I’ve noticed that our culture has very little tolerance for mistakes or failures. The irony is that I think we learn more from our mistakes and failures than our successes. I’m not sure whether my homeschool environment encourages mistakes or whether it “nips them in the bud”. While I think homeschooling has the POTENTIAL for a lot of tolerance of mistakes because it’s a completely safe environment in which to make them. I also know that I, personally never care or worry whether the kids’ work is perfect or even conforms to my vision of right or beautiful. Of course, some subjects leave no room for question and are completely objective. The obvious being math. But even in math, I can give partial credit if they performed the operation correctly but made a simple error of numbers. Sometimes I don’t give partial credit if I feel that they rushed.

For the most part, my children  HATE to make mistakes and I’m not sure why. I would admit that I don’t have tolerance for do-overs when it means wasting lots of time or money. For example, I don’t like to throw food away if a new recipe stinks. That rarely happens because I tend to stick to what I know or can pretty much anticipate how it will turn out. But really, I should let the kids have at it more in the kitchen and not worry so much about their mistakes. School work: I tell them over and over, “that’s what erasers are for”. I’m admitting that this is a failure on our part as parents but I’m not sure how to turn it around.

To be fair, though, I don’t think schools and parents with kids in school have the luxury of tolerating mistakes. I think there’s a fear that their child will be humiliated or labeled for less-than-perfect work.  The notion of helping kids with homework is counter-intuitive in my view, yet it’s common and expected. I thought the purpose of homework is to give the kids more practice on a given concept or allow them to complete work at home that there wasn’t time for in school. The idea that parents should help with and then correct it before the child returns to school cheats kids in 2 respects. First, in an obvious way, the child doesn’t learn how to do his own work. Secondly, a teacher would have no idea that the children in a class are having trouble with a particular concept and likely would move on. Don’t even get me started on projects and contests. I think it’s common that parents help so much that they pretty much do them. My friends of conventionally-schooled kids complain that they HAVE to help or practically do the types of projects that are assigned. There’s no way that the child could complete them on his own. I’m sure I’d be the same. It would be cruel to send Johnny in with a poster that he made by himself next to the fabulous ones created by the other kids’ parents. Maybe that’s not the best example but you get my drift.

I recently had an opportunity to ask an expert in managing people (he was hired to reorganize a certain federal agency after Katrina) how tolerant he was for mistakes in that agency when mistakes literally might cost lives. He agreed that we learn from our own mistakes and he encouraged employees to make them in non-crisis day-to-day work performance. I asked how in the world he encouraged mistakes? He said, he created an environment where it was completely safe to make them and employees knew they could come to him when they made mistakes. His first question was always “Did anybody die?” If the answer was “no” then he’d tell them “We can fix that.”

I think I’ll apply that same standard around here to encourage mistakes AND independence. Hopefully, nobody will get hurt.