by Alfie Kohn
One need only watch a child carefully—or, if the occasion presents itself, ask her directly—to get a sense of how often she tends to fall short of her own or others’ expectations, how often she’s disappointed with how things worked out, how often she doesn’t get what she wants, how often she finds herself on the receiving end of critical judgments from her peers or adults, how desperately she wishes she could perform as well as___________ (that kid she knows who seems to do things effortlessly). And her frustrations are doubtless compounded if all these feelings aren’t taken seriously by adults. Which they often aren’t.
The key question, though, is how likely it is that failure will be constructive, and whether our chief concern should be to make sure children have more opportunities to screw up. Undoubtedly many very successful people have encountered setbacks and deprivation on the way to triumph. Such inspirational story arcs are a staple of popular entertainment, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that most people who encounter setbacks and deprivation go on to become successful.28 We rarely hear about all those folks who tried and tried and tried, displaying awesome grit and gumption, but never made a go of their business, never sold their app, were never discovered by a talent scout, never had a chance to smugly recount their earlier setbacks and deprivation to an interviewer—for the simple reason that they’re still having them.
Here’s what we learn from psychology: What’s most reliably associated with success are prior experiences with success, not with failure. Although there are exceptions, the most likely consequence of having failed at something is that a child will come to see himself as lacking competence. And the result of that belief is apt to be more failure. All else being equal, a student who gets a zero is far more likely to give up (and perhaps act up29) than to try harder. The late psychologist Arthur Combs put it this way:
It is a common fallacy among many lay people and some teachers that, since the world is a very hard place and people sometimes fail, children should be introduced to failure early. . . . But the position is based on a false premise. Actually, the best guarantee we have that a person will be able to deal with the future effectively is that he has been essentially successful in the past. People learn that they are able, not from failure, but from success. While it may be true that toughness and adequacy come from successfully dealing with problems, the learning comes not from experiencing failure but from successfully avoiding it.30
We may wish that a child who can’t seem to get on base, or spit out a list of facts from memory during a test, or coax anything more than a hideous shriek from his violin will react by squaring his shoulders, reciting the mantra of The Little Engine That Could, and redoubling his efforts until, gosh darn it, he turns things around. But wishing doesn’t make it true. That turn of events remains the exception rather than the rule. It’s true that kids learn from failure, but what they’re likely to learn is that they’re failures.
To make sense of this, we need to understand something that’s often ignored by people who insist on the benefits of experiencing failure: Trying to succeed isn’t the same thing as trying not to fail. The first isn’t always constructive, but the second is pretty reliably destructive.31 Some of the greatest names in psychology—including Kurt Lewin in the 1930s and David McClelland in the 1950s—emphasized the all-important difference between being motivated to approach success and being motivated to avoid failure. When you actually do fail, it tends to trigger the latter: an avoidance mentality. The goal isn’t to accomplish great things but to cover your butt, save your reputation, and preserve a positive view of yourself.
In a typical experiment, children are asked to solve problems that are rigged to ensure failure. After that, they’re asked to solve problems that are clearly within their capabilities. What happens? Even the latter problems now tend to paralyze them because a spiral of failure has been set into motion. This doesn’t happen in every case, of course, but for at least half a century researchers have been documenting the same basic effect with children of various ages.32
The fundamental difference between approaching success and avoiding failure will be missed by anyone who tends to focus only on what can be observed and measured. The decisive factor isn’t what happened but how an individual—in a certain social context—interprets what happened. It’s not just behaviors that matter, in other words, but attitudes, goals, perspectives, and feelings. On the one hand, this means that not every dropped stitch, botched chord, or “death” at a given level of a video game will register in the child’s mind as a spirit-crushing Failure. After all, any attempt to master a skill will involve setbacks along the way. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that under certain conditions (which I’ll describe shortly), the objective fact of coming up short may indeed be experienced by children as failing in a meaningful way. And that does prove damaging—partly, as Deborah Stipek of Stanford University explains, because it changes their understanding of why they succeed and why they fail. Specifically, kids who have learned to see themselves as failures are “more likely to attribute success [when it does happen] to external causes, and failure to a lack of ability” as compared to “children who have a history of good performance.”33 A kid who doesn’t do well assumes that if he does succeed, he must have just gotten lucky—or that the task was easy. And he assumes that if he fails again, which he regards as more likely, it’s because he doesn’t have what it takes: intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent, whatever. This quickly turns into a vicious circle because attributing results to causes outside of one’s control makes people feel even more helpless, even less likely to do well in the future. The more they fail, the more they construct an image of themselves—and a theory about the results—that leads to still more failure.34 All of this helps to explain why, as the educational psychologist Martin Covington put it, “simply increasing the pressure on students to try harder in the face of failure”—for example, by “rewarding hard workers and punishing the indifferent”—“is to invite disaster.”35
And it’s not just achievement that suffers. Kids who fail also tend to lose interest in whatever they’re doing (say, learning), and they come to prefer easier tasks.36 Both of these outcomes make sense, of course: It’s hard for a child to stay excited about something she has reason to think she can’t do well, and it’s even harder for her to welcome a more difficult version of whatever she was doing. In fact, failure often leads kids to engage in something that psychologists call “self-handicapping”: They deliberately make less of an effort in order to create an excuse for not succeeding. This lets them preserve the idea that they have high aptitude. They’re able to tell themselves that if they had tried, they might have done much better.37
What all this means is that when kids’ performance slides, when they lose enthusiasm for what they’re doing, or when they try to cut corners, much more is going on than laziness or lack of motivation. What’s relevant is what their experiences have been. And the experience of having failed is a uniquely poor bet for anyone who wants to maximize the probability of future success.
So how can we predict when failure is likely to do less damage? Different aspects of a situation and different characteristics of an individual help to determine how a given experience will be perceived and therefore what impact it’s likely to have.
•Was it an unusual occurrence, or is failure so common for the child that he’s come to expect it and therefore to infer that he’s incompetent?
•Was the failure accidental, or was the child deliberately given too difficult a task in the hope that he would somehow be a better person for failing at it?
•Was failure intrinsic to the task itself (falling off the bike) or was it defined on the basis of someone else’s judgment (getting a bad grade)?
•Was the failure just one element of a long-term activity that the child sees as meaningful and enjoyable, or was it a stand-alone event?
•Was the failure part of a process (learning to write or dance), or a su
mmative outcome at the end of that process (a poor result on a test; an unsuccessful audition)?
•Has the child been helped to think about managing failure, or is it assumed that failure, per se, will benefit him?
•How did the child feel about himself before he failed? (As we’ll see in chapter 6, people are least likely to persist in the face of failure if they start out with low self-esteem.) Has he been raised with unconditional care and the kind of autonomy support that produces a sense of efficacy—or in a “doing to” environment characterized by rewards and punishments?
•Did the child fail in a supportive environment where setbacks are viewed as no big deal? Or was the impact of the failure compounded because it took place in the context of intense pressure to succeed—or, worse, losing to someone in a public competition?
What leads kids to say, “This isn’t worth it” or “I’m no good at this”—in other words, what’s least likely to turn the experience of failure into something productive—are things like grades, contests, rewards, and punishments. These things draw attention to how well kids are doing—or, more ominously, how well they’re doing compared to everyone else—as opposed to helping them focus on what they’re doing. Ironically, the former are often favored by the same people who extol the motivational benefits of failure.
Under certain circumstances, then, it is possible for a child to pick herself up and try again, just the way we might hope. But it’s still not the likeliest outcome. And the news is even worse if we’re concerned not only about achievement but about kids’ psychological health. Even someone who really does buckle down and try harder when she fails may be doing so out of an anxious, compulsive pressure to feel better about herself rather than because she takes pleasure from what she’s doing. Even if it does occur, is success really worth that price?
Finally, if we take the advice of all those articles that urge us to step back and let our children stumble, the important question isn’t what message we meant to communicate (“You can do it!”) but what message the kids are likely to receive (“Mom could have helped me but didn’t”). Not every instance in which a parent holds back will generate resentment or disappointment, of course. As we saw in Chapter 3, the amount of help kids need and welcome varies widely. But if we respond less to those individual needs than to a one-size-fits-all commitment to promoting self-sufficiency, or an abstract conviction that failure is good for kids, then we may damage the relationship we have with our children. (In fact, we may be affecting the way they view themselves as a result of that relationship: “Does she not love me enough to help? Am I not worth helping?”) A decision not to step in when kids are obviously frustrated and feeling inadequate is unlikely to make them more self-sufficient or self-confident. Instead, it’s apt to leave them feeling less supported, less secure about their own worthiness, and more doubtful about the extent to which we really care about them.
The notion that kids need even more opportunities to fail is incredibly simplistic and often flatly false, in part because the whole BGUTI mindset is misguided. Like so many assertions about the motivational power of rewards and competition, it just doesn’t stand up to the best psychological theory and research.
CHAPTER 5
The Underlying Values
Conditionality, Scarcity, and Deprivation
Let’s review. Amazing accomplishments routinely take place in the absence of rewards. Competition isn’t necessary to promote excellence and often holds people back from doing their best. Exposing children to unpleasant experiences is not a constructive way to prepare them for the possibility that they will encounter more unpleasant experiences when they’re older. Frustration and failure have a tendency to elicit more of the same. And there is no evidence to suggest that children who receive recognition just for playing, or support just for trying, will develop unrealistic expectations, a sense of entitlement, or a sudden lack of interest in doing well.
What’s particularly striking about these findings is how little they seem to matter. At some point one starts to realize that many traditionalists aren’t just offering predictions about what will happen to children later (if we do this rather than that); they’re telling us what we ought to do with children now. If their empirical assertions turn out to have little support, they merely shift gears and emphasize that losers shouldn’t get trophies. For Pete’s sake, they lost! They’re supposed to go home empty-handed!
More generally, one finds an almost palpable outrage over the possibility that kids will get off too easy, or feel good about themselves without having earned that right. This anger—which, incidentally, I have never witnessed from people on the other side of the argument, such as supporters of participation trophies or opponents of dodge ball—contributes to the impression that what’s at issue here are deeply held values. The economist Paul Krugman once pointed out that “the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best”; it’s about differences in conceptions of morality and justice.1 So, too, for disputes involving children.
Three features of the powerful reaction I’ve described are worth noting. First, it’s liable to be triggered by very modest changes (or even just proposals for change): getting rid of school-sponsored dodge ball but not all competitive sports; eliminating zeroes for children’s individual assignments, not grades, per se; putting an end to separate gatherings for elite students, not to awards assemblies across the board. Second, critics seem to take on faith that such changes are widespread. (Typical assertion: Today’s teens have been “bathed from the cradle in affirmations and awards meant to boost their self-esteem.”2) As with claims about permissiveness and overparenting, no evidence is ever presented to show that the practices being disparaged really are pervasive, even when it’s something as easily quantifiable as the use of participation trophies. Finally, published criticisms are often distinguished by vitriolic sarcasm—mocking references to how we’re protecting “the precious snowflakes of the world” or children’s “tender self-esteem.” The point, presumably, is that children are not as precious or tender as they’re made out to be. Moreover, that case is made through ridicule rather than by demonstrating that the activity in question actually doesn’t harm them.
Each of the empirical claims explored in the last chapter has a corresponding “shadow” value that I’d like to try to illuminate now. Behind the claim that rewards are required to motivate people is a commitment to conditionality. Behind the claim that competition produces excellence is a commitment to scarcity. And behind the claim that failure or unhappiness offers useful preparation is a commitment to deprivation.
CONDITIONALITY
If I give you a hug for no reason other than that I’m fond of you or hand you a banana just because I know you like them, those are not rewards. To qualify for that term, the item must be offered conditionally—based on my approval of something you did or how well you did it. You must “do this” to “get that.”
Many people find it extremely upsetting that anyone might receive something desirable—a sum of money, a trophy, a commendation—without having done enough to deserve it. It’s outrageous, we’re told (in this case by Newsweek), that some children get “awards, gold stars, and happy-face stickers for the most routine accomplishments of childhood.” Even recess in the primary grades is often defined not as a chance to play, a break to which all children are entitled, but as a reward for having lived up to the teacher’s expectations—a privilege that ought to be withheld from children who don’t merit it.
The insistence on attaching strings to whatever we offer isn’t justified only by appealing to the ostensible effects on future behavior. Rather, it’s assumed that we have a moral obligation to reward those who are deserving and, equally important, to make sure the undeserving go conspicuously unrewarded. Hence the fury when, for example, children who didn’t defeat their peers are given a trophy anyway. Everyone at the game knows full well who won, but the losers must not receive anything tha
t even looks like a reward.3
And it’s not just treats or trophies that must be earned. Children shouldn’t be allowed to feel good about themselves—or “special”—without being able to point to tangible accomplishments. (In the following chapter, I’ll say more about the conservative assault on the concept of self-esteem and particularly on any version of it that isn’t sufficiently conditional.) This basic message often shades into a disparagement of children or young adults in general. For example, a 2012 commencement speech delivered by an English teacher, in which he told the graduates, “Do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not,” was noteworthy mostly for the explosion of (overwhelmingly positive) attention it attracted, including nearly two million views on YouTube, a decision by a local newspaper to publish the complete transcript, and a book deal. A vast segment of our culture believes that kids are too highly valued, that they haven’t paid their dues and need to be put in their place.
The idea that good things must always be earned, and that any compromise on that principle means that we’re spoiling or overprotecting children, might be said to live at the intersection of economics and theology. This is where lectures about the law of the marketplace meet sermons about what we must do to earn our way into heaven. Here, almost every human interaction, even among family members, is regarded as a kind of transaction. In explaining her opposition to the idea of expressing unconditional love for one’s children, the influential developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind declared, “The rule of reciprocity, of paying for value received, is a law of life that applies to us all.”4 No one (even children) is entitled to get something (even love) for nothing.
Just as things that are desirable must be classified as rewards so they can be parceled out conditionally, so it follows that when people do something bad, bad things must be done to them. “The essence of punishment is that it involves suffering, or in [the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher] Grotius’s terms, ‘The infliction of an ill suffered for an ill done,’” according to the criminologist Philip Bean. “The suffering created by punishment is not incidental, but the deliberate work of persons who claim the right to inflict it.”5 This holds true even when children are involved and even when the punishment is described euphemistically as a “consequence.” In effect, a tit-for-tat view of justice is married to a market-exchange view of life.
