Why I want my kids to fail.

With the Summer Term looming on the horizon, I found myself reading Prince Andrew's comments on failure with interest. It seemed particularly relevant at a time of year filled with exams, sports fixtures, music festivals, dance shows and competitions of every description.

I have long suspected that we have become rather frightened of allowing our children to fail.

How many people now hide a little gift in every layer of Pass the Parcel? How many parties end with every child receiving exactly the same prize? How many schools hold Sports Days where nobody really wins anything?

More importantly, why?

As the mother of four children, and someone who has spent years in and around schools, I have sat through more than my fair share of "everyone's a winner" events. The intention is admirable. Nobody wants children to feel humiliated, left out or defeated. But somewhere along the line we seem to have confused kindness with pretending that everybody is equally good at everything.

They aren't. And that's perfectly fine.

One of the arguments I hear most often is that competitive sports are unfair because some children simply aren't very good at them. Well yes. Some children aren't very good at Maths either. Others struggle with reading, spelling, handwriting, concentration, music, art or remembering where they've left their PE kit. Human beings are wonderfully diverse creatures. We all have strengths and weaknesses. The answer surely isn't to pretend those differences don't exist.

In fact, sport often provides exactly the opposite opportunity. The child who struggles all year in the classroom may be transformed on Sports Day. The child who finds academic work difficult may suddenly discover that they can run faster, throw further or jump higher than anyone else. For one glorious afternoon they are no longer the child who is always behind; they are the child everyone is trying to beat.

My mother taught for many years and can still recall children who found confidence and self-belief on the sports field after years of struggling elsewhere. The same is true today.

Likewise, not every child will excel in every event. My daughter is tiny. She had absolutely no chance in the High Jump one year and, at one point, practically had to be lifted over the bar. She found this hilarious. She didn't win. She wasn't traumatised. Two days later she was dancing at a village fete and entirely in her element.

Children are often far more resilient than we give them credit for. What concerns me more is the message we send when we remove every possibility of failure. Because failure is not the opposite of success. More often than not, it's part of the journey towards it.

Somehow "failure" has become a dirty word. Yet every one of us has failed at something. Failed an exam. Failed a driving test. Failed an interview. Failed to make the team. Failed to achieve something we desperately wanted. The important lesson isn't how to avoid failure altogether. It's how to cope with it, learn from it and try again.

Children need opportunities to experience disappointment in manageable doses. Not because we are unkind, but because life inevitably contains disappointments. Better to learn that lesson surrounded by supportive adults than encounter it for the first time as an adult and discover that nobody has ever taught you how to lose.

What has always struck me about these attempts to engineer equality is that children are rarely fooled by them anyway. They know who ran fastest. They know who scored the goal. They know who won the race. When adults tie themselves in knots trying not to acknowledge reality, we risk looking faintly ridiculous.

The goal should not be to create an artificial world in which everybody wins. The goal should be to create an environment in which everybody has the chance to succeed at something. Life isn't fair, and trying to make it so sets our children up for a different kind of failure, albeit not the one we are so desperate to protect them from. So bring back reading schemes, House points/credits and grading in our primary schools; the kids love it, they know where they are and it is the most realistic and useful preparation for life after school.

Celebrate success at every level, recognise effort but don't demean outstanding achievement in any field for fear of upsetting someone. Otherwise there are no winners - only precious, emotionally overprotected individuals who go under the first time they don't get a prize in the proverbial Pass the Parcel. And that's really not good preparation for life in the real world.

And the child crossing the finish line first may be fighting battles you know nothing about. That moment of success may matter far more than you realise.

As C. S. Lewis observed:

                "Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement."