Set Your Kids Up To Fail, It’s Awesome.

Summary

In this episode, Danny Dumas discusses the importance of allowing boys to experience failure as a crucial part of their growth into manhood. He shares personal anecdotes about his son and emphasizes the need for parents to give their children responsibilities and the freedom to face consequences. Dumas advocates for a parenting style that encourages independence and real-life experiences, preparing children for adulthood by letting them learn from their mistakes.

Takeaways

• Let your sons experience failure to learn valuable lessons.
• Allowing kids to face consequences helps them grow.
• Life is a push and pull of responsibilities and outcomes.
• Parents should not micromanage their children's lives.
• Encourage independence by giving them responsibilities.
• Failure is a necessary part of learning and growth.
• Real-life experiences are essential for developing maturity.
• Let children make decisions while under your supervision.
• Teach kids to negotiate and advocate for themselves.
• Failure is not the end; it's a stepping stone to success.

Chapters

00:00 Raising Boys into Men: The Journey Begins
04:50 Consequences and Responsibility in Growth
10:59 Embracing Failure as a Life Skill

If you click on this link above I may make a commission, but it wont cost you anymore money, but it might be slightly harder for Jeff Bezoes to fill up his $500,000,000 yacht so if you want to help me and stick it to the man use the links above

Click Here To Reconnect With Your Family.

Send me an email at danny@dannydumas.com

Take the 28 Day Earn Your Title Challenge

Transcript

0:36

Hey, welcome back my friend or if you're new here, welcome for the first time. My name is Danny Dumas and this is the Earn Your Title Podcast and you're in the right place if you want to become a better husband, father and leader. Today we're talking about raising boys into men and I haven't read this book yet, but my sister sent it to me and you know, in Instagram there's a carousel and so there's all these steps of manhood and the name of the book is The Uprising by Chris Vallotton. and I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but I will link it in the show notes. It's the epic battle for the most fatherless generation in history. And one of these steps to becoming a man is to be treated as a man. And in order to be treated as a man, you have to allow your sons to fail. And you could say uh daughters as well. I think this probably applies to both, but I'm gonna talk to the sons because I recently had an experience with my son. And it was so powerful. And I want to, I want to give you this opportunity to do this with your kids. Now my son is 17, he'll be 17. He's moving to that next generation. I think you need to be careful with this in the younger years, ah because they, they may not handle this as well, but what we let my son do, my wife and myself, what we let him do, we let him fail. And I know that seems like a bad thing. He failed. How did he fail? Well, he is going into a senior year of college and he wants to take some extra credit classes to kind of improve his GPA. And we found out he can go to his local community college for free. And so, you know, in the springtime we talked to his guidance counselor. She set this up. He signs up for a class and we let him do all of it. He's had to get a college email. They only communicate through that email address. We knew what the class was. And you know, in the springtime we kind of, Hey, you know, any news on the class? We asked him about it. He's like, yeah, it's this day, this day, this day. Well, as it's coming up, we knew it was coming up and we didn't say anything. And the class starts on a Tuesday. Tuesday goes by. My son realizes he completely forgot about the class. He, and one of the reasons he forgot about the class is because he lost his phone, couldn't find it anywhere. He was actually house sitting, which was, we gave him a chance to get away from our house. He'd been gone for a week. Couldn't find his phone, couldn't access the email, didn't know what room, didn't know anything, missed the first day. Very upset the next day. He realized, my word, I missed my very first day of college. Some of his friends were like, yeah, if you missed the first day, you're kicked out of class. And he was not to tears, but you could tell he was emotional that he felt he had messed up talking to my wife. And we just said, fix it. So he goes to his guidance counselor. And she was able to contact the school to make sure that he wasn't kicked out. He was able to go. He found his phone. Thankfully he gets online. And this is what was awesome about this experience. He gets online. He figures out he can still go. Contacts his professor. Let's let's her know what happened. Then he drives to the college the day before he's supposed to go, finds the classroom, finds where he's supposed to go so that he's not going to be late. goes and gets the list, goes to the store and purchases the supplies on his own. And you know, he's already had a second class. He'll be going to his third class this week. What an awesome lesson. I am so thankful he failed. I'm so thankful he missed that class because he was irresponsible and he was just, you know, we just say he lives in a Kuna Matata life, you know, just no worries. And I don't want him to grow up worrying, but I want him to realize that life is going to happen. And in this book, you know, treat yourself like a man. One of the ways that you do that is by giving them some more responsibility and then giving them the consequences. So they suggest taking or rid of his curfew. I think, and I've heard talk to my wife about this, I think that's something we're going to do. Hey bud, no more curfew, man. You want to stay up to two in the morning? No big deal, but we're not waking you up in the morning. Give them the consequence. Let them see that life is this push and pull that they get to do something and they directly are affected by the outcome for good or bad. You know, it would be so easy for when he signed up for college to have him put our email down and we sign in and we have access to all that. But why? Because we want them to be successful? Yeah, absolutely. I want my son to be successful. I want him to make a lot of money, not have any debt, have a beautiful wife, make beautiful grandbabies, you know, for me to be a great grandpa. I want all that for him, but if he doesn't go after it and if I push that, he actually didn't get anything. And at some point that's failure. And me and you, you know, I'm 45, our generation is really bad at just straight up snow plowing every problem out of our kids' lives, never letting them touch disappointment, never letting them even brush by, you know, consequences. That is terrible. We are doing a disservice. if you do not let your kids fail in the safest way possible. Because with the college, the reason that that's something we picked a hard line to, just let him handle it. If he didn't do it, he actually didn't lose any money. We didn't lose any money. And we were pretty sure he wasn't gonna lose the opportunity to go to college in the future. Michigan now has two years of free community college. We were pretty sure by missing one class that wasn't gonna happen. Would we have stepped in? Probably, I don't know. I don't actually know. don't think it would. If he had failed and he wasn't going to be able to take the class, I think I would have let him just miss the class completely. I think that would have been the better lesson, but because he went and he was aggressive and he talked to his professor, he didn't. So it worked out okay. I want you to do that with your, with your kids. Find a situation where they get to read through the quantity, find a situation where they get to reap the consequences of their effort, good or bad. That's the important part. is if they do the right things, if they're on time, they work hard, they're going to have good consequences. If they're lazy, if they stay in bed, if they don't do the homework, they're gonna have negative consequences. Do that right now while they're still in your house under the safety of you supervising, making sure they're not physically gonna get hurt or get into drugs. There should be some consequences that you don't want them to experience, but the more consequences that you're like, in reality, it's no big deal, let them do that. You'll let them have the consequences, treat them like the man or the woman that they're going to become. And it's going to be hard because you're going to be frustrated. You're going to want more out of them than they want out of themselves. But that's a muscle they have to build. Even the desire to be successful, that is not in every kid. Lots of kids want to just be lazy. And that's okay. Lazy is the natural way. But if you can give them that direction, if you can give them maybe the the guardrails. I like the idea of guardrails that, you know, I'm not, I'm not driving the car for you. You know, you get to go anywhere inside this. Now you're not going to go over here because you're going to fall off a cliff on this guard rail. If you go over to this guard rail, you're going to hit the mountain. I'm not like, I'm not going to let you get there, but anywhere in between. Now I would prefer you stay in the right lane, not coming oncoming traffic, but anywhere between is safe. It's okay. The decisions you make aren't going to be the consequences of bad decisions aren't going to be affecting you 30 years from now. let them go. And you can start in their teenage years with little things and go right up to their senior year of high school. Let them do almost everything they want to do. My parents, I'm very thankful, were really good at this. By the end, I stopped. They never said, hey, Danny, you no longer have a curfew. But they were very consistent. Like, we just want to know where you're at. And I realized I may be pushing it a little bit that if I called them said, Hey, you know, my car for you was midnight. Hey, I'm to be late. I'm staying at a friend's, you know, and we're doing something. It looks like it's probably, I won't be leaving until 1230. You're watching a movie. Okay, but thanks for calling. They gave me a little more leash, a little more leash, a little more leash. And when I bought my own house, when I was 20, I moved out. I didn't even tell my parents. I straight up, I got a realtor and I looked at a bunch of houses. My parents didn't see. the house until I had closed on it. Now looking back, I wish I would have talked to my parents and that probably would have made better decisions. I probably wouldn't have moved out because my parents are like, why are you moving out? You, you get to live for free, save your money. That would have been smarter. But my parents didn't do that. Why? Cause they knew when I was 20, was a legit adult and I had a normal grownup job, but my parents knew that I need to make these decisions. without their influence too much so that I could grow into the man I am today. And I think them letting me do that, even maybe letting mistakes, like, well, I look back, I wish I wouldn't have bought a house when I was 20. I guess I was 21. Yeah, I must've been 21. Because I didn't need to. Like, I look at that and I'm like, that was really dumb. I could have saved thousands of dollars a year by not buying a house. But I did that and I learned lots of responsibility. I learned how to fix things. I learned all these things. Let your kids have some real life experiences. Let them do that while they're under the safety of your roof. Let them know that they can. Because I think sometimes, you I know when I was growing up, I had friends that moved out because their parents said, you can't. And they said, oh yeah, watch me. And it put them in a terrible position because they were being adversarial because their parents had just micromanaged their life. They said, the moment I turn 18, I am out because you're not going to tell me what to do. That is not what you want. You want your kids to say, I want you to experience life. I want you to make these decisions that I'm always here for you. I am a safe place. So then they're going out and do things not because in spite of you, but because you've given them the tools, you've let them fail. You let them see the consequences. It's amazing to me, you know, my wife being a teacher, how many parents come and negotiate for their kids to get better grades. Well, do you think they could do extra credit? you man, have your kids do that. When your kid fails, a test, if you are emailing the teacher asking for a special favor, you are missing out on an amazing opportunity. There are not too many teachers that I know that won't give a kid something else to do, another chance, if they come to them and make it in person, not even email, hey, go look face to face, because this is a skill that our kids are not going to have that we had because we didn't have email. Look your teacher in the face and said, you know what, I was, I was lazy. I realized that I've messed up. Is there anything I could do for extra credit? And most teachers are gonna go, yeah, absolutely. You talked to me, like you didn't send, your parents didn't send me an email, you didn't send me the email. Give our kids the chance to be successful. know, and failure is, you know, learning how to fail is a totally life skill. You need to learn how to, excuse me, they need to learn how to fail because failure is not. Devastation, failure is just part of the game. If you're doing something and if you're pushing the limit and trying to be successful, you're gonna fail. You let your kids practice while they're at home. Give them the ability to have the consequences of their action fully play out, even if that's bad. So go ahead, go help your kids fail. think you'll like the outcome. If you've enjoyed this, I would love for a review. Spotify, Apple, wherever you're listening to this, five star would be awesome. Couple words like Danny is so cool. That would be awesome. Whatever you feel comfortable saying. I would appreciate that. It just helps the podcast grow, which I'm so excited about the growth coming up on two years. Again, my name is Danny Dumas and this is the Earn Your Title podcast and I will talk to you later. Bye.