Ep 67: The Hidden Secrets of Teenage Success

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.


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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?
Should you answer your kids wishes and bail them
out?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!


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