they are part of everyday life is key to helping your freshman accept that failures occur and she must be resilient.
#2. Show compassion.
Your freshman isn’t likely to share failures or struggles with you if she knows she will hear “I told you so” or “life’s tough.” Both of these statements are likely true. You probably did tell your freshman this would happen earlier in a conversation, and life is tough. But these kinds of statements may make your freshman feel belittled, like her problems are trivial and unimportant.
To her, the failure she faces is very real and has many unpleasant results. She may not know how to cope with these small setbacks. She needs to hear your support and your unconditional love.
Recognize the validity of her disappointment. Help her to face her failure and get back up. Encourage her to keep trying, because failure is painful part of the learning process from which she can benefit.
#3. Let your freshman struggle.
I’ve seen this many times as a teacher, a student struggles on assignments. She asks questions in class that demonstrate she’s not really interested in learning, she’s merely aiming to earn a letter grade. When I give her an honest but seemingly unsatisfactory answer, she mentally rolls her eyes and rarely engages in class again.
Much of adult life is figuring out the gray areas of life, the areas in which there is not one right answer. What I fear as a teacher is that grades often communicate something inaccurate to my students: there’s always a distinguishable right answer for every problem.
I’ve also seen many parents step in when a student begins to struggle. Their child didn’t earn a 90% or higher, so they think they need to schedule a meeting. Their child got a C on a homework assignment, so they think their child needs to get tutoring. What I wish I could directly tell these parents is that struggling some and facing small failures may be the best lessons their children learn this school year.
Please college parent, let your child struggle now. Be slow to contact an academic advisor or a professor, because your young adult needs to learn how to advocate for herself, how to get help when she needs it, how to bounce back when a test goes horribly, and how to cope with disappointment. These skills only get harder to learn the older your freshman gets, and the consequences only become greater after college.
Failure is an option, and accepting it is a choice. Helping your freshman learn from failure starts with talking about your own failures, showing compassion, and letting your freshman struggle. Failing is part of life and your freshman needs to be equipped to handle failing well.
