The Daily Dad

You Can't Prevent Them From Making Mistakes

Mar 2, 2020

02:41

Snipd AI

Exploring the importance of allowing children to make mistakes and learn from them, drawing parallels to the novel Siddhartha and encouraging fathers to provide guidance and independence.

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Experience and trial and error are essential for learning and growth.

Instead of preventing mistakes, focus on instilling character, awareness, and resilience in children.

Deep dives

Letting Them Learn from Mistakes

As parents, we often try to prevent our kids from making mistakes. We teach them, set good examples, and intervene when necessary. However, throughout history, fathers have had limited success in this regard. In the novel Siddhartha, the protagonist realizes that he cannot spare his son from making mistakes, just as we cannot spare our own children. Experience and trial and error are essential for learning and growth. Instead of trying to prevent mistakes, we should focus on instilling in our children the character, awareness, and openness to seeking help that will enable them to bounce back from their mistakes and grow as individuals.

Allowing Children to Learn from Mistakes

3min

Nobody wants to see their kid make a mistake. That’s why we spend so much time teaching them right and wrong, why we try to be a good example, why we try to catch and stop them when we see them going down the wrong path.

Since the beginning of time fathers have been doing this...and since the beginning of time have had, at best, only minimal success. In the novel Siddhartha, the title character tries desperately to convince his son of the importance of the simple way of life, having learned the wisdom of it through painful experience. Like you, like all fathers, he watches as his son ignores his warnings, despairing as his son goes the wrong direction. As he sees his son falling into bad habits, Siddhartha confides his frustration to his friend, Vasudeva, who replies, “Do you really believe you have committed your follies so that your son may be spared them?”

It would be wonderful if our kids didn’t have to learn through trial and error, if they could simply accept our advice and start where we left off, rather than touch the proverbial hot stove for themselves. But we should be wise enough as human beings by now to know that is simply not how life works. Much of what we learn has to be learned on our own. Some mistakes have to be made to be fully understood. Don’t your own experiences teach you that, anyway? How many of your parents’ warnings did you really listen to?

You can’t prevent your kids from making mistakes. Nor, honestly, should you really want to. You have to let them learn on their own. And you have to give them the space to do it. Knowing that you’ve instilled the character, the awareness, and the willingness to ask for help that they will need in order to bounce back from the mistakes they will inevitably make.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.