9

Instill Resilience and Grit in Your Child

One of the most enduring and valuable sets of skills that we can instill in our children is a sense of resilience in the face of stress or perceived failure. Sometimes termed grit, this “pull yourself up from your bootstraps” mentality is characterized by tenacity, problem solving, and the ability to continue to strive for success despite setbacks. The process of problem solving has leapfrogged innate intelligence and learned skills to be a highly prized quality in an individual.

Resilience partly stems from a person’s temperament, but it’s also a skill that can be learned and practiced throughout childhood in order for it to be well developed in adulthood. Resilience is that ability to adapt to challenges and setbacks and keep on trying, while the term grit adds the implication of strength and fortitude in the face of problems—the confidence to try to overcome instead of feeling like a victim of circumstance. Grit and resilience affect a child’s behavior in many positive ways.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how resilience and grit can be nurtured by having confidence and using praise. You’ll see how mistakes like locking your keys in your car gives you a great opportunity to be a role model. Reserves of resilience can even help stress-proof your child. But the first step toward grittiness is allowing your child the opportunity to learn from failure.

Let Your Child Experience Failure

Adults sometimes handle rejection or failure as a temporary setback that’s simply an obstacle to be overcome. Others are virtually debilitated by them to the point of avoiding taking any kinds of risks whatsoever. It is the same with children; however, when kids learn resilience during their formative years, they are well equipped to skillfully manage life’s ups and downs as adults. Without taking a risk there’s never a chance of beating the odds and succeeding at your wildest goal. Without failure there can never be a successful comeback.

When kids learn resilience, they are well equipped to manage life’s ups and downs.

Remember what we explained in the beginning of this book: Discipline is a form of education, of shaping your child’s behavior in positive directions. A child who learns from her mistakes will be able to deal with adversity in an adaptive way. These adaptations mean she’ll be able to start shaping her own behavior. That ability to adapt is a big part of resilience and grit, because she’s learning how to solve or work around a problem in a constructive way that clears the path to success.

Letting your child experience failure or disappointment is the first step to building a healthy sense of resilience. Too often, parents work on making sure their kids feel good about themselves as opposed to making sure they can cope with life’s bumps and bruises. We can find it hard to loosen our protective instincts and allow our children to get into situations where they may not succeed, much less ones where the chances for success are nil. We want to swoop in and alleviate their pain.

By being overly protective, we rob our children of the growth potential that comes from picking themselves back up after failure, brushing off the dust, and redoubling their efforts toward their goal. The benefits are cyclical: These efforts bolster their sense of self-confidence and self-reliance, which in turn reinforces the way they bounce back from the next failure.

Childhood is filled with natural opportunities to learn to cope effectively with failure.

Letting your child fail doesn’t mean putting her into a situation where failure is certain. Nor does it mean exposing your child to undue stress or pressure. Childhood is filled with natural opportunities for children to learn to cope effectively with stress, pressure, possible rejection, and failure. Being open to the possibility of failure and not letting it scare you, or them, is what gives them those important learning opportunities. Here are a few tips:

• Don’t always let them win at board games. When they’re very little and first learning, let them get excited about winning a game against you. You don’t have to be a cutthroat property developer in Monopoly or attempt manifest destiny in Risk, but once your kids understand the game, play them for real. You can use the coaching strategy to talk with them before the game about how they’ll feel if they don’t win.
• Resist the urge to take over school projects. So his handwriting is crooked, and he didn’t color inside the lines. The child who completes a school project on his own is infinitely more confident of his skills than the one who gets an A by turning in something done by a parent. (Teachers can tell the difference.) As stated in Chapter 4, you want to instill a motivation for learning.
• In sports, don’t skip a competition against the unbeatable team; send your kid right on out to that field to play her heart out. After the loss, don’t complain that the other kids were so much bigger or that the referees made biased calls. Instead, use the praise strategy to compliment your child’s hustle, the way she doggedly went after the ball time and time again, or the way she rallied her team to keep trying until the bitter end. Then, savor the opportunity to bond by commiserating the loss over a well-deserved ice cream.

Grit Doesn’t Mean Being as Tough as Nails

While developing grit includes strength, fortitude, and establishing a protectively thick skin for criticism, setbacks, and failure, it doesn’t mean that you’re trying to make your kid as tough as nails. The word grit sometimes connotes an image like Clint Eastwood in those old Spaghetti Westerns: dusty cowboy hat, eyes squinting against the harsh sun, cigar clenched between his teeth—a tough guy who can handle anything and doesn’t need anyone to help him.

Children can become tough, but should not be expected to become hardened.

That is not what we mean by grit. Children can become tough, but should not be expected to become hardened to failure or setbacks; rather, we want them to learn from those experiences. But make no mistake about it: These can be very hard, sometimes heartbreaking lessons for your children. Helping them through does not mean taking a tough-as-nails approach with them, just as it doesn’t mean you coddle them and make excuses for a failure. Fostering resilience means striking a balance between being empathetic, determined, supportive, and a role model for how to handle themselves.

When your child has experienced a rejection or failure isn’t the time to be overly critical. Try to view the situation through his eyes so you can understand and validate his feelings. This does two things: It gives him the words to express these feelings and leads him to be more receptive later on when you can discuss problem solving for future situations. If he failed, you’re not simply saying that was okay; you’re communicating with him about the emotions he’s feeling. Don’t expect him to brush off a loss immediately; expect him to be sad and mad, and name those feelings for him. When he’s past these emotions, perhaps later that day or the next day you can have a conversation about using those feelings to do things differently next time.

Have Confidence and Use Praise

We wrote about communicating confidence in your child’s competence in Chapter 8, and that certainly comes into play when developing resilience. Communicating confidence stems from attentive, active parenting, which allows for spontaneous, positive engagement, conveys sureness of a child’s ability to handle herself, and ensures an openness so the child can ask for help when needed. Let us be very clear: We are not advocating that you hover, smother, and engage in every minute aspect of your child’s life like a helicopter. That’s not being attentive, and actually will sap a child’s ability to develop resilience.

Here’s the difference between being a helicopter parent and being an attentive parent:

• Helicopter Parenting. You help your child with her science fair project by planning out the presentation and the project display, lining up each photo for her (so they’re perfectly even), and using your calligraphy skills for the header. Any time there’s a direction she doesn’t understand, you email or call the teacher instead of letting your child get clarification in class. You supervise the way she uses inflection in her voice during the presentation, and then stand on the side of the auditorium mouthing the words, ready to cue her with the next line if necessary. After the presentation is complete, you tell your child how great a job “we” did and then collapse from exhaustion that evening.
• Attentive Parenting. You talk with your child about her science project, complimenting her on choosing an interesting subject, and getting her the supplies she tells you she needs. When she asks for help lining up the photos correctly, you hand her a ruler to show her how. You also help her search online for calligraphy templates. Your child gets clarifications on the directions from her teacher and says she doesn’t want to practice her presentation in front of you because she wants to surprise you. In the auditorium, you proudly videotape her presentation from your seat in the third row and later take her out for some ice cream to celebrate her accomplishment.

When you hover like a helicopter, you’re transmitting the idea that you don’t believe your child is able to do something on her own. That’s not the message you want your kids to hear or feel. In order to build up her resilience, have faith in her strengths, make sure she knows it, and let go of your parental instinct to do it for her.

Support your children to try, succeed, or fail, and then, to try again.

We all know that our kids aren’t good at everything. No one is. While you want to communicate confidence in your children, it’s important to help them keep it all in perspective. Support your children to try, to succeed or to fail, and then, if they so choose, to try again. It’s important that children take the lead on resilience when possible. Try not to interfere in your children’s process of bouncing back before they have a chance to cope independently. We recognize our children’s strengths and weaknesses and love them unconditionally. Keep your own goals for them realistic, so you’re not pushing them hard in a direction in which they have no interest in going, but guiding them to set realistic and achievable goals for themselves.

Little League can be a great microcosm of this concept. Your son wants to play, so you sign him up, get him a glove, and start playing catch in the backyard. (As much as you’re tempted to picture him in the uniform of your favorite team someday, you keep your expectations reasonable.) The season starts and the coach doesn’t put him in the batting lineup. Your son is upset because he feels like all the other kids are better than he is, and he tells you he wants to quit. Having paid to join, you let him know he needs to at least finish out the season.

You talk with him about how all the great players have to practice every day to be great and offer to help him improve his hitting by taking him to the batting cages. He consents, and you start him off with very slow pitches and eventually increase to game speed. Your son improves his hitting skills, and you point out the link between his work and his success to him: “Your hard work is paying off; when you first started at the cages, you only hit two out of every five pitches, but now you’re hitting three or four pitches. Way to go!”

Does the coach put him in the batting lineup after this? Maybe; maybe not. Have you increased his grit and aptitude? Absolutely. Your son may sense his improvement and really love the game enough to play again next season, or decide to try another activity instead. Either way, he understands that when things don’t go the way he wants them to, there are things he can do to make them better. He’s started to develop a resilience and work ethic that will benefit his future endeavors.

Reinforce your children’s efforts, not simply their ability.

Praising your children’s contributions to their own success is also important, but a nuanced concept. You want to reinforce your children’s efforts, not simply their ability. Be careful not to praise any child for natural talents—innate intelligence, athletic ability or musical aptitude—that come without effort. Kids who are blessed with natural talents are certainly fortunate, but the child didn’t “do” anything to get that natural talent. Hard work, perseverance, and a willingness to take risks and cope with mistakes is what your child does have control over. So instead of saying something like, “Wow, you are so smart,” to a bright child who does well at the school spelling bee, consider using a different kind of praise, such as, “Wow, you’ve worked so hard and studied all those words every day for a week, and see how that pays off? Well done!”

Problem-Solve Like a Role Model

As with nearly every behavioral issue that arises with your children, being a role model will help you in shaping their behavior in a positive way. When it comes to resilience and grit, modeling good problem-solving skills will have exponential effects.

Consider these situations, and think about your own reaction to them:

• Locking your keys in the car
• Forgetting something important at home
• Putting together furniture or birthday presents with lots of pieces
• Having to fix the TV settings that have gotten messed up
• Mixing up your days and forgetting your child has practice
• Checking luggage for a flight and finding your bag is over the size limit

Are you laughing, thinking about your reactions to all these situations? These are the moments during which you’re building your child’s sense of problem-solving skills. The most effective learning happens from watching you, so role-model thoughtfulness, ingenuity, patience, reading directions, stick-to-itiveness, and asking for help when it’s needed.

If you overreact to your own mistakes and setbacks, your child is more likely to fear making mistakes and start to avoid risks. This can lead to a child who seems to be a perfectionist and falls apart in the face of even minor setbacks.

Store Up Reserves of Resilience for Challenging Times

Like a savings account at a bank in which you deposit a portion of your paycheck every month, building up a reserve of funds on which you can draw when an unexpected problem pops up, when you’re teaching your child to have grit you’re banking reserves of grit for them to pull out when a setback occurs.

These banked reserves can have protective properties, insulating and in effect stress-proofing your child. They allow her to endure more, cope better, or try something for the umpteenth time. The times that you have role-modeled patience contribute to these reserves, as does all the praise you’ve given for her hard work. Each time she’s failed, but got back up again and finally succeeded, she has hit the jackpot of grit, filling up her reserves to overfowing.

Each time she’s failed, but got back up again, she has hit the jackpot of grit.

Other contributors might include a solid social network of friends, family, and caring adults in her corner. Activities that make your child feel good about herself, such as volunteering or getting the opportunity to be a leader, also deposit into that same account. When stressors come about, your child is more likely to handle them easier, and with less disruption, than a child who doesn’t have as much resilience in reserve.

But the reverse is also true. Any condition that create a sense of incompetence, such as social or learning problems, can be detrimental to resilience. There are plenty of opportunities growing up for a child to feel bad about herself. That’s why building up those reserves of grit in every area of life you can is crucial, so that during those times when your child doesn’t feel so confident, she can dig deep down and remember how much she has going for her in another area of life and draw on that reserved grit to bolster her in this situation.

• • •

Grit is good. Grit is powerful. Grit can endure throughout your child’s life. It is, perhaps, the single most important quality you can nurture in your children, because, secondary to your love and discipline, grit can be a foundation to their overall wellbeing.

When you can, let your child have the opportunity to fail. Make sure she also has the chance to make a comeback after a failure. Work hard to avoid being overprotective, and make sure to communicate your confidence in her abilities. It’s a constant balancing act between providing the right degree of challenge, the right number of opportunities to cope with failure, and a constant amount of unconditional love and acceptance.

Be the problem-solver that you want your children to be by showing them your own grit and resilience in the face of a challenge. And make deposits into their banked reserves every chance you get, which will form a protective, stress-proof shield around them. You’ll see behavioral improvements as your children gain resilience, and you’ll be preparing them to handle those bumps in the road that are sure to come at some point in the future. Above all, you’ll be preparing your children for a future of success of their own making.