Sarah came running in. “Look what I found.” Over the top of the paper I was reading came a crispy long object that caused me to jump. It was a snake skin that had been shed by one of our many garden snakes.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” said my wide-eyed seven-year-old.

I stared at the organic wrapper and thought to myself that it really wasn’t that beautiful, but I have learned never to appear uninterested with children. They see only good quality and excellence in the world until educated otherwise.

“Why does it do this?” Sarah asked.

“Snakes shed their skin because they need to renew themselves,” I explained. “Why do they need to renew themselves?“ Sarah asked.

I suddenly remembered an article on this page many years ago where the writer was expressing her concept of renewal. She used layers of paper over a wall to describe how we hide our original selves, and said that by peeling away those layers one by one, we see the original beneath. “We often need to shed our skins and those coatings that we cover ourselves with,” I said to my now absorbed daughter. “We outgrow some things and find other ones unwanted or unnecessary. This snake no longer needs this skin. It is probably too crinkly (起皱的) for him, and he probably doesn’t think he looks as smart in it as he once did.”

Sarah was getting the point. As we talked, I knew that she began to understand, although slightly, that renewal is part of progress; that we need to take a good look at ourselves, our rooms, schoolwork and creativity, and see what we need to keep and what we need to cast off. I was careful to point out that this is a natural consequence of their growth.

“I see, Dad,” said Sarah and jumped off my lap and ran off.

I hoped she would remember this. That often, in order to find our real selves underneath the layers of community and culture with which we cover ourselves year after year, we need to start examining these layers. We need to gently peel some away, as we recognize them to be worthless or unnecessary; or at best, store the ones thrown away as mementoes of our promotion to a better vitality or spirit.

If the kids don’t fall, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school that my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of four children, and no doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and it’d slipped her mind. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed in my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.

Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I figured my mom would still take me, but when the morning came, she refused. It was midterm, and as a straight A student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t an option (选择). In my mind, missing these tests would have been the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. I told her she was ruining my future and everything I’d worked for. But she just held her ground, and that day, I walked to school. And I missed my tests.

My mom didn’t save me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think outside of ourselves. It’s how we self -educate to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic. Falling down makes us better because we learn how to get up.