This article is adapted from Ted's podcast episode 361: Parents, Pay Attention (Leadership and Strategy).

Why Your Kids Need to Fend and Fail

I think the hardest job in the world is parenting. What makes it hard isn't the work, the time, or the fact that it's 24-7 for the entire life of the parent. It's not the resources or the safety concerns. It's the difficulty in being consistent, caring, firm, and balancing protection with learning life's natural consequences.

Why is parenting so difficult? Because it's so hard to be consistent. Parenting is a journey, and every single time we step into a space we've never been before, it provides us the opportunity to learn, grow, and go.

When Parents Get Cornered in a Parking Lot

This episode was sparked by a conversation I had recently in St. Louis with two parents. I was there doing some parenting sessions with a great school system, and after my evening presentation, a few parents stopped me in the parking lot as I was preparing to leave.

They looked genuinely concerned. "Can we talk to you for a minute?" they asked.

They went on to explain how my presentation made them feel guilty, like they weren't good parents and weren't doing a good job either together or individually. That was the exact opposite of how I wanted them to feel after we'd been together.

As I listened, trying to figure out why they felt bad about being engaged parents who wanted to be active in their school and their children's lives, it finally came out. All four of them looked at each other and said, "It was when you made the lawnmower parent comment. That's what's got us feeling really guilty. We don't like the idea that we might be here too much and we might be protecting our children."

They went on to share concerns specifically around the idea that we should allow our kids to fail. As parents, teachers, and leaders, we never want the people around us to fail. However, failure is a good thing. It's good because it is in failure that emotions are engaged and then the experiences are locked into our core operating system, just like a computer's operating system that needs upgrades and updates on occasion.

The Real Fear Behind Helicopter Parenting

We stood in the parking lot for a few more minutes discussing what they needed to do and what they wanted to do. The parents were genuinely worried about their children's future and their role in that future. Finally I said, "Listen, what are you really concerned about for your children? Like what's one thing?"

They all basically said the same thing: "We are worried that they won't find success when they're older if we don't do a lot for them today."

And there it was. The concern that all parents have. "Oh my gosh, if I don't send them to the right school, if I don't give them the right resources, if I don't step in here, if I don't call the school..." That endless list of "if I don't" statements.

Well, that's a problem because worrying about all these macro outcomes for your children puts our attention in the wrong place. Way down the road, worrying about things we cannot control.

I can assure you as a partner with my wife raising our two children, that many of the things we wondered about or worried about when they were little never came true. The amount of time I sat there thinking, "Oh, they're never going to go to college. What if they don't get a job? What if they don't have friends? What if they never date?"

Worrying about macro outcomes for your children puts the attention in the wrong place: the future. It puts the worry in the wrong place and creates anxiety for too much beyond our control.

It's All About the Micro Opportunities

It's all about the micro opportunities with our children and helping them find immediate successes that they can build off of for a better future for themselves. Then we figure out our role in that so they can create conditions for risk, failure, and natural rewards and consequences for themselves with our assistance, not our insistence.

Do you know the difference?

I offered the parents the opportunity to send me more questions and meet with them in the future. That's how we got to this episode. I told them I'd do a podcast on their questions to help us all do some smart thinking around increasing our parenting, teaching, or just simply supporting children with the right mindset.

What Does "Fend and Fail" Even Mean?

Their first question for me was: "Ted, you talked a lot about letting our kids fend and fail. What does that even mean? What does that look like?"

A key difference in generations of people is how technology and information is used. Today, it's easier and yet more difficult for kids to fend and fail for themselves. Why? Children can only grow if they learn to navigate the issues they are facing, things like grades, conflict, and friendships. Well, now it all moves at a thousand miles per hour, and parents of these children are not used to that because it's not what we navigated.

In a few years, when Gen Z starts to have children, they'll understand how to navigate all the anxieties that online opportunities or solutions present every single day. But for those of us in our 30s, 40s, or 50s, can you imagine if your parents could open up a device and see your grades immediately? I don't think half of us would be here.

Daily reports, cameras in childcare centers, hourly updates for how your child is doing and what they're doing. It all makes it very difficult for little people to find their own way because mom and dad immediately know exactly what's going on all of the time so they can process it and then bring their worries to the kids. No wonder they're all rattling all the time and vibrating with nervousness. We're bringing it to them.

The Empathy Exercise

Be empathetic for a moment. Imagine when you were a child if your parents could access your grades, get feedback on your skills after you finished soccer practice or hockey or volleyball, or get a video of you doing everything.

How in the world would you ever learn to stand up for yourself if an adult could come charging into every situation you faced? How would you learn the skills needed to support yourself if you were not doing well on assignments? How empowered would you be at practice to take more risks if you knew your mom and dad were watching via the internet?

Can you imagine if every time you made a mistake, your mom or dad could DM your teachers in the middle of class because you got a bad grade?

Your Job as a Parent

Kids need to learn to fend for themselves and fail. As parents, it's our job to keep our kids safe. It's not our job to ensure they are successful by how we measure success for them.

Great kids know how to navigate their own world, and the only way they find their way is by navigating their own storms.

It is not that scary to allow your child to fail a quiz, miss an assignment, or not have their water bottle. That's failure in the life of a kid. They need to learn to see what happens when those things happen to them.

The Employee Test

How do you know if you need to let your child fend or fail for themselves more? I like to think of it this way: If you feel like your child employs you, you need to make a change.

If your child forgets their water bottle or lunch, they will survive. If they forget their assignment in third grade, they will still get to graduate from high school.

If you never let them experience the feelings of failure or even just go a little thirsty at school for a day, they're never going to think twice about these things in the future because they know someone will come and do it for them. Their employee. Their parents.

We always know we can call our employee, our mom or dad, and get them to drop everything for us and get us what we failed to get right for ourselves. That's what it means to fend and fail. They have to learn the consequences.

The Manipulation Factor

Now, remember this, and I'm saying this from a place of true love, care, and concern for children: They are manipulative. Children are very manipulative. Actually, everyone's very manipulative. We manipulate our surroundings to our benefit.

If we know that we can call upon the older people in our lives to bail us out all the time, we actually become conditioned to manipulate further. Why? Because it works.

Imagine this. You're driving to work and you get a text that says, "I forgot to grab my project before we got in the car this morning for school." Your response shouldn't be, "Oh, okay, I've got an appointment, but I'll skip my appointment and I'll drive it over."

Your response should be, "Make sure to grab it tomorrow and then go explain to your teacher what happened."

Now, some of you are listening to this right now and you're getting a tight feeling in your chest, a little anxiety like, "Well, what would I ever do? I couldn't do that. Are you crazy, Dad?"

The more you do this, the more they'll expect it and the more frustrated you'll be. That is fend and fail.

What Fend and Fail Is NOT

Do you know what it is not to fend and fail? It's a parent who runs and gets it. A parent who emails the school and CCs the principal that the assignment will be brought to school this afternoon and that you expect there not to be any downgrades because as a parent you couldn't get back to school fast enough because you went to your appointment or you had to work.

This isn't about you. It's about them.

Parents, do your job and let the children fend and fail for themselves. Otherwise, you'll be on the receiving end of phone calls like me someday. I remember a few years back, we did not hire a teacher at one of our schools and the father demanded to meet with me. "How could you not hire our child?" he said. And I thought to myself, we dodged a bullet.

Building Micro Steps Toward Success

Children will not get into a habit of failure if they fend for themselves. The opposite happens. They make micro steps towards their own success.

Disorganized children need to learn the natural consequences of their behavior so that they can develop the survival techniques for navigating their future. If every time there is a storm, you go and pick them up and shelter them instead of teaching them how to get through it on their own, you will struggle watching the natural consequences over time and find yourself increasingly struggling to have a strong and independent child.

You want empowered children, not enabled children.

Making the Transition

Sounds easy, right? It's not, especially if you one day simply decide to stop being an employee of your child and begin being the parent who supports natural consequences and allows them to fend and fail.

You'll freak out. If you've been doing this for a long time and suddenly you just stop it, your kids are gonna be like, "What's going on?" And you will be in a position of like, "I can't, I don't know if this is gonna work."

But I'm gonna tell you right now, try it once. Let the guilt wash over you and move forward.

Seriously, the amount of children who are not being allowed to grow forward through their own failure is a real issue for us. We're worrying about technology and artificial intelligence. Well, we should also throw into the mix the fact that as parents, we are acting like we are their employees and we are the answer to our own problem.

Never Accept "I Don't Know"

The second question from the parents was: "Ted, what did you mean when you said it's not okay to accept 'I don't know'?"

This brings us back to the fact that all of us can masterfully manipulate those we are raised by. The moment we are born, we begin to be trained by our parents and guardians and loved ones.

Think about this. As infants, these gigantic creatures hold us close to their faces and with upturned lips and exposed teeth (also known as a smile), we learn that if we smile back at them, they smile more and get more excited. They do crazy stuff in front of us. They make noises and they make us giggle and laugh. We also learn if we cry, they jam food in our mouths or change our diapers.

That's where we learn manipulation through survival.

As children, through our development, we continually watch our parents and family members and we learn how to make them feel loved, appreciated, cared about. And we also learn how to get things we want or avoid when they display certain behaviors.

Why? Because we are constantly observing our world and trying to survive in it. That survival has shifted from actually staying alive to trying to stay in control.

The "I Don't Know" Trap

As a result, our children learn how to trigger us and they constantly, as they age, are looking to expand their own boundaries of control. One behavior they learn early from us is to say, "I don't know." Then they watch us weirdly stomp around and say things like, "How can you not know?" But then they get what they want. They get us to just walk away.

We regularly fail to follow through on this simple statement and engage them with expectations. We fail to engage our own children.

So when your child says "I don't know," you don't accept that. We must always respond with resilience like a buffalo parent.

Examples of "I don't know" in action:

• "Why didn't you get your assignment in?" "I don't know."
• "Why didn't you clean up your room?" "I don't know."
• "Why don't you act kinder to your sister?" "I don't know."
• "What do we need to do so that..." "I don't know."

If you're a parent, you've been on the other end of it. If you're a teacher, you've heard it as well. Everyone listening to this has heard somebody say it to them because everyone has learned that by saying "I don't know," it either increases the situation by putting fire onto it or it diffuses it because people are like, "How would you not know?"

The 15-Minute Solution

We're going to engage it from this point forward. When a child says to you, "I don't know," this is what you do:

You say, "Oh, okay. Well, I'm going to come back in 15 minutes and I'm going to ask you again. Maybe that'll help jog your memory."

And then you turn and walk away. Very quickly. You walk away. You don't engage. You just walk away.

Then you set a timer on your phone because you're a human being and 15 minutes sometimes can feel like 15 seconds or 15 hours. And if you forget to come back, well, they won again. So we're going to diligently come back in 15 minutes with our alarm.

Now, once your kids get conditioned to this (i.e., learn to manipulate it) and they hear your alarm come in 15 minutes, they're going to really perk up a little bit to see if you're coming. And if you've never done this before, the first time you come rolling around the corner, they're going to be stunned that you came back. Why? Because you've never come back.

The Resilient Part

When you go back and they still say, "You know, I don't know," and they put their face back in their phone or their device, you say, "Okay, listen, I'm going to give you another 15 minutes. But this time as the parent, as the guardian, you take their device, you take their phone or whatever they're doing. And you say, "I'll bring this back in 15 minutes and I hope you have an answer."

And the key here is you step away again. You don't argue. That's what they've learned to do: argue with you so that you get tired and frustrated and walk away.

The reason being, they will likely now find you to get that device back and answer your question. Because normally these questions are very simple questions, and yet we will let them just take the easy path and not answer it.

As soon as you take that device on the second trip back to "I don't know," and they don't answer because they're not willing to answer it, you walk away and they will work really hard to get back their stuff. And you will get the moment back on track with them.

Why Kids Say "I Don't Know"

When kids say they don't know, they are actually doing a few things:

1. They know you give up easy.
2. They also know that you're probably not coming back.
3. They'll get back to whatever they wanted to do very quickly.
4. They know you're going to stomp around and make all kinds of noise. If they're with a sibling or a friend or a cousin, they're just looking at each other, giggling and eye rolling. Just like we do as adults with our adult parents.

So stop it.

Parents who demonstrate resilience get kids who demonstrate resilience. Kids that have parents who do all the heavy lifting don't know how to do it and they never get strong enough to fend for themselves.

The Core Truth About Fend and Fail

The key to this concept of fend and fail is that kids have to experience failure to fend for themselves. They have to have parents who don't quit on them and don't defend them tirelessly, but instead allow them to figure out their own path.

If children know that their parents never quit on them, they don't quit on themselves. If children know that their parents work tirelessly to support them and teach them lessons from their own lives, they'll learn their own lessons.

Parents, we need to do our job.

What Good Parenting Actually Looks Like

There are so many good reads out there, so many good books on how to raise children. But the truth is, there are a few things that you need to pay attention to:

First, maintaining high expectations for your family.

Second (and this is very important), time together. When you have meals together, you get to process these things. When you drive together and everyone's engaged instead of on a device. When you just get to sit in a room together, play games, cards, or just be together. That helps solve a lot of parenting problems.

Third, you're constantly looking for teachable moments. Look for the failure and then talk about what did you learn? How did you grow? What do you need? Making sure to point out that you're paying attention to these things so that they feel safe and loved.

Fourth, removing technologies from their faces. I was out to dinner the other day. I saw a child who had to be less than a year old holding a phone, watching a cartoon. And I so badly wanted to walk over there. My wife just grabbed my arm and said, "Leave it be, Ted. Leave it be."

Fifth, you need to provide unstructured play. Get off of the devices. Stop watching practice. Let them go do stuff. Let them fend for themselves. Let them learn the social hierarchies of the life they are about to enter into as their middle school years and high school years and their college and career years come.

The 45-Day Cycle vs. The 45-Second Cycle

When I was a kid, I had 45-day cycles of improvement in my life in school. Now, not saying my upbringing was the best in the world, but my time of life was pretty awesome and typical in the 80s.

As a student, if I didn't get my work done, if I failed a test or needed to negotiate for a better outcome on my report card, I had a quarter to do it, to get it done. I knew my grades. They weren't posted online. My parents could just stop by and ask how my grades were. I could make up assignments, retake tests if the teachers allowed me to. And most importantly, me and my teacher were the only ones who knew what was going on.

Fend and fail was a 45-day continuous improvement cycle for a student like me.

Today, it's like 45 seconds from the moment your parents get a push alert on their phone that a grade has been entered. Then a child gets a text from that parent asking, "What happened? Go ask your teacher why you got this grade." And then the kid goes into an anxiety loop.

Your Three Jobs as a Parent

Parenting is not easy because it's a journey of learning in motion and we've convinced ourselves that every decision is high stakes for our kids. The truth is that it's our job to remind our children of three things:

1. We love you.
2. I'm going to keep you safe.
3. I'm going to hold you accountable.

Those three things can only happen if we allow our children to learn and grow on their own, to fail and fend for themselves. That will help them challenge their own storms, find ways to thrive on their own. That will be what we will be doing best: fending and failing with us beside or behind them.

Never in front of them with a lawnmower that cuts down all of the obstacles in their lives. Our job is to support them with the steep climbs of all the different ways in which they go through life because that's what makes us stronger for the journey of life.

A Final Reflection for You

How much time are you spending as an employee of your child? Doing their work, completing their tasks, finding reasons to make them successful versus allowing them to find their own way with you?

How often are you defending your children to other adults in their lives? Coaches, teachers, their grandparents, their neighbors, your friends?

You should never be a defense attorney for your child unless they are in truly big, big trouble. Otherwise, they should learn and grow.

The Lighthouse Metaphor

Parenting is like operating a lighthouse. And your kids are out there sailing around on these big stormy seas. The best sailors have sailed the biggest storms on their own.

Continue doing what is working or what has worked for you. If you're doing well and you're not worried, don't suddenly start changing who you are as a parent, a teacher, or a leader because of something I said. If it's working, stick to it.

Parenting is a journey and it never gets easier. It just changes and we become more accustomed to the ways in which our children and their decisions and circumstances impact their world (not our world, their world).

For Teachers and School Leaders

Teachers and school administrators, share this concept and also apply it. Last year, I shared the idea of schools creating job descriptions for parents. I still wholeheartedly believe in this and I would support any school. I'll even help develop them with you if you contact me because schools need to take a firmer stance on the roles of parents in their school community.

Schools were built for children, not for adults. For children to learn and grow in and for the adults to create the conditions so that children feel loved, safe, and accountable. We all share in those three responsibilities, regardless of your role as a stakeholder in the lives of children.

Teachers, do not accept "I don't know" and guide students through their own failure.

Parents, let the kids fail.

And admin, create the boundaries.

Buffalo Parents Run Into Their Own Storms

Buffalos run into the storms they are facing, and parents, you need to do the same. We all need to do the same. But the storm here is one that changes hourly and what parents need to do is be aware that the storms evolve, grow, and if we're successful, they create their own sunny days and starry nights. And then they invite us to join them in their success.

The storms are our children. They're beautiful and purposeful and they're really just an inconvenience when they pop up and get really violent and nasty. (Not that your kids do, but the storms do.)

So run into them, teach through them, and let others fail along the way so they know what to do the next time and how to prepare mentally, physically, and emotionally. That's what they need and it's what we want for them.

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