September 15, 2025

The Failure of Failure

The notion that kids today have it too easy and would benefit from more experiences with failure is no longer a surprising, contrarian claim; it has become the conventional wisdom. But it’s dead wrong on two levels: Most children deal with frustration and failure quite a lot, and those experiences tend not to be beneficial, according to research. Either naïveté or conservative ideology leads many adults to believe that when students fall short, they’ll react by trying harder next time. But more commonly students are trapped in a vicious cycle such that they’re even more likely to fail again — and they’re also apt to lose interest in what they’re doing and to prefer easier tasks. Educators and parents would do well to realize that the supposed benefits of failure are vastly overrated.

RESOURCES:

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, “Not Learning from Failure – the Greatest Failure of All,” Psychological Science 30 (2019): 1733-44

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler et al., “The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure,” Journal of Experimental Psychology – General 153 (2024): 1920-37

Ann K. Boggiano et al., “Competing Theoretical Analyses of Helplessness,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 55 (1993): 194-207

A note from Alfie Kohn: