The Proctor-Parent Partnership: Building Failure Immunity

I distinctly remember the first time I left my daughter without a family member or close friend on her first day of preschool, fall of 2020. Driving back across town, stopped at a red light, I was not quite prepared for the feeling: a knot in the chest, an inner voice asking, Is she okay? Perhaps the most profound act of trust a parent can perform is to place their child in the care of educators, however talented, and then drive away, returning eight hours later. It does not get easier as their world expands. By high school, the stakes can feel ever higher. And for boarding school families, that act of trust becomes literal as they drive or fly home after registration day.

The instinct to protect is natural, and, in 2026, is only intensifying. In a world rife with anxiety and uncertainty, “intensive parenting” has become even more intensive. This impulse is understandable, but the research increasingly suggests that in shielding our children from failure, we may be preventing them from developing the very resilience this moment in history demands. In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Russell Shaw, Head of School at Georgetown Day School, offers a framework that speaks directly to this tension. Shaw borrows an analogy from immunology to argue that early exposure to manageable setbacks builds what he calls "failure immunity" – the psychological antibodies that allow children to face future disappointments without falling apart. "You can't develop perseverance," he writes, "if you've never had to persevere."

In the piece, developmental psychologist Ann Masten describes resilience as "ordinary magic" – the result of normal developmental processes. But those processes require practice encountering obstacles and pushing through them. Angela Duckworth's research on “grit” tells a similar story. Perseverance is not innate, but rather is developed through repeated encounters with difficulty and the experience of working through it.

Shaw's recommendations for parents are straightforward: resist the urge to rescue, normalize failure as part of a meaningful life, and examine their own relationship with setbacks. When adults model resilience, acknowledging disappointment while demonstrating they can regulate their emotions and solve problems, children learn those same skills. At Proctor, each adult who works with students – advisors, dorm parents, coaches, Learning Specialists, teachers – navigates these same tensions daily. The temptation to smooth the path exists for any adult who cares deeply about a young person. The challenge, for all of us, is learning to provide support without removing the struggle. Shaw's prescription neatly dovetails with Proctor's educational model. and our commitment to teaching adolescents how to be well in the world. 

Deep Relationships

At Proctor, adults model resilience in the dining hall, in small dormitories, in advisory groups, at extra help sessions, and on the sidelines of games. Our faculty live alongside students as teachers, coaches, and dorm parents. When a student stumbles, they are not navigating that moment alone – they are surrounded by adults who know them deeply enough to provide support without removing the opportunity to “productively struggle.”

Experiential Learning

From the Proctor Woodlands to off-campus programs to hands-on learning in classrooms, students learn by doing, reflecting, and growing through experience. Shaw recounts his own formative experience as a young Outward Bound instructor and his first profound understanding of failure immunity: If you don't pay attention when your instructor shows you how to set up your groundsheet, rain will likely soak your sleeping bag. At Proctor, three-quarters of our students participate in at least one term-long off-campus program. There, students encounter real problem-solving, real world consequences, and, as a result, exponential growth.

Whole-Person Well-Being and Self-Knowledge

Proctor integrates Learning Skills, metacognition, and well-being so that students understand how they learn and how to thrive in a complex world. Understanding how one learns includes understanding how to respond to difficulty, frustration, and setback. Proctor's educators give students the tools to name and strategize around challenges, transforming difficulty from something that passively happens to them into something they actively learn to navigate.

The irony is that in an era of increasing anxiety around college admission, agentic AI, climate change, and a labor market that looks nothing like the one we entered, many parents are doubling down on protection. But in doing so, they may be preventing their children from developing the very capacities they will need to lead successful, fulfilling lives. Adaptability, resilience, the ability to pivot, and the confidence to try something knowing it might not work are skills that cannot be built without practice – without encountering setback and, yes, failure along the way. The most valuable thing we can offer our students is not protection from difficulty but the structured opportunity to encounter it, struggle with it, and discover they are stronger on the other side.

Read More from the Proctor-Parent Partnership Series