A person learns for many reasons. Some might learn because their parents taught them. Some might learn because life taught them.
The most common problem I see with kids/young adults is they have not ever been at rock bottom- their parents always rescued them.
If a parent taught their kids one thing, and one thing only, it should be about how to create opportunities for themselve and how to react to the adversity that same opportunity requires.
I call this "critical thinking". My engineering degree taught me this early on- I sure did not learn it from my parents. Going through last 2-3 years of college on my own sure helped too.
It is true that a 15 year old is not able to assess risk and reward- that part of brain is not filly functional until around age 18 or 19, I think. But not fully developed is much different than not capabale of doing something at all.
I see parents doing homework for their kids. I see parents arguing and fighting over what position their kids play on the soccer team. I see parents allowing their kids to do everything and anything they want without saying "no". This means the kids do not learn compromise, do not learn to interact with others to get what they want, and do not generally learn to cope with disappointment or make an opportunity from a failure.
I had a girl on my U12 soccer team, she made a really bad play early in a game 2 weeks ago. Other team scored as a direct result and we lost the game 1-0. What I told the team was that it was not the mistake which told be anything about the girl, it was how she responded (she played much better after mistake and outside of a brief conversation at halftime I did not really talk much about it until after the game). The player knew the mistake, and once corrected, she played the best of nearly anyone on the team that day.
It's not the mistakes you make which define you. it's how you recover from them.
This requires 2 things
1) the freedom from parents and adults for the kids to make the mistakes
2) the ability to analyze, the will to do better and the creativeness to recover from the same mistake.
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Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
One person's stupidity is another person's job security.
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