Embracing the Gift of Failure

At Davidson Day, we believe that real success comes not from avoiding failure, but from learning through it and embracing it as a powerful teacher. In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey captures this idea beautifully, showing us that when we let children experience failure, we give them an incredible gift: the ability to transform mistakes into opportunities for growth. As partners in your child’s education, we’re committed to helping our students build resilience, responsibility, and independence by celebrating success and learning from failure. But to truly break old habits, strengthen the school-home connection, and equip your child for success beyond our campus, we need parents to reinforce the value of failing well at home. When we work together in this way, we can prepare your child not just for school, but for life. 

To help guide you in this shared journey, we’d like to highlight some of the key lessons from Lahey’s book—principles that will empower you to support your child’s growth through both their successes and their failures.

Failure as a Stepping Stone to Success

In The Gift of Failure, Lahey writes, “Parents who rescue their children from failure deny them the opportunity to learn perseverance, problem-solving, and resilience.” This idea is central to our philosophy at Davidson Day. We create a safe, supportive environment where students are encouraged to take risks and make mistakes. Whether they’re working through a challenging math problem or navigating a social conflict, our students learn that failure is not the end, but the beginning of growth.

Parents can support this process by allowing their children to experience small failures at home—missing a homework deadline, for example, or struggling with a complex task—so they can learn the value of persistence and problem-solving. This is how the skill of learning to fail well is developed: by helping students confront challenges in a controlled, nurturing environment where failure is viewed as a necessary step on the path to success.

Learning from Mistakes: Embracing Responsibility

One of Lahey’s most important messages is that children need the freedom to make mistakes and the opportunity to work through the consequences. She explains, “If we want our kids to be truly independent, responsible adults, they have to learn to make mistakes and recover from them.” At Davidson Day, this philosophy informs everything we do. When a student struggles with a subject or a project, they aren’t simply given the correct answer. Instead, they are guided through a reflective process where they take ownership of their mistakes and learn how to improve.

Parents can reinforce this at home by encouraging children to take responsibility for their own decisions and actions. Instead of stepping in to solve their problems, help them reflect on what went wrong and how they might handle the situation differently next time. This helps children understand the growth that comes from not only owning their mistakes but learning from them.

The Zone of Proximal Development

Lahey emphasizes the value of "productive struggle"—the idea that children learn best when they are working just beyond their current abilities, where the task is challenging but achievable with effort. This helps children build resilience and self-reliance, essential skills for both academic and personal success. She explains, “Allowing students to struggle just beyond their level of competence—what educators call the ‘zone of proximal development’—is crucial for learning. It’s in this zone that real growth happens.”

At Davidson Day, we create opportunities for students to engage in productive struggle. In the classroom, this means giving students tasks that are challenging enough to require effort and persistence but not so difficult that they become overwhelming. Our teachers provide support, but they don't step in to offer immediate solutions. This mirrors the concept of the “zone of proximal development,” introduced by psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which Lahey draws on to show that children learn best when they are operating just outside their comfort zone but with appropriate guidance.

This is an approach parents can reinforce at home by encouraging their children to tackle tasks that are difficult but achievable, offering support when needed but allowing them to work through problems on their own. Whether it’s mastering a tricky math problem, learning a new instrument, or handling a social situation, the key is to let children grapple with challenges long enough to learn and grow. This aligns with our belief that growth comes through perseverance and effort, not simply through easy successes.

Risk-Taking and Resilience: Building Confidence

Lahey stresses the importance of allowing children to take risks, writing, “Children need to experience the discomfort of a challenge and the satisfaction of overcoming it on their own.” At Davidson Day, we encourage students to take intellectual risks. Risk-taking is an essential part of developing resilience. When students know they have the support of their teachers and their parents, they’re more willing to step outside their comfort zones, try new things, and take responsibility for their learning.

As Lahey points out, “When parents and schools work together to support children's autonomy, we help them grow into competent, confident adults.” At Davidson Day, we see education as a shared responsibility between school and home. While we are intentional in creating an environment at school that is both nurturing and challenging, parents play an equally important role in reinforcing these lessons at home.

By adopting Lahey’s principles of allowing children to fail, encouraging productive struggle, and supporting calculated risks, parents can help their children build the resilience and independence they need to succeed. Whether it’s letting a child face the natural consequences of a forgotten assignment or encouraging them to solve a friendship issue on their own, parents and educators must work together to give children the tools they need to thrive.

Practical Steps for Parents

Here are a few strategies parents can implement at home:

By embracing the principles in The Gift of Failure, Davidson Day parents can play a crucial role in shaping their child’s development. At Davidson Day, we see failure as not just a setback but a vital part of learning. When children are given the space to struggle and problem-solve, they gain the confidence, resilience, and sense of responsibility they’ll need to succeed in life. Through a strong partnership between school and home, we can nurture independent, capable young people who aren’t afraid to take risks, learn from their mistakes, and thrive both in and out of the classroom.

As Lahey writes, "Success is about learning how to fail well." Let’s continue working together to empower our students to learn and grow, not despite their failures, but because of them.