165: How grit helps (and how it doesn’t)

Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so

Do you get tired of hearing the same old interests two podcast episodes? I don't really But Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours.

And back to Kat Cole, while we can’t argue that going from being raised by a single working mother who struggled to make ends meet to a CEO probably takes both persistence and passion, is this really the kind of passion we want in our world? The kind where our goal is to use women’s bodies to peddle chicken wings and convince people they need a cinnamon roll that provides them with almost half of their recommended daily calorie intake. David Denby, the author of the New Yorker article, says that Professor Duckworth worked with the founder of KIPP and the head of a private school in New York to distill a long list of character traits into seven virtues. Grit is one; the others are self-control, zest, optimism, social intelligence, gratitude, and curiosity. Denby notes that this list is devoid of any mention of anything like honesty, courage, integrity, kindliness, responsibility for others, ethics, or moral development. Indeed, at the beginning of Grit, when Professor Duckworth mentions the importance of being driven by a sense of purpose, but it seems as though this purpose exists only to serve the individual. David Denby observes that the list “would seem to be preparing children for personal success only – doing well at school, getting into college, getting a job, especially a corporate job where such docility as is suggested by these approved traits (like gratitude) would be much appreciated by managers. Putting it politically, the character inculcated in these students is perfectly suited to producing corporate drones in a capitalist economy. Putting it morally and existentially, the list is timid and empty.”

I’ve done a lot of reading over the last couple of years about where power lies in society and in schools, and I have to say that I agree with Denby’s critique. We might know and choose not to think about it, or we might just never have thought of it before, as I had not before I started studying for all these master’s degrees, but one of the major purposes of school is to pass on society’s culture and values to the next generation. It is the government (the national government in many societies, with power increasingly being devolved to the states here in the U.S.) that sets educational policy and works with private corporations to determine the curriculum that students must learn and will be tested on. Standardized tests are couched in the language of student success, but ultimately what we want them to be successful at is getting a job, so they can earn money, pay taxes, and create demand for American products. And it’s not just “generic” culture that’s passed on, it’s the cultural values of the dominant culture, which is why it’s acceptable in schools to use language in the way that most White children do and not like many Black children do. Families who don’t speak English well are assumed to have values, histories, and ways of learning that are inferior to those of the dominant culture, and *if only these families could learn to do things our way,* their children would get on so much better in our society. Given what we’ve learned about the potential futility of telling children who have experienced emotional trauma when they were very young to “be grittier,” is it possible that children from non-dominant cultures may also find that there are reasons that they cannot or would not want to increase their own levels of grit? Perhaps the single-minded pursuit of excellence that Professor Duckworth espouses might be less-than-compatible with the familial emphasis of Latinos, for example, who may not make decisions about individuals without consulting with the family?

The effusive blurbs on the book cover go even beyond Professor Duckworth’s own dramatic pronouncements: Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says “Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success, but Duckworth is the one who has found it…She not only tells us what it is, but how to get it.” Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (which we’ve looked at previously in an episode on supporting your introverted child) says “Impressively fresh and original…Grit scrubs away preconceptions about how far our potential can take us…Buy this, send copies to your friends, and tell the world that there is, in fact, hope. We can all dazzle.” Don’t we all want to dazzle? Don’t we all want to know the secret that will help us do it? Well, it turns out that grit might not actually be the secret. Professor Crede’s meta-analysis reviewed 88 studies, and found the correlation of 0.18 between grit and academic success. For those of you who have been out of school for a while, a correlation describes a relationship between two factors, or variables. A correlation of 0 says there is no relationship between the variables and a correlation of 1 says there’s a perfect relationship. And most importantly, correlation and causation are very different. Just because we can say there’s a relationship, doesn’t mean we can say which variable impacts the other. Professor Duckworth herself found a correlation of 0.2, which she says are what personality psychologists would describe as a “small-to-medium” effect of grit on academic success. Now a correlation of 0.2 isn’t nothing; I was recently corresponding with a friend who is on the verge of getting a Ph.D in something I don’t fully understand related to global health which has a very heavy statistics component, about the impact of homework on academic outcomes. It turns out that the correlation there is about 0.16 – so, lower than the correlation for grit, and my friend described the homework correlation as “not a bad correlation at all in the real world; it’s the difference between failing a class and getting a C, or going form a B to an A+.” So grit is one of a host of factors that predicts student success, and is not as high a predictor as, say, either a SAT score or a high school GPA on a student’s first-year college GPA, which have correlations in the neighborhood of 0.5, and is hardly the single unique quality that will enable all of us to dazzle. It would also be remiss of us if we failed to examine whether grit is even a trait we want to encourage. Because by encouraging grit, we have to discourage something else. If we encourage single-minded pursuit of academic success, we’re discouraging the other things that student could be spending time on, like being creative, or simply being a generalist: some careers require expertise in one topic, but others derive a great deal of value from pulling together disparate experiences into a whole greater than its parts. If we encourage our children to demonstrate their proficiency on standardized tests, they necessarily have less time available to spend on something they might have chosen to study and pursued with single-minded passion, if they had had the time. Grades and test results are someone else’s judgment of how well a student is doing. If a student were instead engaged in something they actually found interesting themselves, it’s much more likely that they would become their own toughest critic, because they would actually care about the work products, not just the A at the end.

So, as usual, we draw to a close by asking what parents are supposed to do with this information. Well, if you’re a White or Asian parent, I guess you should start by acknowledging that if your child is in one of these schools down the road from my house, where I know a decent number of my listeners live, and if grit is being touted in that school as the amazing thing that’s going to level the playing field for historically disadvantaged students, then now you know there’s a good chance that grit is not going to be the thing that ‘saves’ these students. In fact, there’s a good chance that grit is going to be the thing that puts ever-more distance between these students and your student, who may come from a relatively more well-advantaged background. And that grit may be the thing that helps your student to succeed in school, and college, and in the corporate world, if that’s important to you. So if after all that you’re thinking grit *is* something you’d like to nurture, how do you do it? Well, first, allow your child to experiment with lots of different activities. If they enjoy ballet or soccer or whatever for one class then they might want to participate for a season, but they might not. Ask your child. Make this initial learning more like play than learning if possible. This approach is more likely to hold your child’s interest, and experimenting with different activities gives them a chance to gain context for what they like and what they don’t. Once the child does commit to the activity, make sure they understand the value of deliberate practice that’s designed to identify their weaknesses and work on these so they’re no longer weak. One of Professor Duckworth’s studies found that students who had learned about deliberate practice were more likely to give advice to other students related to practicing, and were also more likely to choose to do more deliberate practice in math rather than messing about on social media. For those who hadn’t been doing well in school, this led to increased performance as measured by their grades. So once your child settles on an activity, make practice a habit; something they don’t even have to think about starting every day. Next, don’t be afraid of allowing your child to fail. Really; that’s how they learn. Toddlers fail all the time; then they get up and try again. When we rush over to help them out, we teach them that failing is shameful; something to be feared. Once you fear failure, you won’t stick your neck out and take a risk, which makes it more difficult to get better. When your child comes to you with a success or a failure, what you say next tells them how you view their success or failure. If you say “You’re a natural!,” you show that you value innate talent. If you say “You’re a learner!” you show that you value the effort it took to do the activity, even if your child isn’t a natural at it. If you say “well, at least you tried,” your child may not learn to pick herself up and try again. If you say “Well, that didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better,” your child learns that failure is just another step on the learning journey. These examples might sound familiar to you as being related to what Professor Carol Dweck calls the growth mindset; the idea that qualities like intelligence are not fixed, but can be changed through learning. We’ll have to do an episode on that sometime Over time, your child will internalize these ideas as self-talk that she can use to reframe her own failures into lessons from which she can learn. But she may still need your helping hand to identify new strategies to try; to suggest people who may be able to offer expertise; to just listen while she figures things out. In many ways, it’s a harder role than just fixing the thing for her. In the longer run, it’s likely to pay off. But the best lesson I got out of Grit, and one that I plan to put into effect in our house, is called the Hard Thing rule, which has three parts. Firstly, everyone in the family has to do a hard thing – something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’m already doing mine; my research for this podcast and my master’s in education is my hard thing. I love it, but it’s still hard work – especially the statistics part. Although my husband says that my hard thing should be cleaning the house. He definitely thinks I need the practice at that. My daughter isn’t really old enough at three to choose a hard thing, but in a few years I’ll ask her to choose one. My husband is having a hard time deciding on his hard thing; his best suggestion yet is to stop looking at his phone during every free second of the day. The second part of the hard thing rule is the part I like the best: you can quit, but not until a natural stopping point has arrived – the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or something like that. Carys isn’t in any classes yet but I’d been wondering what might be the appropriate balance of sticking with* something without forcing her to do it for my sake rather than hers. The idea is that you have to finish what you committed to in the beginning, which means you can’t just quit on a bad day. The final part of the hard thing rule is that you get to pick your hard thing. Obviously you should pick something you enjoy and you should let your child pick something she enjoys. You don’t get to force her into piano lessons for her hard thing if she prefers soccer (or football). (Again, note the irony of allowing your child to pick their hard thing – but somehow hoping, without any apparent evidence, that the resulting grit will translate to environments where passion is not present that is contradicted by the evidence found in Professor Farrington’s report.) Interest in the topic should help to get you (or your child) through the bad days so you can really make a decision when the season is over or that tuition payment is up about the totality of your experience and whether you want to do more of it, rather than just whether it sucks right now. And by modeling a hard thing yourself, you’re providing your child with exactly the kind of role model he needs to become more gritty himself. I plan to only ask my daughter to pick *one* hard thing, and I don’t plan to obsess over whether she is becoming better than anyone else at it. To me, that feels like an appropriate balance of learning what it’s like to be gritty and not getting obsessed with the idea that grit is the be-all-and-end-all of success in life.

The actor Will Smith is quoted in the book as saying “I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me…but if we get on the treadmill together, there are two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.” I’m not interested in raising a child who is so caught up in proving that she’s the best at something that she has to out-compete everyone. She might become highly successful, but it doesn’t seem as though she’d be much fun to be around, and ultimately achieving balance between being productive and being satisfied with what one has achieved seems to be a much better outcome than someone who would rather die than get off a treadmill before someone else. So, in sum, grit may be *one* of several traits that are important to a child’s success in life, which Professor Duckworth does acknowledge in her own conclusion, after she’s spent a whole book telling us how important grit is. Indeed, she says in the National Geographic article that “there’s more that we don’t know than we do know.” But grit by no means the only characteristic that’s important; Professor Duckworth herself says that she thinks ‘goodness’ is more important than ‘greatness.’ Be wary of school-based interventions that promise to increase grit, especially if they are delivered on a one-size-fits all basis, using rewards to get children to do it, and doubly-especially if they promise to level the playing field between privileged and under-privileged children. Perhaps the best thing you could do on that front would be to mentor an underprivileged youth so they, too, can learn from you what it means to be gritty, and you could also talk with them about what components of grittiness are a fit with their culture. Don’t lose sight of the fact that committing to a goal and sticking your head down and doing the work should also be balanced by looking up every once in a while and making sure the goal is still the right one. College and a corporate job is not the right fit for all children. I have to assume (because Professor Duckworth’s research only focuses on high achievers) that grit can benefit people from all walks of life, with all kinds of life goals. Finally, consider implementing the Hard Thing rule when your child is old enough to choose her hard thing for herself. It could be just the balance you need between allowing your child appropriate choices and helping her to see the value of sticking with a thing even when it gets tough.

Thanks again for being here with me today. Don't forget that you can join the free You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher. We'll leave registration open for just a few more days until August 31st, and all of the references for today's episode including the new references for the re-released, as well as a link to the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop can be found at YourParentingMojo.com/gritrerelease

Hi, this is Jenny from Los Angeles. We know that you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting. And we're honored that you've chosen us as we move toward a world in which everyone's lives and contributions are valued. If you'd like to help keep the show ad free, please consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Don't forget to head to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro to record your own messages for the show.