We Decided to Put Failure in the Set
A child who only ever succeeds stops trying. Notes on mixing failure into the set, and on what a coach says to a fallen child and what a coach never says.
The Day Nothing Failed, the Child Stopped
It was last fall. In my class of seven-year-olds, there was a girl who could clear the three-level vaulting box. Ten jumps, ten clears. Her hand placement was good and her landings never wobbled. So I set up level four. She walked to the starting line, then turned around. “I don’t want to do this.” That was all she said.
At first I took her for a timid kid. A few weeks of watching showed me a pattern. The more a child had succeeded every single time, the faster that child backed away from a new task. The kids who fell often in regular practice would at least run at level four. For a child who has stacked up nothing but successes, failure is an unfamiliar event. And in front of the unfamiliar, the body stops. That was when I understood. What she was avoiding was not the taller box. It was her first failure.
Getting Failure Into the Set
I changed how I arranged the tasks. In every set of ten attempts, I mixed the difficulty so that two or three would end in failure. For the vault, six jumps at level three and four at level four. For jump rope, I planted a target five skips past the child’s personal best in the middle of the set. In terms of success rate, I was aiming for somewhere around 70 percent.
It did not click right away. For the first two weeks I pushed the difficulty too high. When the success rate dropped below half, one six-year-old boy refused an entire station. He sat down on the mat and would not get up. He did not cry. He just folded up and held out. That failure was mine. Mixing in failure and drowning a child in it turned out to be two different things. The next week I rebalanced the ratio: seven attempts out of ten the body can pull off, two or three that slip away by a hair. At that point, the children’s attempts picked up visibly. The boy who had held out on the mat came back the following week. Only after clearing level three twice did he stand in front of level four again.
The numbers said the same thing. We log shuttle-run lap times every week, and after we mixed the difficulty, the number of times kids took another run at their own records rose from an average of 1.4 per set to 2.8. Double. Facing a task they might fail, they ran more, not less.
What We Don’t Say to a Child Who Falls
When a child catches a knee on level four and rolls onto the mat, the first words that want to come out are “It’s okay, good job.” I swallow them. They are words that rush to erase the failure that just happened. I don’t say “So close” either. It implies that success was the only destination. Even after a success, I don’t say “See, you can do it.” That line turns the next failure into something to be ashamed of. Comparisons with other kids were never on the list to begin with.
Instead, I read back exactly what the body did. “The takeoff was good. Your hands were half a beat late.” When you state only the facts, the child receives the failure as information. Last month a boy got tangled three skips short of his jump-rope target. All I said was, “Forty-seven. That’s nine more than last week.” He regripped the rope and said, “I want to go again.” No one told him to; he chose the repetition himself. That is exactly the scene we want to see in our Playfit classes.
The last question is always the same. “One more, or move on?” The choice goes to the child. A retry right after a failure carries more force when the child picks it than when the coach assigns it.
Failure Takes Reps Too
I am still in my second winter of running these classes. In that short time, this is the biggest thing I have learned: falling down takes sets and reps too. A child who has failed small, many times, on the mat will run at a height she has never seen before. She catches, she rolls, she walks back to the starting line. As those walks pile up, failure shrinks from a frightening event into one ordinary rep.
The girl who turned away last fall cleared level four last month. Her knee caught fourteen times before that. On the fifteenth, she was over. When she landed and looked back at me, this is all I said. “Good hands. Next set.”