Crash. Silence. “Uh-oh.”
Pink paint everywhere. On the table, on the floor, on the five-year-old. Maybe a few drops on the cat, I’m not sure. I ended up getting far less work done that morning than if I’d just set up his paints for him, but at least now he knows how to get everything ready by himself. And it’s understandable, because when you’re five years old you make a lot of mistakes. My son sees this as a major drawback to being five—it bugs him when he doesn’t succeed at something, and he’s looking forward to his sixth birthday when, he assumes, he will suddenly have all the poise and savoir-faire of a Grown-Up, the logical next step after Big Kid.
Of course, it’s hard to learn if you don’t make mistakes, something I often remind him of. You don’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and you don’t learn how to set up your own paint without spilling a whole pot of it on the floor (and the table and yourself and possibly the cat) once in a while. It’s hard to take your dad’s word for that, though, especially when you’re feeling frustrated, and it’s hard to try new things when you don’t want to get it wrong.
And so, sometimes it falls to me to help my kid fail a little bit. This week I registered him for a brand-new activity. So that this post doesn’t embarrass him in ten years, let me be vague and simply say that it’s something he’s never tried and he really didn’t want me to sign him up. He’s worried about catching COVID while doing it, he’s reluctant to try it without his mom there to cheer him on, but most of all, he doesn’t know how and he doesn’t want to be bad at it. We had a long and impassioned debate, and we decided—I decided, and he got tired of arguing—that he’ll try it for a year, and if he hates it, we’ll choose something else next year.
Then I sat back and dissected every iota of that decision. (Maybe I should try to give that tendency up for Lent? But then I’d have to analyze whether or not that’s a good idea first.) Am I being too hard on him by making him try this? Could I have done a better job of preparing him for it and getting him to buy in? Maybe, on both counts. (See my earlier post about Minesweeper parenting.) But what I want him to learn isn’t even how to do this particular activity: I want him to learn how to step outside his comfort zone safely. To find that balance between, on the one hand, going over Niagara in a barrel, and on the other, never leaving the house because it’s too risky out there. I want him to experience being bad at something, making a ton of mistakes, and then slowly getting better—or not getting better at all, and having fun and making new friends anyway. I want him to learn that when you’re playing a game, winning is the goal but it’s never the point.
In order to do that, he’s going to need to fail sometimes. Even if he ends up becoming an utter prodigy in his new activity, he won’t get there without falling flat on his face now and then. So I’ll be there to help him fail: to take a chance on something new and to enjoy his successes, but also to pick himself up gracefully when he hits a bump in the road. Starting with showing him how to most efficiently clean up a puddle of pink paint from a hardwood floor.
Check back on Monday, March 28 for the next post: What’s outside the frame?