Why Failure is Essential to Raising Resilient Children
Raising resilient children begins with an uncomfortable truth: failure is not something to prevent—it’s something to prepare for. In a culture that prizes achievement and perfection, many parents instinctively shield their children from disappointment. Yet research on growth mindset, grit, and executive function tells a different story. Learning how to handle failure is one of the most powerful predictors of long-term success.
Teaching Resilience: What Education Gets Wrong About Failure
American heptathlete Anna Hall remembers her first “catastrophic failure”—she was 12 years old. Before becoming a world champion, Hall broke her foot during a fall in 2021, just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. Knee surgery followed in 2024, months before the Paris Games. Yet Hall views those injuries not as defeats but as building blocks—blips on a trajectory defined by persistence and self-awareness. Her story, featured recently in USA Today, raises a question every parent should consider: what if shielding our children from failure actually undermines their capacity to succeed?
Duke University Professor Aaron Dinin built an entire course around that very question. His class, IE 252: Learning to Fail, challenges students to use failure as a deliberate strategy for learning and discovery. Dinin, who is known as the “TikTok Professor”, observes that “98% of what’s gonna happen is not gonna work the way you intended.” Rather than treating that statistic as discouraging, Dinin frames failure as a tool—a mechanism for problem definition and needs discovery that traditional education rarely teaches.
If we want to focus on raising resilient children, we must rethink our relationship with failure — at home, in school, and in ourselves.
Growth Mindset and Grit: The Science Behind Raising Resilient Children
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s pioneering research on growth mindset reinforces what Hall and Dinin demonstrate through lived experience. Dweck’s studies reveal that children praised for their intelligence tend to shy away from challenges, while children praised for their process—effort, strategies, persistence—remain motivated and take on harder tasks (Dweck, 2006). The distinction matters enormously. When a child believes ability can expand through effort, failure becomes feedback rather than a verdict.
Angela Duckworth’s work at the University of Pennsylvania adds another dimension. Duckworth defines grit as “persistence, determination, and resilience,” and her research demonstrates that grit predicts success more reliably than IQ or socioeconomic status. Among adolescents, grit longitudinally predicted GPA; among West Point cadets, grit predicted retention through grueling training (Duckworth et al., 2007). Grit, like any skill, develops through repeated encounters with difficulty—encounters that overprotective parenting can inadvertently prevent.
What Parents Can Learn from Elite Athletes
Hall’s upbringing offers a compelling model. Growing up competing with her sisters “over everything—grades, who could learn how to ride a bike first”—Hall developed an early love of challenge. Her father, a three-sport college athlete, held the sisters accountable, encouraging practice outside organized sports while fostering a philosophy rooted in effort rather than outcome. That healthy pressure, as Hall describes, “was geared towards doing what you love.”
Dinin’s classroom echoes this philosophy at the collegiate level. His final exam requires students to learn entirely new skills—juggling, pen-spinning, card tricks—over the course of a semester. The lesson embedded in the assignment captures his teaching ethos: “The best kind of learning is slow, methodical every time, bit by bit.” Students arrive at Duke conditioned by years of grade-driven perfectionism, and Dinin works deliberately to dismantle that conditioning.
How to Raise Resilient Children at Home: Practical Strategies That Build Executive Function
At Novella Prep, we see the consequences of failure-avoidance daily. Students who have never struggled academically often lack the executive function skills—working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control—needed to recover when college-level coursework challenges them for the first time. Research confirms that executive function skills mature well into the early thirties (Arain et al., 2013), meaning parents have years of opportunity to cultivate resilience through age-appropriate struggle.
Practical steps begin with small shifts in language and expectation. Praise effort and strategy rather than outcomes. Allow children to experience natural consequences when stakes remain low. Resist the impulse to intervene at every sign of frustration. Normalize the conversation around what went wrong and what might work differently next time. Hall’s career and Dinin’s classroom both demonstrate a fundamental truth: the ability to fail productively does not develop in the absence of failure. Helping children learn to fall—and rise—may be among the most consequential gifts a parent can offer.
References
Arain, M., Haque, M., Johal, L., et al. (2013). Maturation of the adolescent brain. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 9, 449–461.
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
USA Today Sports. (2025, November 8). Failing is the best thing we can do as a kid, athlete, and a human.