![]() ![]() It’s a learning opportunity - a chance to grow personally and even produce a better outcome than originally expected.Īfter reading such a beautiful book, children may want to try their own hand at creating something new. Failure isn’t something to be ashamed of. Year after year, my ‘best’ students - the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives - are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.īeautiful Oops! gets children off on the right foot by teaching them it’s okay to make mistakes. Jessica Lahey, an English teacher and the author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, wrote in The Atlanticthat she regularly sees her students prevented from making mistakes.Ĭhildren make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. ![]() To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn’t bring you running) present the opportunity for ‘successful failures,’ that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. If children are able to live with mistakes and even failing, why does it drive us crazy? So many parents have said to me, ‘I can’t stand to see my child unhappy.’ If you can’t stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The potential mistakes carry greater risks, and part of being a parent is minimizing risk for our children. It’s easier when they’re young - tolerating a stumbling toddler is far different from allowing a preteenager to meet her friends at the mall. Hanging back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, argues that parents should step back and let their children make mistakes. After all, isn’t failure something children should be ashamed of? Shouldn’t parents encourage kids to actively try to avoid making mistakes? Presumably that entails helping them avoid making mistakes whenever possible. Even in classrooms without grades, most students receive a “passing” or “failing” mark.Ĭonventional wisdom suggests that when it comes to mistakes, we should help our children as much as possible. The logic seems somewhat counterintuitive in a world where teachers still grade papers in red ink and assign “F” grades (for “failing,” of course) to subpar assignments. Some readers may question the premise of this book. ![]() Think of it as an opportunity to make something beautiful! The overriding message is summarized in the final pages of the book. The mistakes in the book cleverly focus on art, but it’s not difficult for readers to draw parallels between this theme and virtually everything else in life. With every page comes a new accident - a folded corner, a couple drops of spilled paint - and an interactive opportunity for readers to “do” something creative with it. For example, on one page children pull back flaps to see how a stain left by a coffee mug can be transformed into a beautiful work of art. Making the most of mistakes is a central theme of Beautiful Oops! ( public library) by Barney Saltzberg, a playful and thoughtfully designed book for children ages three and up. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new.” “We need to think about failure differently,” Ed Catmull asserted in Creativity, Inc., his tell-all book on managing Pixar Animation Studios. A playful book with a timeless lesson for young readers - it’s okay to mess up, and failure is nothing to be ashamed of.
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