Embracing failure to succeed

How my parenting approach is different from my own upbringing and why I believe embracing failure will help my daughters succeed. There is no such thing as success or failure, there is only progress.
 
Progress is when you try, keep trying, and you never give up. It is failing and growing rather than failing and stopping.

Failure as we know it is when someone quits and gives up. It is an end of a road. As a parent, it was important to me that my children focused on making progress rather than being scared of failure.

Every kid should learn how to progress, instead of freezing or quitting when facing any challenge. Failure for me today is equal to progress, it is not the opposite of success. Failure and success are the two different faces of the coin called progress.
 
Most people have been programmed from the moment they started school to believe that the grades they achieve determine their ability to do well at work and flourish in life. Unfortunately, most parents pass this limiting belief unconsciously to their children. There is a huge need today to call parents to be more conscious and aware of the beliefs they have which limit their abilities to support their children to thrive in life, work, or business in the future.
 
The Lebanese-American writer and poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote:
 
 “Your children are not your children.
 They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
 They come through you but not from you,
 And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you”.
 
So, we are here as parents to help our kids try, thrive, fail, learn, and progress. We are not there to try to shield our kids from trying and failing.

My wife and I struggled a lot as parents to understand those facts at the beginning. We knew that our daughters would be our best teachers when we realised that we wanted to support them on their journey in a different way from how we had been raised. 

Since then, we have been continuously educating ourselves on conscious parenting. We learn every day, as if we are children ourselves. We are growing with our daughters as we all progress in different aspects of our life together.

Our manifesto at home right now goes as follows:
 
 1- Thrive for progress: There is no such thing as failure, only progress. We help our daughters try and not to be afraid to try new things. Grit and perseverance are the essential skills of progress. They are only acquired by trying without fear or judgement.

2- Embracing risks: There is no No. Everything is a Yes to try, except if it poses a real danger to them. Our role as parents is to facilitate their experience in life and not to impose on them what they should do. We expose them to experiences and encourage them without forcing them to do them.

3- Build mental muscles: Problem solving is more important for us than memorising useless information at school. Going to school is to learn skills, especially social skills, such as connecting with others, solving problems, empathy, and emotional intelligence.
 
 4- EQ is more important IQ: Grades at school do not determine one’s ability for excellence. According to schools, I was a big failure for 25 years of my life. I did nothing at school other than rebelling unconsciously against the school system that jailed me for too long, and against the parenting style that oppressed me in a conservative society where I grew up.

For them, it was the way of raising a child. For me, it was a prison that took me years to overcome. My kids will not experience that.

5- Developing resourcefulness: when facing failure, it is not the end. It just a detour to find another way to do things.
 
6- Public schools are very expensive: If you think public schools are free, you are mistaken. This is where kids get introduced to bullying and drugs. The cost of rehab goes beyond 35,000 dollars if it happens one time. We know it may happen multiple times. Parents should rethink how to home school with likewise parents instead of delegating raising our kids to the government and confused teachers.
 
Confidence is not about never failing; it’s about knowing how you can overcome it. By embracing failure, my daughters learn to believe in themselves, in their ability to bounce back, adapt, and conquer any challenge in their own way. True confidence comes from experience, and failing amazingly provides the most powerful lessons.
 
 Embrace failure and always aim for progress.