Failure Is a Viable Option

By Lily Qi

A couple of years ago, when my son was looking for his first college summer internship, I gave him some general advice and urged him to start early, but stopped short of stepping in to make sure he landed a good job. It was hard to watch him struggle, but the frustrations he went through that summer turned out to be so much more valuable than anything I could have possibly taught him through helping or nagging. Besides learning what it would really take to land an ideal internship, he learned that failure is a real possibility.

The movie Apollo 13 has a famous line, “Failure is not an option.” This referred to the need for spacecraft Apollo 13 to return to earth safely after a near-disaster moon-bound NASA mission. In that situation, much was at stake, including human lives. That famous line reflects the can-do spirit that Americans value and a determination to not accept anything less than success.

In everyday life, not everything has such irreversible consequences. In order to achieve greater success, we can and should let failure play its role. As parents, learning how to let failure teach our kids the valuable lessons we want to instill in them, rather than lecturing or rescuing them, is a critical parenting skill–even though watching them fail when we can prevent it seems out of the question and against our natural instincts.

Today’s American youth have a highly structured life growing up, with far less unsupervised time to explore compared to previous generations. Parents often refuse to even consider letting their children take some risks that may lead to failures, especially when it comes to college choices, majors, and careers. Going to a good college, studying a practical major, and having a clear career path after college seem so paramount that exploration is no longer an option.

The proven paths of success that many Asian parents favor may work for a small number of lucky young people who know what to do with the rest of their lives when they are still in their 20s, but not for most who need a few years or even a decade or longer to explore and figure out what they are good at or passionate about. In fact, the Millennials, or Gen Ys (people born after 1980), are expected to have two or more careers, not just jobs, in their lifetime. This means a lot of exploring, including in uncharted territories. With an overwhelming array of choices their parents’ generation never had to make–choices made possible by globalization, technological advancement and the trend toward interdisciplinary education and professions–it’s a daunting task to sort it all out so early in one’s life.

Recently, I gave a talk about career choices to a group of Georgetown University Asian American students, many struggling to balance between their well-educated parents’ expectations for clear and practical career paths and their desire to explore various options before settling down. One student asked what she should do instead if she doesn’t want to major in accounting as her parents prefer. It’s the kind of story I hear over and over again. In most Asian cultures, parents play a strong hand in their children’s lives, often well into their adulthood.

While Asian parents enjoy a reputation for being engaged and responsible parents, we need to update our parenting skills with the changing times, which include resisting the urge to hover over our children’s shoulders, make decisions for them, and rescue them when things go wrong. Helicopter parenting leads to overly dependent children who lack resilience when facing life’s trials and tribulations or who get lost easily when facing complex decisions. Depriving our children of the opportunities to fail may save them in the short run, but can cost them in the long run. It is no secret that Asian Americans tend to perform well in highly structured environments such as academic institutions where rules of engagement are objective and clear, but not nearly as effectively in places where rules of engagement are far more subjective or ambiguous. Having the freedom to explore and fail early on may just be the answer.

My son is home this week for spring break. When trying to renew his driver’s license, he found out he had a speeding ticket on record—his first. I could easily pay for him and then lecture him, but how would he learn that a speeding ticket doesn’t care whether you can afford to pay or not? By not paying for him, I am hoping to hand him a gift that will last a lifetime.

Lily Qi can be reached at qulturematters@gmail.com or via her blog site at www.qulturematters.com.