Let her make mistakes; it really is a good teacher

Academically, your daughter’s probably more or less on par with everyone else in the class. Grade One was the great equalizer as kids from all over come with different childcare / kindergarten experiences and are now caught up. On the home front, no doubt a year’s worth of conversation with a 6 year-old has brought you two closer as father and daughter. Conversations with a 7 year-old are really much different.

As your child becomes more challenged in social and intellectual pursuits, she may need time to reflect and think about situations even more. But it doesn’t mean she has all the suitable coping strategies. She’s going to ask for help. And here’s the big test: do you solve it for her or do you let her figure it out? Here’s what happens when you stand back and let them try first:

• Forces them to think and to understand the situation before they should do anything about it. If you gave them the solution, they have no idea how you got there and they won’t necessarily be able to replicate it. What you’ve done is created a dependence.
• Nothing beats the feeling that they did it themselves. Builds confidence, self-esteem and a general can-do attitude can be realized simply by letting them fail via trial and error. Makes them feel very grown up.

Just because you are older and more experienced doesn’t mean you have a better solution.

Doing it for her and solving her problems will simply rob your daughter of the opportunities for her to get to know her own abilities. And there’s no guarantee that she will like your solution anyway. Then she is in a double bind: she still has the original challenge and was presented a solution she didn’t want or no encouragement to resolve the initial problem herself and powerless to refuse your solution.

While failure is a great teacher, there is, of course, context. You don’t want to let your kid stew in a problem so complex that it leaves them frustrated. What she will learn from this, is your refusal to help and her inability to overcome. The next time, she might not even try.

So let them fail. Encourage them to discover new solutions instead of taking yours. Just because you are older and more experienced doesn’t mean you have a better solution. Einstein had said problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them.