Fear of Failure and the Children of today

Today’s children often have parents who are quite successful.

Parents who built further on what their own parents created after the war.
Parents with their own homes.
Parents who could — and wanted to — build careers.
Parents who lived in a world that felt clear and structured.
Parents who did not grow up with social media.
Back when everything — seemingly — was still possible.

And then you look at your own child.
At the end of high school. Or perhaps in the first years of college.

And it seems… as if nothing is happening.

No plans.
No direction.
No movement.

As if your child is standing still.

That can be confusing. Concerning. Sometimes even quite frustrating.

Because you want your child to move forward.
To make something of their life.
To take opportunities you may never have had.

But how does your child actually feel?

Maybe it is simply too much. Too much at once.

Yes, you also had to figure things out on your own.
But your (and my) world grew bigger gradually.

Your child’s world has been big from day one.
Loud and fast.
Full of opinions, possibilities, and expectations.

In a single day, your child sees more lives, choices, and success stories than we saw in our entire youth.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, they have to discover:
Who am I?
What do I want?
Where do I even begin?

Fear of failure here does not come from laziness.
It comes from comparison.

From the feeling that you are already behind before you have even started.
That you must choose while having no idea what the right choice is.
That you have to live up to something that was never spoken out loud,
but is clearly felt.
At home. And among friends.

And then something happens that we as parents often fail to recognize:
your child does not move into action — your child freezes.

Not because they don’t want to.
But because they no longer know how.

Sometimes doing nothing feels safer than doing something that might be wrong.

Maybe what you see is not unwillingness or laziness.
But an overloaded nervous system from too many options, too much pressure, too much comparison.

Maybe your child does not need a push.
But space to explore without feeling they are already falling short.

We were able to make mistakes and experiment because there was no social media where everything remains visible forever.
We compared ourselves to a small group of people from our village or town. That was all we knew.

So, maybe the greatest help we can offer is not giving solutions…
but removing the unspoken pressure.

By letting them feel, just a little more:
You don’t have to know yet.
You are allowed to doubt.
You are allowed to search.
You are not too late.

Sometimes, that is exactly what helps a ‘frozen’ child begin to move again.
Maybe this is precisely what this generation is learning.