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Emily Martell was born to be Rizzo. So badly did the Grade 4 student want the role of the sassiest Pink Lady in her school’s production of Grease that she marched into the audition in a short brown wig and silky pink jacket and told the panel as much.

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“She was so good and I was so proud of her and thought ‘She’s going to get this part,’” her mother, Ali Martell, said.

She didn’t get it, and saw the defeat as a crushing failure — one so traumatic she seriously considered abandoning her passion for school plays.

Ms. Martell could have easily confronted the casting director and demanded he right this wrong — she wouldn’t be the first to do so at their Thornhill, Ont., school. Instead, she let Emily think about the “failure” — and make her own decision.

“She stewed on it for a day and a half, then came back to us and said ‘I never want to quit, I love drama. I didn’t get the part I wanted but I’m going to be the best Jan ever,’” she said of the secondary Pink Lady role her now Grade 6 daughter was offered instead. “She figured it out on her own.”

In letting her daughter work it out alone, Ms. Martell’s hit upon something a growing group of educators and thinkers are pushing parents to be better at, something far more crucial to children’s success in a world that increasingly values resiliency and innovation: Actually letting them fail.