A review by writerethink
The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed by Jessica Lahey

4.0

I really liked this book, and I think she does a really good job of supporting her argument about autonomy-supportive parenting. But I found myself wondering how to apply these insights to parenting my neurodivergent child; that's not a critique of Lahey's book, because that's clearly not the audience she's targeting, but I often find myself wondering about how best to support autonomy in a kid who's got serious deficits in executive function and has explosive meltdowns when things go wrong, etc. How do you support learning from mistakes when the child in question lacks the impulse control to actually apply, in the moment, what they've learned from those previous mistakes? Some of the scenarios of "low-stakes" failure (e.g. forgetting homework) that Lahey described would look very, very different in our house, and I'm just not sure whether self-loathing, self-destructive meltdowns do anything to help a child become more autonomous. But I'll keep thinking about how to the best autonomy-supportive parent I can be for my particular child.