Grit and Resilience

                                "The greatest predictor of success is grit."

                           "Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint."

    Both of the above quotes are from the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth. Anyone who works in education knows Angela Duckworth. Her work on "grit" and "failing forward" are some of the most important in education in the last half century. Her thesis is relatively simple: the greatest predictor of future success is the ability to work through struggle to desired result. If she's right (and most agree that she is), the best thing that educators can do challenge our students and then give them the tools to overcome these challenges. To be sure, when most adults reflect on our favorite/best teachers, it was those who pushed us to be our best selves.

    Moreover, if you were to gather all of your parents in a room before the school year starts and ask them if they believe in the above quotes, almost all of them would agree. Of course they want their students challenged. Of course they want their students to have the opportunity to fail forward. When the school year starts, however, any struggle by their student induces a panic and a demand that the school change something. Parents increasingly believe that as long is their student is working hard (and even sometimes when they're not), they are entitled to get an "A".

    Recently, I had a situation where a number of students didn't get along w/ a particular teacher. This teacher was bright and hard working. He clearly knew his subject. He wasn't the warmest teacher, though, and sometimes struggled w empathy. In short, he was a competent, but not great, teacher. He was teaching an honors course and demanded a high standard for success. These kids believed his standard was too high and challenged the teacher regularly. The parents, without fail, backed their students and regularly pressured the administration to make changes. These demands did not center on the teacher's competence-it was that he was forcing the students to work harder than they preferred. There was no interest in having their students struggle or learn from their experience. They wanted their student to get an "A" irrespective of how hard the students worked.

This disconnect between parents claiming they want their kids to struggle and their inability to allow it to happen has two causes. Without question, this dynamic has been made worse be the global pandemic. Students struggled with mental health and lost out on opportunities. The hardest thing for any parent is to watch their kid struggle. Covid caused a lot of struggle. Parents saw this and lost their ability to tolerate any time their kid struggled. The pandemic was unfair to all of us; therefore their kid should not have to suffer anymore. Hopefully the effect of this will mitigate as we move further away from the pandemic.

The second reason is more complicated and more dangerous. Parents are increasingly deriving their self-worth from the success of their kids. I saw this in the kids that I taught and I saw this with the parents of my kids' classmates. Some of this is financial. Between academic support and all of the money spent for their activities, parents are pouring tremendous amount of money into their kids. Getting into the right college or an athletic scholarship is seen as validation of that investment. Some of this, though, is psychological. They see their kids' success as a validation of their success as parents. Lack of immediate success is, then, a condemnation of them as a parent. A "C" in a class is not an opportunity for the student to grow-it is a reflection on the parent. A kid sitting the bench in a sport is not an opportunity for the kid to learn about playing a role-it is failure of the parent.

My son sat the bench for the entirety of his senior season on the baseball team. Was the kid ahead of him better? Did my son get screwed? It doesn't matter. My son obviously would have preferred to play, but by not playing was an opportunity for him to grow and learn how to play a role on a team. It was a lesson in humility and sacrifice. I never would have dreamed of saying something to the coach or encouraging him to quit. For me to intervene, I would have robbed from my son an opportunity to grow.

It used to be that we worried about helicopter parents-parents who were always hovering and wanting to save their kids from any potential mistakes.Now, we have bulldozer parents who obliterate any obstacle to the success of their kid. The result is that we are raising kids without the opportunity to struggle. We are robbing them of grit.

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