They should be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any consequences, and you fear life!
By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.
But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid.
If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.
Depending on the context not challenging yourself or being too shy might be a mistake in itself.
I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur.
I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong answer to 2+2.
So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the consequences of mistakes can be painful.
Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make a mistake.
By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.
But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid.
If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.