Fail Forward

Last week I went to a business seminar on innovation for work. The topic was around business competitiveness and setting the pace in your industry by staying innovative. But a lot of what was said really spoke to me as a parent of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder. One of the terms the speaker said that became my new favorite phrase is “fail forward.” Accepting failures as part of the process and that you learn from them. Make the failure meaningful and find opportunities to come up with new ideas or opportunities to move forward.
I think, as a general rule, good parents carry around a great deal of unnecessary guilt. I know I do and I’d like to think I’m a good parent. I’m always trying to make sure I do all I can do to give Penelope the best chances at a happy life. Any errors I make are not just a waste of that precious time but counter-productive – a slip backwards that now has to be regained.
We’d like to think we have more control over our kids than we actually do. I came to the realization a while ago that I can’t make Penelope do anything. I can change the way I do things that may make her more likely to do what I want, but that’s the limit of my control. I think that is where some of the guilt lies, in that when our child makes that poor decision, we feel like we are the ones that failed because we weren’t able to prevent it.
With Penelope and her RAD, the hurdles to make better choices are much larger. So I tend to obsess over what I can do to help her. Then I think about how she has to work hard at this too, and then I debate in my head if she is capable or if she is just unwilling. That leads me back to the beginning of this ongoing cycle of what I can do to help her.
The approached I’ve learned works best for Penelope is the Love & Logic parenting model. It makes her own her behaviors and be responsible for her choices. It’s especially helpful for combating some of the developmental delays that are common with RAD. The challenge in this method is giving up the power. Again, power or control we really do not have.  But the premise of this parenting method is that kids need to make mistakes and get in trouble as part of their learning process. Let the action and subsequent consequence teach the child, not the parent.  The parent’s role is to set the boundaries and be the child’s support through these experiences. It applies to your average kid, but also to the extreme behaviors of of child with RAD.
These kids can go well beyond normal mistakes and bad choices. Even with that, I’ve learned that Penelope tends to make the biggest strides when she has to deal with the repercussions of her mistakes. Some of these mistakes are ones I can live with. But there are a few that I wish never happened. Even so, the more severe here action resulting in a larger consequence, the more she has moved forward.
Even though I still struggle with letting go of control and deal with parental guilt, I’ve learned that her mistakes are one of my greatest tools to help her. Looking at these events and challenges that pop up as opportunities. So I like this phrase “fail forward.”