There’s no way around it: Things don’t always work out for your kids. They fail the test; they don’t get the part; they don’t make the team; they don’t get into their first choice of college. As a parent, watching the sting of these defeats in real time can be tough to stomach. It’s a natural instinct to want to step in when failure happens and “fix it.”
Parents’ desire to protect kids from failure is so common, in fact, that the English lexicon has added a whole set of catchy labels to describe it, says David Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute.
