Many of us want to teach our children to be resilient, to be able to withstand and recover from difficulties. Here are some initial steps you can take to instill this in your children.
First some background. These ideas come from the book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol Dweck. Here’s a summary from her website, mindsetworks.com: “Carol Dweck and her colleagues became interested in students' attitudes about failure. They noticed that some students rebounded while other students seemed devastated by even the smallest setbacks.
”After studying the behavior of thousands of children, Dr. Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset to describe the underlying beliefs people have about learning and intelligence. When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement.
“According to Dweck, when a student has a fixed mindset, they believe that their basic abilities, intelligence, and talents are fixed traits. ... In a growth mindset, however, students believe their abilities and intelligence can be developed with effort, learning, and persistence.”
Now, let’s apply this to parenting. Suppose your child is struggling with something, let’s say math, and they say to you, “I’m not good at math.” This is an example of a fixed mindset.
We might be tempted to say, “That’s okay. I wasn’t great at math either.”
With a growth mindset approach, you might say something like, “I know math can be hard. It was hard for me too. But, I’ve learned that math is something you can get better at if you keep working at it. I really believe that you can get better at it if you work at it. I want to help you. Let’s talk about what’s hard and how we can get you help to make learning easier.”
And as your child works at it, you want to praise their effort. You can say, “You’re really working hard on your math. I see the time and effort you’re putting in. Great job!”
In fact, you can praise a child’s effort at any time, instead of the grades they get or the number of goals they score.
A corollary: In Middle School, my high achieving daughter, started putting in less effort. She wasn’t striving to do her best and it didn’t seem to bother her that her grades were lower. She told me about friends getting grounded for getting a B instead of an A and asked, “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”
No, I wouldn’t. But I did tell her I noticed she wasn’t putting in as much effort recently and asked what was going on. After we talked about it, I said I wanted to encourage her to work harder and get A’s, not because I cared about her having the highest grades, but because I wanted her to achieve to her potential.
I knew from all our experiences together that she was fully capable of getting A’s. And I wanted her to feel the satisfaction of knowing she did her best. That kind of satisfaction feels great. I asked how that sounded to her. Fortunately, she agreed and seemed relieved. And she started working harder. And then we praised her effort and hard work, not the grades themselves.
Praising our children’s effort, rather than their grades or intelligence, helps them to focus on persistence, overcoming challenges, the journey to the end goal, not just the final result. It lets them know that they can keep going and keep learning, especially if they know they have your support along the way. This is what helps build resilience.