The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed | Book Spotlight

Prizes and samples provided by HarperCollins
The Children’s Book Review | August 21, 2015

Age Range: Adult Non-Fiction

Hardcover: 304 pages

About the Book

The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed

Written by Jessica Lahey

Publisher’s Synopsis: In the tradition of Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, this groundbreaking manifesto focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.

Modern parenting is defined by an unprecedented level of overprotectiveness: parents who rush to school at the whim of a phone call to deliver forgotten assignments, who challenge teachers on report card disappointments, mastermind children’s friendships, and interfere on the playing field. As teacher and writer Jessica Lahey explains, even though these parents see themselves as being highly responsive to their children’s well being, they aren’t giving them the chance to experience failure—or the opportunity to learn to solve their own problems.

Overparenting has the potential to ruin a child’s confidence and undermine their education, Lahey reminds us. Teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight—important life skills children carry with them long after they leave the classroom.

Providing a path toward solutions, Lahey lays out a blueprint with targeted advice for handling homework, report cards, social dynamics, and sports. Most importantly, she sets forth a plan to help parents learn to step back and embrace their children’s failures. Hard-hitting yet warm and wise, The Gift of Failure is essential reading for parents, educators, and psychologists nationwide who want to help children succeed.

Adults | Publisher: HarperCollins | 2015 | ISBN-13: 978-0062299239

Available Here: 

About the Author

Jessica Lahey is an educator, speaker, and writer. She has been an English, Latin, and writing teacher in middle and high school for over a decade, writes the bi-weekly “Parent-Teacher Conference” advice column for The New York Times, is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, and appears as a commentator on Vermont Public Radio. Jessica earned a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a concentration in juvenile and education law. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two sons.