Look, I know that title probably made some of you spit out your coffee and frantically check if you accidentally clicked on some kind of parenting horror story.Teaching Kids to Fail: A New Parenting Approach But before you start drafting angry emails about how I’m clearly the worst mother on the planet, hear me out.
In our culture, failure has become this absolutely toxic word that we whisper about like it’s a communicable disease. “Oh my god, did you hear? Little Timmy failed his spelling test. His parents must be devastated.” Like failing at something is basically the end of the world instead of, you know, just Tuesday.
Here’s the thing that’s going to blow your mind: I am actively, intentionally, unapologetically teaching my kids to fail spectacularly. And not only that—I’m teaching them to enjoy it.
Before you call child protective services, let me explain why this is actually the most loving thing I could possibly do for them.
My Epic Homestead Hall of Fame Disasters
So here’s my secret sauce, my number one life hack, the thing that’s made the biggest difference in everything I’ve accomplished: I’m willing to fail bigger and more embarrassatingly than pretty much anyone I know.
Homesteading has been my graduate-level education in the fine art of spectacular failure, and honestly? I’ve got some impressive credentials:
The Great Fence Fiasco: We moved the same stupid fence line three times because apparently making decisions is hard when you’re adults pretending to know what you’re doing with livestock.
Tree Cemetery: I’ve killed and replanted the same row of trees four separate times. At this point, I’m pretty sure the trees are gossiping about me in whatever tree afterlife exists.
Breeding Calendar Disaster: Our first year doing artificial insemination on the milk cow? I missed the breeding window so many months in a row that I started to wonder if I was even qualified to own a calendar, let alone manage livestock reproduction.
Kitchen Crime Scene: Once I exploded a bottle of blueberry water kefir and it literally looked like someone had been murdered with a Smurf. There were purple chunks stuck to the ceiling for months, and every time I saw them I’d think, “Yep, that’s my life now.”
Garden Genocide: Last year I destroyed my entire garden with tainted hay mulch. Turns out poisoning your own vegetables is easier than you’d think, and way more expensive than just buying organic at the store.
But here’s the plot twist that changed everything for me: every single one of these disasters taught me something valuable. The fence is now in the perfect spot. I finally found trees that don’t immediately commit suicide in our soil. I can now breed cattle like a semi-professional. My kitchen explosions are mostly contained these days. And this year’s garden is thriving because I learned what not to put on it.
The Participation Trophy Apocalypse
Here’s what’s driving me absolutely insane about modern parenting: we’ve become so terrified of letting our kids experience any kind of discomfort or disappointment that we’re basically raising a generation of humans who think success should just happen automatically.
Participation trophies for everyone! Gold stars just for showing up! Let’s make sure no child ever experiences the horror of… not being perfect at something immediately!
You know what this is creating?
That’s not empowerment—that’s sabotage.
I discovered this amazing video by Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx, where she talks about how her dad used to ask her and her brother about their failures at dinner every night. Not their successes—their failures. He wanted to celebrate the fact that they were trying things that were hard enough to potentially fail at.
Mind. Blown.
What if we started celebrating failure as proof that someone had the guts to try something difficult? What if we taught kids that failing just means you’re playing big instead of playing safe?
Teaching Tiny Humans to Embrace the Suck
So now I have these conversations with my kids that probably sound completely insane to anyone listening:
“Hey, remember when Mommy totally bombed that horse show pattern? That was awesome because now I know exactly what to practice!”
“Tell me about how many times you fell trying to nail that cartwheel—wasn’t that the best part?”
“Dad’s project didn’t work out the way he planned, so now we get to brainstorm completely different solutions!”
And the most beautiful thing has started happening: they’re not afraid to try things that might not work out perfectly.
A few weeks ago, my six-year-old was learning to tie a rope halter in the barn. These things can be confusing even for adults, especially when they’re all tangled up. I watched her struggle with it for a while, and my helicopter-parent instincts kicked in.
“Here, let me do that for you,” I offered, reaching for the halter.
She didn’t even look up. “NO, Mommy. I have to mess up so I can finally learn how to do this. I don’t want you to help me.”
In that moment, I realized she’s already smarter about failure than I was at thirty.
The Beautiful Truth About Falling Down
Here’s what I’ve learned from years of homestead disasters, business experiments gone wrong, and general life chaos: success tastes so much sweeter when it comes after failure.
When you’ve struggled, when you’ve messed up, when you’ve had to get creative and try again—that’s when achievement actually means something. Anyone can succeed at something easy. But succeeding at something that kicked your butt repeatedly? That’s the good stuff.
The kids who learn early that failure is just information, that mistakes are just expensive education, that falling down is just practice for getting back up—those kids are going to rule the world.
Meanwhile, the kids who never experience struggle, who never learn to problem-solve their way out of difficulty, who never develop resilience muscles—they’re going to be completely unprepared for adult life, which is basically just one long series of things not going according to plan.
My Wish for You This Year
So here’s my completely unconventional parenting advice: stop trying to protect your kids from failure. Stop rescuing them from every difficult situation. Stop making their lives so easy that they never develop any problem-solving skills.
Instead, teach them that failure is feedback. Teach them that mistakes are data. Teach them that the most interesting people are the ones who’ve tried lots of things and fallen on their faces repeatedly.
And for the love of all that’s good in this world, stop being afraid to fail yourself. Your kids are watching, and if they see you playing it safe all the time, that’s exactly what they’ll learn to do.
Try something new this year that you might completely bomb at. Sign up for a class that intimidates you. Plant a garden that might fail spectacularly. Start that business idea that feels scary. Let your kids watch you struggle and figure things out and occasionally mess up embarrassingly.
Because here’s the truth nobody wants to admit: the people who change the world aren’t the ones who never fail. They’re the ones who fail faster, learn quicker, and get back up with more information than they had before.
Now go out there and fail at something awesome. Your future self—and your kids—will thank you for it.
And if you have any epic homestead disasters to share, please send them my way. I’ll be the first person to give you a high-five and celebrate your willingness to try something that might not work out perfectly. Because that’s exactly the kind of energy we need more of in this world.
