James' World 2

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When my older son Jack, was in high school, he accepted a summer job selling solar panels door-to-door. My first reaction was to tell him not to do it. I felt protective—afraid of the rejection he would face on doorsteps all summer long. I just couldn’t see how my thoughtful son, a good athlete and straight A student, could cope with so much failure.

As a parent, it’s natural to want to shield your kids from failure. But we often hover over our kids in what are arguably low-stakes situations, inadvertently robbing them of essential learning experiences and causing anxiety rather than the confidence we had intended to build.

Instead, we can learn to let kids fail well.

To be fair, we are in a bind: if we overprotect, we are ridiculed as helicopter parents, but if we underprotect, we suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences of a child’s immature decision-making. Making the job even harder, every few years the parenting pendulum seems to swing: the three-martini playdate replaces the anxious co-piloted playdate and back again. It’s easy to see why parents are torn: Should you let children make their own mistakes, or stay close by, removing obstacles, limiting risks, and preventing failure? Struggling to manage the bind, parents suffer. And so do their kids.

But there is a path forward that avoids either/or thinking and helps kids build good judgment to accompany a learning-oriented, adventuresome spirit. It supports kids in pursuing the right kind of failures, while helping them avoid danger. Extrapolating from my organizational research and personal experience, I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to help children develop the failure muscles they need to stretch and learn, and to grow into responsible members of society. To do this, we need to examine two dimensions of failure science: assessing the context for risk and understanding that failures are not all alike.

Consider three kinds of failure I’ve identified in my research: basic, complex, and intelligent.

Basic failures have single causes—usually a simple mistake. They are preventable. This is why we childproof our homes when children are small, and ensure that medicine bottles can’t be opened without the strength to twist and pinch. Basic failures don’t bring new knowledge, and most of us would be better off avoiding them (such as by paying attention when we’re following a recipe). But they’re part of the experience for any child learning to master a new topic or skill, and it’s good to remind children to take the time to learn from mistakes, so they can keep improving.

Complex failures have multiple causes—each innocuous on its own—that come together to produce havoc. You forget to charge your cell phone, get stuck behind an overturned truck on the highway, can’t reach your spouse, and miss the day care pick up. Most complex failures can be prevented with vigilance, but we’ve all had days where everything goes wrong, and these kinds of failures will continue to slip through in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. We should learn from them and move on.

The intelligent failures are the ones that matter here, the ones parents should let happen to help children thrive.

It starts with learning to reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development. I believe that most of us, to live the fullest lives, should experience more failures, not fewer. Whether it’s tennis champion Roger Federer winning only 54 percent of the thousands of points he played in his illustrious career (proving that, as he put it, “even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play”) or top chemistry professor Jennifer Heemstra saying that 90 percent of the experiments in her lab end in failure, the most successful among us have long demonstrated that you have to be willing to fail. So why do so many parents feel a need to protect their children from failure?

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It was 2016, and I’d been a zookeeper for seven years. I lived with my partner and two stepchildren in a Victorian terrace house in Bristol. We’d met when her kids were four and eight, so I had not experienced the early baby stages, the sleepless nights, nappies, and bottle-feeding.

But that was about to change.

On 15 March, I parked my car outside the house as usual, but rather than bowling inside to shower and eat, I unclipped the car seat and carried a baby gorilla into the lounge. Afia had been born by emergency C-section at Bristol zoo after her mum, Kera, developed pre-eclampsia. I first took her home when she was four weeks old.

On the couch, she nestled in the crook of my arm and clutched my thumb with a delicate fist of wrinkled grey fingers. The trust in her dark eyes snapped awake an instinctive devotion in me – the foundation of the bond that grew between us.

I worked with a family group of seven western lowland gorillas at the zoo. Classified as critically endangered, they are at imminent risk of extinction in the wild. The captive population is managed collectively across Europe by a specialist team: zoos don’t own the species they keep, or sell them, but rather they maintain the genetic diversity within the population by moving animals from one collection to another. I followed industry-wide husbandry guidelines, but what we were doing with Afia had never been tried in the UK before. As a gorilla keeper, I was now part of the team that would hand-rear her.

Hand-rearing is a rare part of zoo keeping, and the goal is always to reunite the baby with its own kind as quickly as possible. As gorillas rely on their mother’s milk for three years, the aim with Afia was to try to get her back with her mother or, failing that, train one of the adult females to become her surrogate mum. Afia would need to be acting like a normal gorilla infant by the time we introduced her into the troop; if we could achieve this within a year, she wouldn’t remember travelling in the car each night or sleeping in a bed with a duvet.

Baby gorillas develop more quickly than humans, so my parenting ride lasted just seven months. I wore a string vest, to replicate a gorilla’s fur, as the first thing Afia needed to learn was to hang on to me wherever I went. She slept on my chest at night, clung to me in fear at unexpected noises, and I helped with her first stiff-legged steps.

y day, we spent time with the adult gorillas, particularly with Kera, Afia’s mum. Adult gorillas are dangerous animals, which meant we would never go into the enclosure with them. Kera remained separated from the rest of the group and struggled to recover from the C-section. Our interactions were through grilled windows and doors in the gorilla house, but Kera was so sick and unresponsive that no maternal bond with Afia could be formed.

Soon, Afia began to ride on my back, furry arms clamped around my neck. She could climb and was trying to master swinging from one rope to another. I recognised her facial expressions – sleepy, solemn, inquisitive – and she had full trust in me, knowing that I would keep her safe. At six months, she was running around the lounge and throwing her toys about. My favourite expression was her play face, a grin that we both knew meant diving off the sofa and wrestling. I would take up my regular spot on the floor and wait for Afia to push the coffee table up against the couch so she could climb on to it more easily. She would spend the next hour leaping on to me or the cushions she’d chucked nearby.

My own family group had to be hands off, as part of the hand-rearing protocol. The kids mentioned later they felt waves of irrational jealousy. When I was rolling around on the floor, Afia chuckling with gorilla laughter, my partner said: “I can see now what sort of parent you’d have been for the kids at that age.”

We ate dinner together as a family, Afia on my lap, enthusiastically drumming her hands on the kitchen table and making grabs for the cutlery. The gorilla troop eats together at the same time, so sharing meals needed to be the norm for Afia, and she would look around the table at us all, squishing fistfuls of steamed sweet potato through her fingers. After dinner, she’d slump across me on the couch, asleep, briefly waking up for a bottle-feed before bed, where she would snuffle and belch cheesy milk breath over me. In bed, Afia had started off sleeping on my chest, but now she was older, she would slide off to snuggle next to me, or roll over and throw a hairy arm over my partner instead.

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My parenting ride … Alan and Afia in 2016. Photograph: Ryan Walker

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