Reese Witherspoon talks about the importance of letting her kids fail

Allowing your kids to experience failure is important for their personal development and growth. While it might seem counterintuitive, failure is a valuable and necessary part of a child’s learning process—especially for teaching resilience. Reese Witherspoon agrees and recently had a candid conversation about letting her own kids fail.

During an appearance on the podcast “Good Inside with Dr. Becky,” Witherspoon admitted that it’s difficult to let her kids fail and that her instinct, like any parent’s, is to shield them from it.

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“I see this a lot with parents – I don’t know when we stopped letting our kids fail. Like I learned so much from the paper I didn’t turn in or the demerits I got, so I got detention,” she tells Dr. Becky.

She recalls a time when she was suspended from school for being “disruptive” in fifth grade, after getting caught writing and passing notes to her friends.

“And my parents didn’t say, ‘Uh, she didn’t deserve that.’ And take me out of school,” she says. “They actually let me sit in it, and feel uncomfortable. So I think, learning from failure is actually a valuable tool that you can’t take away from kids, right? You rob them if you don’t let them sit in the discomfort of the experience.” 

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Witherspoon is mom to daughter, Ava, 24, and sons Deacon, 19, and Tennessee, 11. She says when Ava was in third grade, she was part of her school’s basketball team and was disappointed she hadn’t scored any points during the games. So she talked to her daughter about it, and she didn’t cherry-coat it.

“Yeah, I know. I know, that probably feels really bad,” she remembers saying. “You know what also, maybe you’re not good at basketball?”

“[Ava] was like ‘What? Can you tell me I’m not good at something?'” Witherspoon shared.

“It’s actually really important to learn what you’re not good at,” she says of being honest with her children.

Witherspoon admits it was really hard for her to do, but she knows it was for the best.

“I think the hard part too, as a parent is, age-appropriate failure. So we are supposed to intervene when… their little hands can’t cut correctly. We’re supposed to help them with motor skills, right? So intervening with certain things at [a] young age, is different,” she explains.

The important thing to remember is that allowing our kids to fail doesn’t mean we’re abandoning them when they’re struggling. We can still provide emotional support and guidance while allowing them to learn life’s tough—but necessary—lessons. In the long run, it helps our kids navigate the ever-changing world they’re a part of while building up their coping strategies at the same time.