THE GIFT OF FAILURE – HOW TO STEP BACK AND LET YOUR CHILD SUCCEED –
Jessica Lahey, R304
Harper
With so many manuals around advocating constant parental involvement in every aspect of child-rearing, a book that calls for letting the young get on with minimum interference could seem a good counter-balance.
Rather than have everything children do closely supervised, judged and usually praised, Jessica Lahey believes that parents must at all times “support autonomy rather than dependence”.
But this new regime, as she describes it here, soon turns into a rigid system with all the disadvantages attendant on following a formula rather than reacting more intuitively to a child. Spontaneity is at least honest.
Lahey backs up her case with quotations from other child-rearing manuals with similarly arresting titles. As a serving teacher and mother, she claims to have changed her own behaviour towards the children in her life as a result of adopting this approach, and numerous anecdotes drawn from her family and neighbourhood are used to back up her current beliefs.
But too many massive generalisations are also allowed to fall without qualification. “Children who like their parents all the time tend not to be children who are corrected when they misbehave, or asked to consider the needs of other people.” Who says?
Her vision of school as a place where all children live in perpetual fear of failure is also ludicrous.
As for today’s state of “enmeshment”, where so many adults meekly move back into their bedrooms after leaving university, this surely is primarily caused by housing and money shortages rather than by offspring who have “failed to launch” due to their parents’ past over-protective practices.
For most normal parents, a walk with their children in the country or a popular family game stripped of any self-improving agenda could ultimately make for time far better spent than reading this well-intentioned but superficial study. – The Independen t