Reese Witherspoon: I dont know when we stopped letting our kids fail
Reese Witherspoon wears many hats. She’s an actress, producer, business woman, philanthropist, book club aficionado, and mother of three. Oh, and she’s also an author! Her latest book is a children’s book called Busy Betty and the Circus Surprise. While promoting the book on a podcast called Good Inside with Dr. Becky, Reese discussed her own childhood as well as the “power of letting kids struggle.” While talking about the latter, Reese gave an example of how she once helped her daughter Ava learn a lesson from failure.
Reese — who often shares insights into mom life on social media — began the chat by saying that all three of her children have very different personalities. Without specifying who, the Oscar winner said: “I have one very introverted kid, very quiet. I have a very social kid. And I have a kid who’s very talkative, very inquisitive, and like, almost endlessly curious.”
Though Ava and Deacon are grown up now, Reese reflected on raising her kids over the years and said it’s a parent’s job to “know your players.”
“Each one of your kids is gonna be totally different… As parents, it’s our job not to make them conform to who we want them to be — it’s our jobs to figure out who they are and help them play to their strengths,” she explained. “I see this a lot with parents. I don’t know when we stopped letting our kids fail,” the actor began, before reflecting on lessons from her own upbringing. “I learned so much from the paper I didn’t turn in, or the demerits I got so I got a detention,” she said. “I was suspended from school when I was in fifth grade for talking in class and being disruptive and writing creative notes and passing them to my friends.”
Looking back on her suspension, Reese said her mom and dad didn’t attempt to defend her actions or fight back against the school’s decision, but instead, they forced her to “sit in it and feel uncomfortable.” Despite being difficult, this experience helped inform how Reese would eventually raise her own children.
“I think learning from failure is actually a valuable tool that you can’t take away from kids,” she said. “You rob them if you don’t let them sit in the discomfort of the experience.”
After this, Reese gave a specific example of how she put this into practice when her daughter, Ava, desperately wanted to be good at basketball. Despite practicing hard, she recalled that Ava found the sport really difficult. “She couldn’t do the layups, she just couldn’t get the coordination with the dribbling — she just didn’t like it,” she explained. After her last game of the season, Reese recalled that Ava “went home and laid down on the bed and started to cry” because she was the only person who didn’t score any points.
“‘I didn’t score one goal, and everybody scored goals this entire season and I didn’t score any goals,’” she recalled her saying. When dealing with this, Reese decided it was best to be honest and show her daughter the importance of accepting failure.
“I said, ‘You know what… maybe you’re not good at basketball.’ She was like, ‘What! How can you tell me I’m not good at something?’” she remembered. “I was like, ‘It’s actually really important to learn what you’re not good at.’”
I kinda chuckled while reading this, imagining that in Reese’s head, her circle is basically other famous parents and their potential nepo babies. Some of these parents hire people to take the SATs for their kids and have their assistants call their friend’s assistants to get them jobs. In all seriousness, I’m assuming she’s talking about overprotective moms who are dubbed “helicopter parents” because they hover around their children, controlling their lives to make sure they don’t fail. When I was in my mid-20s, I once witnessed a peer’s mother tell her that she had done her resume and was applying for jobs as her because she didn’t think this peer was trying hard enough to get one. It was wild because neither of them had any self-awareness while talking about it in front of me.
Anyway, I think that when you’re teaching your children life skills, it’s absolutely important to teach them how to deal with disappointment, failure, and being honest with themselves about their strengths and weaknesses. And yes, children are very different from one another. I see it in how my own kids process and react to things like frustration. My older son will get upset and quit, refusing to keep trying while my younger son keeps at something until he gets angry and acts out. Sadly, there is no exact copy + paste method to parenting. It’s okay to let them fail as long as you’re there to support them through how to process and react to their failure. If you’re interested in hearing Reese’s full interview with Dr. Becky, you can check it out here.
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