Better than Grit: Growing your Child's Resilience.

Grit

Grit is a buzzword lately. Apparently we’ve spent so much time teaching our kids empathy, we forgot about grit.

I've done grit, and I love it. It’s that stick-to-it-iveness that keeps going through frustration or failure. It’s one crucial aspect to managing life. When I think of grit, I visualize those old western movies where the guy would get shot in the leg and grit his teeth while he walked 20 miles through the desert to the next town over.

The kid in the above picture has grit. There was so much frustration, so many bruises and skinned elbows to get that good at skating.

Grit even has a theme song: “I get knocked down, but I get up again. No you’re never gonna keep me down.”

Photo by Emily Reider on Unsplash

I have lived most of my life that way. It was the dominant value for past generations. Do you recall hearing these? “Life’s not fair,” and “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” “Get over that and move on,” and “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Grit was something I took a certain amount of pride in.

But the thing about grit is that it ends in burn out. You can only spend your life walking against a windstorm for so long.

Grit is important. You need grit. Your kids are going to need grit. But if grit is the main way you do life, it will fail you.

If not grit, then what?

As a culture we eventually recognized that and started trying to make things more fair. Turns out whatever doesn’t kill you might make you weaker. We started to learn about the lasting effects of early experiences and trauma. We learned kids with more empathy perform better. We wanted to create a kinder, more empathetic world. We wanted our kids to do well.

And we overdid it.

It turns out this is another thing we parents are failing to do: we aren’t teaching our kids to fail. We aren’t teaching them grit. We keep hearing that we need to let our kids fail because if we don't they won't be prepared for life when they get out of school and into the big bad world where nobody cares how they feel.

There are TED talks: Why I teach my children to fail and Let’s teach our kids to fail forward. There are articles like this one from NPR: How to Teach Children that Failure is the Secret to Success or this from PBS: Teaching Children Its Ok to Fail. It’s even discussed in Forbes.

Adam Russo’s talk at TEDx Naperville We Must Teach Our Kids to Fail shared that "We are programming kids to grow up and enter a world where everything is supposed to feel good and then it doesn’t. Because we are not teaching them the other side of the coin, which is grit, perseverance. Because success does not come instantly, success is not a feel good process, success comes with many failures… Let’s just keep feeling good and as long as we keep feeling good everything will be great. It doesn’t work that way. Life is not instant.” He points out that we need to be able to let our kids work things out for themselves without running in and rescuing them right away.

I agree with everything he has said.

He ends his talk with this question, “When they have a hardship, when they have a hard time, in the end: do you want them to look for an arm to be put around them or do you want them to look deep down inside and try again with grit?”

I know what answer he wants me to give, but that’s not my answer.

My answer is yes and yes. Yes, I want my kids to look deep down inside and try again with grit. Equally, I want them to look for an arm to be put around them.

(I want to be fair, Adam Russo is just making a point here. He’s a therapist and he values interpersonal connection as well.)

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

It’s not grit and It’s not empathy. It’s both.

It may be true that we’ve had this cultural trend, but the idea that this entire generation has dumped the gritty way of living is simply false. I know just as many struggling teenagers in my office who are struggling because of too much grit as I do teenagers struggling because of not enough grit.

I know kids burning out from grit and perseverance. Kids with an inability to ask for help, or maybe those requests for help weren’t heard. Do they feel overwhelmed? They keep working, or they work harder. Do they have tough emotions? They get over that and move on. These kids need a hug that doesn’t let go. They need to be shown empathy.

I also know kids who seem unable to handle the slightest difficulty, who ask for help constantly. They need to step out of the hug. The temptation is to give them a little boot camp, but it’s probably better to teach them to fulfill responsibility gradually.

Is it all our fault as parents?

Weren’t we all being told recently we were too uncaring to our children? Didn’t the experts say that for a long time? We needed to show more empathy and do emotion coaching and stuff. And now it’s not enough grit and we are being too nice? And we are all trying so hard to get it right.

Do you feel overwhelmed? Remember that the purpose of each of my articles is the find the way out of overwhelm. Stick with me to the end and we’ll get to the way through. You’ve got this!

What if a lot of this is not you at all?

One of my sons was all grit. It was his inborn temperament. At 2 months old he would spend 20-40 minutes at a time in his play gym kicking the post in just the right way to make the music play. Whenever he got frustrated or it didn’t work, he kept trying. As he got older he never asked for help. He just tried harder. At school even if he didn’t understand something, he pulled out that grit and kept going.

He is incredibly resourceful and doesn’t give up. But the other side of this is that he is more scared of vulnerability than he is of doing it himself. He hates failure, but he hates vulnerability more. So he often missed out on the supportive connection that would have restored him emotionally and helped him find solutions when he was stuck.

My other son is all connection. Again, this was his inborn temperament. He snuggled me all the time as a baby and loved to play. He loudly asked for help the moment he got frustrated. He is both genuinely supportive to others and is great at getting support from others. He can pull a group of other kids or adults around him to get whatever he needs.

He is incredibly resourceful and good with people. But the other side of this is he is more scared of going it alone than he is of vulnerability. He hates failure, The idea of going it alone was pretty intimidating for him.

One of the great blessings of my life is that over time my boys are learning from each other. Sure, we are coaching them about handling mistakes. But it does seem like they are doing a lot of this themselves. I am amazed by the way they have started to take care of each other. They comfort and encourage each other. They push each other to keep trying and stick to it when things are hard. While they can be dramatically negative things as individuals, they often tell each other that mistakes are part of learning.

It’s both. It has always been both. Grit and Compassion.

Didn’t you say there was something better than grit? What’s better than grit?

Resilience and Growth.

Where grit and compassion for self and others meet in a person, resilience is born. Resilience is the ability to bounce back. To go through something hard and then come back to the same place you were before.

Growth is more than resilience. Growth is that thing beyond resilience we sometimes are awed to witness in people. They’ve gone through something just terrible and we ask ourselves how they can survive it. Later we find they have a greater peace and sense of purpose than they did before. They bounce back and then progress to a higher level of functioning. They become joyful.

Growth of this kind is so recognized in human history that multiple religions teach the spiritual benefit of suffering. I would never ask for suffering for my child, but I do hope that they may find growth if they do suffer.

What if we don't prepare them?

We’ve heard so much about what will go wrong for them if we fail to prepare them. What if we don’t prepare them for failure properly?

The 3 Fs in the picture above can help us work with our kids when they fail.

I don’t know if we can fully prepare our kids for failure or suffering in life. All we can ever do is our best. We can show them that we believe we are still worthy of love if we fail, and so are they.

But seriously, what if they aren’t prepared?

They will fail. Life is hard. And when they fail they will fall into one of the following categories: 20% of them will get stuck in bad feelings, 60% will show resilience and bounce back to about as happy as they were before, and 20% will do the extraordinary as they grow into something more than they were before. Many of the ones who get stuck will eventually bounce back or grow if they work with a therapist.

By then you will have grown yourself to become more comfortable with failure, and you will be there for them, supporting them through it with compassion even as you coach them to get up and try again with grit.

Take a look at my last post, you can learn the 3 Steps to Help Your Child Grow though Failure. Want more? Subscribe here. Or learn more about me at The Primary Carer.

Disclaimer: This article represents general education and does not constitute medical advice. My ideas are mine alone.