Grit or Quit? How to Help Your Child Develop Resilience

This week's article summary is Grit or Quit? How to Help Your Child Develop Resilience.

Grit has been a popular topic in education since 2012 when Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed was published, soon followed by Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Both books and the grit movement in schools complemented Carol Dweck’s earlier research and writing on growth mindset.

Like so many ideas in education, grit took a complex topic (success criteria) and attempted to solve it with a simplistic solution: just work harder.

Is grit important? Sure, but within limits. 

The article below focuses on extracurricular activities, especially sports, and what to do when a child wants to quit a team mid-season.

From a grit standpoint, adults should encourage (even require) children to stay on a team and see through their commitment. Parents often believe perseverance through an adverse experience builds character, which will help shape the child’s character.

The article is a good reminder for both parents and teachers that while we should help our kids embrace a growth mindset, learn to deal with adversity, and not to give up too easily, all that kids have to deal with can’t always fit into a tidy equation. There are always extenuating factors and sometimes quitting a team is warranted. 

When my kids were young, my wife and I viewed their development in an overly linear manner. For us, every step in their life was a direct building block to their future and any misstep could cause irrevocable damage. (One time my wife freaked out when one of my kids got an F on a 6th grade math test. She thought this was his first step on the road to ruin!) It turned out my son who failed a 6th grade math test thought he could ace the test without studying. An F was a better lesson for him than getting an A by not studying; it helped him begin to realize that there are no shortcuts in school or life for that matter. 

He also was a competitive soccer player, but by 8th grade he had begun to tire of the constant practices and weekend travel. He told my wife and me that he just wanted more time to hang out with his buddies and to learn to play guitar. We could have been stern parents and insisted he fulfill his obligation to his soccer team, but we recognized he was truly burnt out on soccer…at 14! 

As an adult, he doesn’t lack a growth mindset or work ethic—and he plays the guitar pretty well too!

Sometimes it’s okay to be a quitter.

Joe

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Grit. Don’t quit.

That’s the mantra many parents may have in mind when they, like me, spend what feels like years ferrying children to a seemingly endless variety of sports and activities. 

When it comes to grit, resilience, and kids sport, the question around their enrollment, ongoing participation, and right to quit is often the topic of much conversation – and consternation. As parents, what should we do when kids announce, often mid-season, they want to “take a break” or quit altogether?

As a parent and educator this raises the question of that invisible line we often tread about how much to push them, when to let them take a break, and when it’s OK to just let them quit.

More than mere buzzwords, the terms grit and resilience have themselves been the subject of extensive research. Professor Angela Duckworth has defined grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goal”, saying it involves working strenuously towards challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

Grit has been associated with growth mindset, satisfaction, and a sense of belonging.

One study found perseverance of effort predicted greater academic adjustment, college grade point average, college satisfaction, sense of belonging, and intent to persist.

As adults, perhaps we can reflect on experiences we’ve had in life that have helped build our resilience. But kids and adolescents are still developing grit and the ability to work strenuously towards a goal. Their brains are undergoing significant developmental changes. 

My research has a focus on teacher education and what helps teachers stick with a career that can be enervating and challenging.

Learning to help children and adolescents navigate challenging situations and being able to cultivate your own resilience in the face of trying circumstances is a crucial skill for teachers.

So how do we handle those difficult conversations when kids announce they want to quit a sport or activity?

Firstly, remain neutral and check the temperature of the conversation. Is this a heat-of-the-moment conversation? Right after a big loss or a less-than-stellar piano recital? Good decisions are not usually made in those moments. Sometimes the problem can be peer related and again, it is important for kids to learn to navigate those challenges.

All told, when kids announce they want to quit, keep the dialogue open. Listen carefully when they explain their reasons, but talk to your children about grit, too.

Share with them research that compares a growth mindset (which teaches that even when things get hard, we can learn and grow and get better) with a fixed mindset (which posits that either you’re good at something or not and there’s little room to change). Research also suggests having a growth mindset can foster persistence and positive long-term outcomes.

 

The key is that parents don’t teach resilience to children just by telling them about it. It is truly built through experience.

Accepting and Supporting Student for Who They Are

This week's article summary is How School Can Make Students Feel Dumb.

It’s written by a high school English teacher who struggles with spelling and often mixes up words when he speaks, which lead to embarrassing situations with his students and colleagues. 

His article is a reminder of how delicate self-confidence is: it takes a long time to build it up yet it can crumble quickly.

The article poignantly captures the importance of helping support our students and colleagues. As discussed in a previous summary, to truly embrace a growth mindset, we need to face failure and disappointment with resilience, fortitude, and a belief in our abilities and the dedication to learn through work and effort.

For most of us, confidence is precarious as we are prone to self-doubt. Our confidence can be easily be squashed if we don’t have others to support, buoy, and cheer us on.

Joe

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I was projecting a document onto the whiteboard when a student in the back of the class leaned over to her friend, whispered something, and they both started to laugh, glancing up at me.

“What?” I asked.

They were silent.

“What?” she asked, unsure if she heard me right.

“What’s so funny?” I asked again.

The girl pointed at the whiteboard. “You used ‘are’ instead of ‘our,’ Mr. O’Connor.”

“Oh, thanks!” I said. “I’ll fix it.”

This wasn’t the first time I had made such a mistake, and after class the girl walked over and stopped in front of me, seeming like she wanted to say something. “Yes?” I asked, thinking she might want to apologize for laughing at me.

“It’s just that …” She stopped, trying to find the right words.

“Go ahead,” I encouraged her.

“It’s just that I’ve never had an English teacher who couldn’t spell,” she said.

I was stumped. I wasn’t sure what to say. I told her I’ve tried my whole life to become a better speller. “I’ve dedicated many hours to improving my spelling, but my brain refuses to cooperate,” I said.

My ineptitude at spelling is the main reason I stay away from the whiteboard. I’ll write on it before class and I’ll write on it after class, but I avoid it like the plague during class. Being an English teacher who can’t spell is humiliating—and I do my best to hide this flaw.

But it’s not just writing; when speaking, I’m prone to malapropisms, I get tangled up in syntax, I lose my place in my thoughts, and sometimes I stutter. Language is an ever-replenishing fountain of shame—and no matter how often I aim for eloquence, my brain eventually reveals the tongue-tied, sentence-mangling, word-abusing fake under the mask.

Once in college, I was on a first date with a woman studying to get a doctorate in English. I was doing my best to sound intellectual, when a group of cyclists sped by as we walked down a sidewalk.

“Looks like the Tour de Force,” I said.

“They look like the Tour de Force,” I repeated, oblivious of my verbal blunder.

“You mean the Tour de France,” she said, laughing.

I laughed with her, but inside I felt ashamed.

In the 6th grade, my teacher had asked the class a question and when no one answered, he said, “Come on! Even Patrick could answer this one!” Everyone laughed. I laughed! But, inside, I wanted to slip out of a window and disappear. Another time, my neighbor’s dad stopped me when my stutter wouldn’t allow me to complete a sentence. “You stuttering idiot,” he said.

There have been hundreds of other moments like this in which I felt like the idiot they said I was. Even after graduating from college with honors, earning a master’s degree in education, becoming a high school English teacher, and getting published as a writer, I still feel like the idiot they said I was. I don’t know how to shake the feeling.

Recently, I sat down with a student who wrote an essay on how school can make children feel dumb. He has a learning disability that slows down his processing and scrambles his thoughts. He needs space and time to absorb and pick his way through information, draw conclusions, and then reorganize and express his thoughts in a way he likes.

He told me school discourages individual ways of learning, thinking, and communicating. Teachers look for standard forms, in writing and speech, he said. Standardized tests, he pointed out as an example, award students who can think quickly and can retain and recall information under pressure, but not all people have brains that work this way.

Such tests—and education as a whole—weed out students like him and leave them feeling stupid. Many of his friends, he said, dropped out for this reason. They just feel dumb.

I could have told him that I was one of those students, that I spent most of my high school years in a cloud of disorganized thinking, that I was blessed to discover literature (not in any classroom, but on my own), and through reading I learned to write well, and through writing I learned ways of thinking and organizing my thoughts. I could have told him that I still struggle with my own intellectual inabilities, and these perceived flaws make me feel stupid almost every day. I could have told him this is why he never sees me writing on the whiteboard, because I’m an English teacher who can’t spell.

Instead, I kept quiet and just listened. I praised his ideas and the way he expresses them, and said I always enjoy hearing his thoughts. And when he walked out of my classroom, I think he felt smart.

 

Should Children Be Happy All the Time?

This week's article summary is A Good Childhood is Better Than a Perfect One.

One of the biggest concerns for parents is their child’s happiness. We all want our kids to be happy. But we also want to prepare them to handle life’s inevitable ups and downs.

The article below is a reminder for parents that always protecting your children from sadness and trying to ensure their continual happiness don’t help develop their resilience as adults to cope with disappointment.

Ever since I taught a middle school World Religion course, I have been intrigued with the philosophy of buddhism, which provides a roadmap for a satisfied, fulfilled life. In a nutshell, Buddhism like ancient Stoicism advises to accept and not resist the good and bad of life. No matter what, our life will contain some happiness and some sadness. Buddhism recommends to never get too excited or too forlorn but to be accepting of all life has to offer. For all of us, including children, this means we need to understand that we can’t be happy all the time.

Similar to last week’s article summary on the importance of productive struggle, today’s advises us as parents and teachers to provide experiences for our children and students that are ‘challenging but manageable’. And productive struggle means dealing with a little discomfort. We want our kids to develop their confidence while also learning to deal with missteps and failures. My 4-year-old granddaughter likes to do jigsaw puzzles. She’s developmentally at the point where a 50 piece puzzle is the sweet spot challenge for her, yet the other day she asked me if we could try a 1000 piece puzzle. Almost as soon as I dropped all the pieces on the table, she seemed to know this was a challenge well beyond her ability and concentration levels. After about 15 minutes of frustration, she matter-of-factly said to me, “This is too hard, let’s do an easier one.” Clearly, the 1000 piece puzzle was challenging but not manageable. Still, I liked how calmly she handled this obstacle. She got perplexed, clearly wasn’t happy, then solved her problem, and moved on.

I’ve always tried to follow the Montessori mantra of ‘follow the child’. Kids will push themselves but often know when they need help. Becoming a well-adjusted adult requires countless lessons in childhood through both victories/accomplishments and losses/disappointments. 

Joe

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When Eric Wilson was a kid, he was taught to put a good face on things, no matter how anxious or down he felt. “Always smile,” he recalls his parents saying. Smiling through difficulty isn’t a useful coping skill for kids, but it does send a strong message: If you’re not happy, it’s because there’s something wrong with you, and you don’t want other people to find out.

In his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, he encourages children to identify, talk about, and overcome challenges rather than performing happiness. “It’s far easier said than done,” he says. “Parents often can’t stand to see their kids upset for one minute. They want to make it better.”

It’s natural to want to alleviate a child’s pain and to provide immediate assistance when struggles arise, but short-term and long-term happiness may be at odds. In an attempt to keep children happy now, many parents may be failing to help children develop the skills to pursue happiness for the rest of their lives. Parents’ desire to see their kids happy can stand in the way of their obligation to raise resilient adults capable of facing hardship and seeking out joy.

Put differently, the happiness of children may be overrated compared to the happiness of adults.

Unfortunately, this runs counter to a cultural environment in which children’s happiness is prized above all else. “The whole self-help industry says that the proper state of being is happiness,” says Wilson. “There’s this either/or logic.”

But that’s not how emotions really work. If you want to raise a child who’s happy in the long run, neuroscientists and psychologists argue that stepping back and letting the child face their problems prepares them to live happy lives down the road. 

Given that allowing space for discontent is part of ensuring long-term happiness, parents need to take a strategic approach to monitoring and ensuring their children’s happiness rather than exhibiting some of the knee-jerk responses that have become common.

So how do parents take that step back and focus on long-term happiness — healthy development — instead of trying to prevent all forms of sadness? A lot of it comes down to encouraging social behavior and shared experiences, explains NYU developmental psychologist Caitlin Canfield. 

When you’re stressed, your brain releases a hormone called cortisol into your body. Cortisol prepares your body to deal with a perceived threat or stressful situation by raising blood pressure and giving you a boost of energy.

But with too much stress, the ongoing cortisol dosage essentially keeps your body on high alert, potentially causing medical issues like anxiety or depression. This is why stress, more than unhappiness, might represent a clear and present danger for children.

“When we looked at kids in early elementary school who reported high chronic stress that was reflected in their cortisol levels,” says Canfield. “Those kids whose parents reported doing more reading, talking, teaching, and playing also reported that their kids had fewer mental health symptoms.”

“A lot of parents get stuck in the moment to moment — it’s really hard to tolerate the child’s distress,” says Conelea. “A lot of work comes from helping parents handle their own distress from seeing the child’s distress.”

It also comes down to helping kids learn important lessons early on.

When kids are having trouble regulating their emotions, you can take time to stop and talk to them about what’s bothering them. But sometimes, these high-quality problem-solving conversations are not possible because parents are busy, so something may be introduced as a distractor like an iPad because it’s the best thing to do to alleviate stressful situations in the moment.

It’s really good for kids to be in situations that are challenging but manageable. Challenging but manageable is the space where we improve and we grow and we learn. Those kinds of healthy amounts of challenge are important for developing long-term psychological health.

All that said, it’s also important that parents understand that they can only help so much. A massive literature review found that nearly every character trait is at least partially linked to genetics. That includes things like a child’s overall disposition or propensity for melancholy. And it’s all fine as long as parents are willing to engage with the idea that sadness is not, in and off itself, without virtue. It can provide an emotional forum for developing resilience.

“I think our culture needs to be more patient with sorrow, with sadness, with grief. I think there’s a real impatience to get better quickly,” he says. “There aren’t spaces in our culture for that.”

Productive Struggle

This week's article summary is Productive Struggle: What It Is and How to Achieve It.

Earlier this year, as a number of us were presenting to parents about how Trinity measures student learning, I was reminded of the interconnection of a Growth Mindset, the formative assessments we give throughout the year, and productive struggle (the subject of this week’s summary).

A core tenet of Trinity’s culture is that we are a community of learners. No matter how experienced and knowledgeable we are, there is always more to learn. (My stack of unread books at home is a testament to this.)

Possessing a Growth Mindset enables us to remain confident in the face of failure and missteps. Productive struggle is grappling with challenges during the learning process. Formative assessments help our students see where they are in the learning process and what next steps they need to take to learn more and/or to re-strategize about action steps to employ towards mastery.

As there are always ups and downs and highs and lows in learning, it’s important to help our students see that productive struggle is a core part of the learning process: to err is human and to learn we need to err!

Joe

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So many students this year are struggling — struggling to fill in holes from the previous years’ learning, struggling to absorb new material despite those gaps and struggling to find their place in the school’s social community. To get through it, they need to understand and embrace productive struggle.

Think of the child who spent his entire kindergarten year virtually on Zoom followed by a hybrid first-grade year. That student is now in second grade, and “this may be their first time, full-time, in the classroom. They’ve not only missed some of the physical basics — maybe how to open a school milk carton, sit still, stand in line — but they likely also have some developmental gaps that make it harder to go from the concrete to the more abstract thinking.

In college, a similar disruption has occurred. College freshmen didn’t get that typical experience of the last year or two of high school that helps develop stronger work habits and transitions them to less hand-holding from the teacher, better reliance on note-taking, and an understanding of what’s expected of them.

Just like stress can be good or bad, struggle also has two faces. The good kind is productive struggle. 

Productive struggle is really just another term for developing grit. 

Letting students work in teams is one way to develop grit because students can learn that everyone has different learning styles and levels of knowledge, and each can contribute something. Teamwork also teaches social-emotional skills and can improve students’ development of persistence.

Whether students work in teams or individually, teachers should also consistently reinforce with students that they’re not expected to know everything already and that they’re not expected to succeed right away. 

For many students when they come up against walls and struggle they view that as a bad thing. Help students by saying “Everyone struggles sometimes. Struggle is part of the life experience. We want to equip you with tools that you’re going to need to be successful and not crumble — or to understand that when you do crumble, there are ways to recover, and we’re here to help.”

Using real-life examples — such as an athlete, singer, scientist or entrepreneur who constantly practices to improve, even after they’re famous, or grandparents who are asking for help figuring out smartphones or streaming services — can help students see the value in struggle. 

Integrating the social-emotional aspect into learning concepts helps teachers note red flags — each student’s may be different — that indicate when they feel pushed too far. Instead of letting the student keep going and shut down, teachers who recognize what’s happening can quickly intervene to ask questions, suggest a different approach or, with younger students, give them a small break from the subject. Then they bring students back to try again, building grit a little at a time. That’s the productive struggle at work. 

Struggle is common in life, no matter what a student’s — or adult’s — age. Preparing them for it, embracing it and reminding them that a community of teachers and peers are there to catch them when they stumble can make all the difference, they say.