How Children Cope With Failure

Kyle was a jackass.

Four months after hiring him for a pretty prestigious paid internship and that was the nicest quality I could ascribe to him, too. Kyle spent his work week fooling around, hitting on the female interns, and surfing the Internet. Assigning Kyle tasks was an exercise in futility. He was too busy playing obnoxious practical jokes on people to do even some minor filing. Kyle was always at least 20 minutes late for his shift; you could set your watch by him. And at least 3 times he had left for his lunch break and never returned. Even more ludicrous than all of this, Kyle nearly always complained because he wasn’t trusted enough to do anything ‘fun’ or ‘important’ or ‘challenging.’

From my point of view, Kyle should have been thanking God he still had his job. Furthermore, if I couldn’t trust him to close the window, how the hell was I supposed to trust him with something ‘challenging?’

Unfortunately, Kyle’s near constant bellyaching drowned out the voice of my better judgment one day. Hoping to motivate Kyle with a little bit of responsibility, I decided to put him in charge for one hour while I met an important client for lunch. Since almost everyone was out of the office for the day, his only real duties would have been answering the phones, taking messages, and avoiding setting the place on fire.

Kyle seemed pretty thrilled by the fact I trusted him to do more than put stickers on files under direct supervision of someone else, so I had high hopes that my little experiment would inspire Kyle to do a better job. In the very least, I told myself, it’s not like much could go wrong.

To make a long story short, I came back exactly one hour later to find Kyle and 6 of his college buddies in the midst of a food fight. Not only that, but every light on the phone was lit up. He hadn’t managed to take a single call.

Furious, I sent Kyle’s buddies home and called him into my office.

“You’ve been complaining for months that no one trusts you with responsibility. I put you in charge and this is how you repay me? By drenching the copy machine in Dr. Pepper?”

“Oh come on! I doubt it’s even broken! It just needs to air out!”

“Kyle,” I asked, calmly, “Are you totally useless?”

“What are you talking about? I bust my ass around here!”

“You’ve failed at every task I’ve ever given you. That’s not how I define ‘hard worker.’ That’s how I define ‘incompetence.’ And let’s be real here! I could train a monkey to do your job!”

“Are you calling me a monkey?”

I sighed and put my head in my hands. “Tell you what. Take the rest of the day off.”

“Paid?”

“Unpaid.”

“But that’s not fair!”

I couldn’t believe the gall of this guy, but I was tired of arguing with him so I merely said, “Go.”

I spent the rest of the day dealing with angry clients who felt ignored, cleaning bits of taco salad off of the blinds, and muttering to myself that I would have never entered my chosen field if I had known I would become a glorified babysitter. Just before I was about to leave for the day, the phone rang one more time. I picked it up.

It was Kyle’s Mother.

Before we go any further, I guess I should make note of the fact that Kyle came from a very wealthy family. In fact, his Grandmother, who was extremely well known in the community, had put a good word in for him which is how he got the internship in the first place. Kyle’s Mother was a typical trophy wife who had neither worked nor heard the word ‘no’ in her entire life. She also spoiled her children rotten. For his 20th birthday, she gave Kyle a new car worth more than a lot of people’s homes. It was necessary to for her to do this, Kyle had told me, since he had already wrecked the cars he had gotten for his 16th and 18th birthdays.

Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to our conversation.

“My son just got home,” she snapped as soon as I introduced myself, “and he just told me something very disturbing!”

“Oh?” I inquired.

“He told me you called him incompetent!”

“Ma’am,” I replied delicately, “He is incompetent.”

“How dare you say that! How dare you! You hurt his feelings!”

“Unfortunately Ma’am, I am in the business of running this company. I am not in the business of catering to your son’s feelings.”

“He also said you called him a monkey! A monkey! That’s slander! I could sue you! Any psychiatrist would agree that what you said caused lifelong damage to his self esteem! You can’t put a price on that!”

I was enraged. I was livid. Walking in the door and seeing a bean burrito stomped into the office carpet was small beans compared to the utter fury I felt when this woman threatened to sue me.

“If you feel like I have broken the law, feel free to take your case to a lawyer. But in the meantime, I think there has been some misunderstanding here. Harassing me with calls about your son’s work performance leads me to believe that he is still a child as opposed to a grown man. Because [Company] does not employ children, I’m afraid I’m going to have to fire him. Let him know he can pick up his final paycheck on Friday.”

“You’re firing him?” she asked incredulously.

I hung up on her. Thirty seconds later, the phone rang again. I left my office for the day without picking up.

I didn’t hear from Kyle or his Mother for over a week. I assumed this was because they were busy being laughed out of their lawyer’s office after explaining their ‘slander’ case. However, Kyle eventually did knock on the door of my office sans Mom.

“I just wanted to apologize for the substandard job I did here. I also wanted to tell you I’m sorry my Mother called and yelled at you. If you give me another chance, I swear this will never happen again.”

I didn’t even look up from my folder. “I’ve already given you plenty of chances Kyle. I’m done.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But at least let me work off the cost of a new copy machine. At least let me do that.”

Now that gave me a pause considering Kyle had the means to get the company a new top of the line copy machine without lifting a finger. I found myself relenting.

“I’ll let you work off the copy machine. But the keyword here is: work. No fooling around. Do your job.”

“Thank you! Thank you, I promise I won’t let you down!”

Kyle busted his ass working off the cost of the copy machine. Impressed, I decided to let him keep his job. Not losing an ounce of momentum, Kyle continued to do stellar work and eventually started moving up the corporate ladder. Three years later, when I had chosen early retirement he took over for me.

I guess confronting his own failures and learning from them was what was finally needed to turn him into a man.

This is why it is so troubling to hear that Grand Rapids Public Schools seems to want students to remain children perpetually. It’s bad enough when people like Kyle’s Mother turn their mini terrors loose on the world. It’s totally unconscionable when the school systems decide to help create them.

In case you didn’t read that article, the Grand Rapids School system is beginning a new program where they will avoid giving students an ‘F’ when they fail a class. Instead, they’ll get an ‘H’ and the opportunity to take the class over again. And again. And again.

Apparently, the Superintendent doesn’t want to give 14-16 year old students any ‘life failures.’ I guess it’s far better for students to experience their first failure like Kyle did: In their adult years, at the workplace, where a less kind boss would fire them and put them out on the street.

Someone please tell these people that failure is not a bad thing! It’s a learning experience. How are children supposed to learn to buckle down, work hard, and improve themselves if they’re never given the chance to fail? Sometimes it isn’t until we experience the fruits of our irresponsibility that we learn to pull our shit together.

Furthermore, since when is it the teacher’s job to protect our child’s feelings? Instilling a strong sense of self is something a parent should do. Teachers shouldn’t be worrying about the self esteems of their students. They should be making sure the little fuckers can read.

The problem is parents don’t want to be parents. They want little miniature versions of themselves they can hold and cuddle and then send off somewhere else to be raised.

I was talking to a friend a couple of weeks ago about her school age daughter who managed to pull bad grades in a couple of subjects at school. When questioned about her poor academic performance, her daughter told her the reason she wasn’t working as hard is because she vaguely felt like her new teacher wasn’t as nice as the teacher she had last year.

“Do you think I should talk to him about it during our conference?” she fretted.

“Why would you?”

“Well, what if he doesn’t like her?”

“So what if he doesn’t like her? It’s not his job to like her! It’s his job to teach her!”

“I’m just saying, perhaps she would be doing better in school if he made more of an effort to be nice.”

I groaned and put my head in my hands. “Listen, if you think he’s being abusive, definitely step in. But she’s going to have to cope with authority figures who aren’t sweet as pie to her when she’s an adult, isn’t she? So why not let her practice dealing with differing personalities now instead of demanding that everyone treat her exactly the same way only for her to end up shocked and traumatized when she finds out the rest of the world smells her shit and knows it stinks later?”

“But I know she can do so much better!”

“Then quit giving her excuses and ride her ass until she does!”

My friend took my advice and her daughter ended up significantly improving her grade point average. As far as we both can tell, her oh so important self esteem wasn’t damaged in the process. Bonus: she can read.

Parents, do your fucking jobs! You worry about self esteem and how your children cope with failure. Let teachers worry about science and fucking arithmetic.