How to make your kid tough: The Summary
(Here's the TL;DR version you've been hoping for : )
3 Pillars Parent Newsletter #27
By: Glenn Collins and Catherine Lynch
For 6 weeks (Issues 19 - 25) you’ve been reading our deep dive into how to raise a tough kid. There’s a lot of material, so before moving on, we thought a summary would be helpful.
We’ve spent so much time on this topic because toughness is such an important characteristic. When we help our kids cultivate toughness, we’re equipping them with a tool that will help them succeed in life, no matter what they do.
The particular aspect of toughness we focused on was grit. Angela Duckworth, a leading researcher into what makes people successful, has found this:
Grit is more predictive of success than talent or IQ.
She defines grit as a combination of passion and perseverance. And the best thing is, it’s a quality that can be developed. We can help our kids get more of it.
The devil’s in the details though, and the “How” of helping our kids get grittier is the tricky part.
We started this series off with a quote from a man who told us, “Kids in this country today are soft.” There was a clear implication that parents need to be hard on their kids to toughen them up.
We don’t agree with that. While being hard on your kids might toughen them up, there’s also a significant chance that it will damage your relationship with them, negatively affect how they relate to others, and possibly have other unintended consequences.
But this man isn’t entirely wrong either. Most parents try hard to provide a good life for their family. To insulate themselves and their kids from life’s hardships. And there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s natural and normal. But it’s also true that going through tough experiences is a big part of what develops toughness.
This creates a quandary for parents, and the more comfortable the parents’ lives, the bigger the quandary: How do parents simultaneously provide a good life for their family and expose their kids to tough experiences? And how do they do it without being having to be hard on them themselves,
In our series we explored 2 different approaches to developing grit:
Angela Duckworth: In her family, Dr. Duckworth cultivates grit in her kids with a simple rule: everyone has to be engaged in a “hard thing”. For the parents, it’s their work. The kids get to choose what their hard thing is. It can’t be school or something they’re doing “just for fun”. It has to be an activity that involves deliberate practice with the goal of skills development. If they don’t like their “hard thing” they can choose something else, but they have to finish the enrollment period of their present pursuit. They’re not allowed to just quit.
Kurt Hahn: Hahn created the Outward Bound School specifically to address a problem Great Britain was experiencing during WWII - young sailors were dying due to not enough grit. His new school used the natural world to put British youth into challenging situations where they struggled together to overcome hardship. These experiences were transformative and created lots of grit in the process. The original Outward Bound school worked so well that they’ve opened schools in 35 countries all over the world. Parents send their kids on Outward Bound courses for adventure and personal development - and they come away with more grit.
Our approach is a synthesis of our experience, wisdom from other parents, and knowledge from experts like Angela Duckworth and Kurt Hahn. It has 5 main points.
Have High Expectations: Parents must have high expectations - both for themselves and for their kids. They need to be clear in what those expectations are, and lead by example by living up to those expectations.
Expose Them To Tough Experiences: Facing and persevering through tough experiences make for tough people. Parents set up experiences where their kids face challenges and naturally have opportunities to “get tougher”. Whenever possible parents should outsource this. This preserves the relationship because the parents are not the ones being hard on the kids. Let the coaches, teachers, tutors, and instructors do that.
Don’t Smooth The Path: A parent’s job is not to make their kid’s life easy, it’s to prepare them to be a productive adult. Let kids do for themselves the things they are capable of doing. They are much more capable than we give them credit for.
Don’t Shield Them From Consequences: Decisions and actions have consequences. When kids mess up, let them deal with the consequences. When parents “fix” their problems, what they’re really teaching them is to rely on other people to get them out of jams.
Notice Toughness: How parents talk about their kids to their kids has a tremendous impact on how those kids see themselves. When parents notice their kids being tough, they should acknowledge it. This helps the kids recognize their own toughness and internalize it as part of their identity.
There you go. Easy right? LOL, just kidding. We all know that parenting for character is never “easy”. The bottom line is that it’s really a mindset. A mindset where you’re always on the lookout for ways for your kid to stretch themselves, to overcome obstacles, and learn new things. You seek out experiences that stretch them and help them discover their inner strength. When your kid is facing a challenge you say to yourself: “It’s OK if they struggle some,” and “How can I support them so they can meet this challenge?” instead of “How can I fix this for them?”
Being able to persevere in the face of adversity and keep going even when things are hard is one of the most important capacities you can help your kid develop - and you don’t have to be hard on them make it happen.
Harvest moon
Leaving the stands after our granddaughter’s first high school soccer game (a 3-0 loss unfortunately) we noticed the full moon rising. It followed us all the way home, effortlessly keeping pace above the corn fields.