Raising Children With Grit

Parenting Passionate, Persistent, and Successful Kids

Laila Sanguras, Laila Y. Sanguras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000495522
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

Grit, the combination of passion and perseverance, has more of an influence on success than cognitive ability, and parents want nothing more than to raise happy, successful children. Raising Children With Grit: Parenting Passionate, Persistent, and Successful Kids provides the strategies that parents need to teach, motivate, and inspire children to pursue their passions with grit—and succeed. And by focusing on self-discipline, parenting strategies, and personality traits, parents can cultivate perseverance in their children. By coupling that with an emphasis on curiosity and interest-building activities, parents can help their children define their passions. Additionally, this book offers tips for parents about working with school personnel, how to model grit in their own lives, and how social factors can influence the development of grit.

Chapter 1
Grit and the Psychology of Failure

DOI: 10.4324/9781003237488-2

Do you ever worry about what other parents think of you? Are you concerned that your child’s teacher wonders what you were thinking when you forgot to send your son to school with a jacket? Are you anxious that your parents are judging your parenting skills when they’re around your kids? Well I’ve got news for you. You are not alone.

I don’t know many parents who haven’t felt these same doubts and concerns. Parenting is rough. On one hand, we are so scared of messing up our kids that we live in a constant state of worry and fear. And then we’re so self-conscious about those fears that we don’t share with other parents—especially the ones who seem to have everything figured out.

On the other hand, we face legitimate angst when we hear about school shootings (Sky News, n.d.), the rising rate of childhood anxiety (Bharanidharan, 2018), and whether video games are addictive (Agencies, 2018). Potential threats to our children come at us from all angles, and it feels impossible to keep up, let alone protect them.

Here’s the thing. You’re afraid to fail. And you’re not alone—not only does every parent share this fear, but your children are also afraid to fail. They don’t want to let you down, and they feel all kinds of pressure to fit in and succeed at school, with their friends, etc.

You understand that fear of failure—it’s also called atychiphobia, in case you want to impress your kids with your vocabulary at dinner tonight (Winch, 2013). You’ve felt your palms sweat and your heart race when you’ve stood on the precipice of a new adventure. There’s also a good chance that you have shied away from taking a risk because the fear of an undesirable outcome was too great. And that’s crazy, right? Because life is full of opportunities and we know that we’re bound to be unsuccessful at some point, so why not just go for it? Well, it turns out that there is more to understand about failure than just the physiological effects.

Winner and Loser Effects

Get this. If you failed at something once—just once—you are less likely to try that activity again. For example, let’s talk about Cam, your son with a love for nontraditional sports and snack bars. Well, if Cam tries out for the bowling team and doesn’t make it, there is a chance that he won’t try out again. He knows what it feels like to fail and is averse to feeling that discomfort again. The point is that the effect of his failure lasts longer than the actual failure. Think about what this means in terms of your kids—and how it may change your “pick yourself up and try again” speech.

The opposite of this failure effect is called the Winner Effect (Hsu, Earley, & Wolf, 2006), a phenomenon studied by biologists for years. The science boils down to this: Winning heightens and losing diminishes the likelihood of a positive outcome of a later contest. For example, if Cam tries out for the bowling team and makes it, then he is more likely to make the team when he tries out again. His skills have obviously improved because of the season of practice, but he also has a certain confident swagger when strutting through the bowling alley. He knows he’s successful, so he continues to be successful. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Fear of Failure

I want to spend some time talking about failure. We’re all grownups here and know that it is inevitable, but we also need to fully understand what it means to fail in the context of grit. We have to help our children deal with all parts of life, especially the moments that make them feel like their world is crashing around them. (And if you have teenagers, this happens approximately 14 times a day.) We need to equip our kids with the skills to overcome setbacks so they aren’t afraid to take risks.

This fear of failure can be broken down into five responses (Conroy, Willow, & Metzler, 2002):

1. shame and embarrassment,
2. lowered self-worth,
3. uncertainty of the future,
4. losing the interest of significant others, and
5. upsetting significant others.

Conroy and his colleagues developed the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (PFAI) to measure each of these responses. Interestingly, most of the items on the instrument assessed how participants interpreted how others felt about them and their “failures,” not how they personally felt about them. This tells us quite a bit about how we view failure—it’s more about our perceptions of what others think of us and not what we think of ourselves. And can’t you just imagine that this is amplified in kids?

Much of what we understand about winning and losing comes from research on wild animals. (Yes, the “wild animal” can also symbolize a child.) Okay, so, when an animal is engaged in a contest, it continuously evaluates the costs and benefits of that contest, as well as its ability to fight (Hsu et al., 2006). The effort that the animal expends in the next contest is related to how it feels about the outcome, its capacity as a fighter, and what was lost/gained in the contest. This means that if the animal feels lousy about its performance, it will either resist future contests or will put forth limited effort. It will also decide whether engaging in another contest is worth it based on its cost-benefit analysis.

At the risk of beating the bowling analogy to death, let’s transfer what we know about animals to what this means for our kids. For example, if Cam tries out for the bowling team and makes it, but must practice every weekend and is still not as good as his teammates, there is a chance he will stop pushing himself so hard. If he doesn’t really care about bowling, he may stop practicing altogether and just endure the rest of the season because he likes the nachos from the concession stand. Essentially, he has decided that the costs are too high compared to the benefits, and there is a good chance he won’t win his games anyway—because he recognizes that he isn’t really that great.

Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance.

At this point, you’re either right here with me or you’re ready to toss me on the shelf with all of the other parenting “experts.” Hang in there with me, please.

Imagine your son Cam at school, in a rigorous—but boring—math class. Cam studies and his grades are decent, but he isn’t really pushing himself. As the year progresses, his effort decreases, and then next year he is ready to sign up for a lower level math class. Now, his language arts class is also rigorous, but every day is different and kind of fun. Cam studies and his grades are decent, but he, again, isn’t really pushing himself. As the year progresses, his effort increases, and then next year he wants to sign up for a challenging language arts course. The scenarios are very similar. The differences are the costs and benefits. Cam has to study in both, giving up time and energy, but as the benefits multiply, the losses are worth it.

That, my friends, is grit. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance. Grit is what it takes to keep going when you just want to quit. It’s the stick-to-itiveness that we want our children to have because we know the importance of not giving up. And we think this for good reason.

Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) examined the relationships between grit and a variety of variables. Guess what they found? Grit accounted for more individual differences in success outcomes than IQ. That means that grit, a construct that we can help our kids develop, has a greater impact on success than a fairly stable characteristic, like IQ. If you’re not super excited by that news, then you should really read that sentence again.

Think of it this way. We can break grit down into parts and provide our children with experiences to cultivate each of those parts. We can help them develop their interests into passions, and we can teach them how to persevere through any challenges they face. We can’t do that with IQ—it basically stays the same over time. In fact, we know that grit can be developed because older participants scored higher on the Grit Scale (see Duckworth, 2018) than younger ones. And grittier individuals completed higher levels of education and changed careers fewer times than the less gritty (Duckworth et al., 2007).

Let’s Talk Science

John Coates (2012), a former stock market trader turned neuroscientist turned author, identified testosterone and cortisol as the hormones responsible for success and failure. As a result of his research on stock market traders in action, Coates found testosterone levels spiked along with financial hikes, while cortisol levels dropped when stocks tanked.

Coates (2012) cited a study in which researchers analyzed the results of more than half-a-million tennis matches. The researchers found that 60% of the players who won their first match won the second match. He concluded that the rush of testosterone generated a cycle of success that extended to other competitive environments (i.e., hockey, chess, etc.; Popova, 2012).

This tells us that, chemically, our bodies are prepared to repeat success after success. And we know that this is also true of failure. Our experiences begin to loop and build upon one another, regardless of whether we are “winning” or “losing.” It’s important to understand this so that we know how to respond to our children’s successes and failures.

It does us no good to tell our kids, “Just get over it,” or “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Failure can quickly turn into rejection, and vice versa. For example, Peter may try to join his peers in a game of basketball at recess, only to be turned away. This rejection that he experienced makes him feel as though something is wrong with him or he is somehow unworthy as a friend. Get this: When we feel physical pain, our brains release opioids to help us deal with what is hurting us (Jiang, 2015). But you know what? The same is true for emotional pain!

A group of researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School ran an experiment to see if our brains respond to emotional pain in the same way (i.e., releasing these opioids into our systems; Jiang, 2015). They recruited participants, hooked them up to a brain scanner, and asked them to look through some fake dating profiles and point out the ones they were interested in. The researchers then gave the whole “It’s not you, it’s me” speech to the participants and told them that these fake men and women were not interested in dating them. Do you know what happened? The brain scanner detected opioids being released as soon as the rejections started. What’s even more interesting is that the participants knew that the dating profiles and the rejections were not even real, yet their brains still responded as if they were.

We can pull two “ah-has” from this. One, Peter’s brain would have responded the same way, whether his peers socially rejected him or they pelted him with basketballs from close range. And two, it does us no good to tell our kids, “Just get over it,” or “It’s not that big of a deal.” Their brains are sending them a different (and more powerful) message.

How to Handle Failure

In You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt (1960) wrote, “The purpose of life… is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience” (foreword). If we are to live up to the former first lady’s advice, we are bound to be let down at some point. To prepare ourselves—and our kids—for the inevitable, we have to figure out how to handle failure.

First of all, failure looks different for everyone. I taught students who thought of failure as a true F, and others called themselves failures if they earned less than an A on a paper. I have friends who get sucked into a downward spiral when they spend too much time on social media, upset that their lives don’t live up to the perfection we tend to post online. One of my children slumps into a depressed state when her friends plan a social event without her. The point is that we view our failures in terms of our goals and values. The things we want most are often the things that cause us the most heartache, and there is nothing wrong with that.

As parents, we get ourselves into a pickle when we discount the struggles of our children because they are not important to us. My son gets upset when his videogame avatar dies, which I don’t particularly care about, but I’m willing to listen to his story of how it happened (to a point). Each experience, even if it seems trivial to us, is an opportunity for our kids to understand their feelings during difficult times. Let’s explore some ways we can do this.

Caroline Beaton (2017) offered three suggestions for how to handle failure.

1. Don’t Obsess Over It

We all get caught up in trying to learn from our failures, agonizing over every detail. More times than I can count, I have lain in bed reliving a situation in which I felt less than incredible. No matter how many times I looked at it, the result was still the same: I had let myself or someone else down, and I regretted it.

What you really need to do is recognize that living your best life involves not quite meeting your expectations sometimes, and then focus on how you can move forward.

My family and I have been working hard at paying off debt (we all thank you for buying this book), so we listen to a lot of Dave Ramsey’s podcasts. Episode #9389 is called “What You Focus on Is What Happens.” Regardless of what Dave discussed on this show, the title tells us a lot. Sure, there is value in learning from your experiences, but that should be a small part of how you deal with failure. What you really need to do is recognize that living your best life involves not quite meeting your expectations sometimes, and then focus on how you can move forward. Better yet, reframe the experience and focus on how it will get you closer to your goals.

As a parent, this means that you need to be open to discussing your child’s failures, but you need to resist the urge to harp on them. It isn’t helpful. In fact, the shame and misery that comes from wallowing in your child’s mistakes can be detrimental to their coping process. The story he tells himself focuses on where he fell short—this story is the same loop that will play in his head when he is in a similar situation in the future. It’s almost as if his brain is betraying him, reminding him of the time he crashed and burned previously. Who wants that?

2. Don’t Fly Blind

When we are scared, we tend to make one of two choices. We close our eyes and take the leap, or we back away and pursue a different path. Although these options are fine if we are on the edge of a cliff looking down at a vast pool of water, they ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Grit and the Psychology of Failure
• Chapter 2 Getting to Know Your Parenting Style
• Chapter 3 Understanding Your Child’s Personality
• Chapter 4 Stages of Development
• Chapter 5 Self-Discipline and Self-Regulation
• Chapter 6 Cultivating Your Child’s Passion
• Chapter 7 School and You
• Chapter 8 Social Grit
• Chapter 9 Modeling Grit
• References
• Appendix A: A Parenting for Grit Playlist
• Appendix B: Q&A: Ask Me About Grit!
• About the Author