How to raise children with grit (2019)

This seems like well thought out advice, but I feel like most people don’t have the emotional intelligence or communication skills to pull off “wise parenting” - and will actually be doing “authoritarian parenting” without realizing it if they, e.g. try to enforce things like (cue Tom Smykowski in office space) “I know this sucks, but keep doing it until you reach the natural stopping point. The NATURAL STOPPING POINT I SAID. Can’t you see I’m a WISE PARENT.”

In general, one has to be careful using conceptual advice for things like parenting- as it can lead to justifying some pretty awful, even abusive behaviors. I’ve seen adults angrily or even violently forcing a child to do “power poses” so they would “grow up successful” - a fad idea based on discredited research that seems ridiculous and clearly fails the common sense test. Said child is now an adult and does not speak to that parent anymore.

It's important to note that pretty much every claim Duckworth has made about grit has been called into question by other research. That doesn't disprove it, but I think as a rule we should be extra skeptical of simple, easily-understood concepts that try to explain a complex world, or which even promise to give you control over it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scien...

I'm not an expert in psychology (just a mental health care consumer trying to navigate the ridiculous minefield of snake oil), but I think it's long past time to retire "grit" as a construct. Like way too many things in psychology, it originated as the hobby-horse-cum-personal-brand of an individual luminary who started giving TED Talks and writing pop science books about how important it is. It's not clear that it has any predictive power that the Big Five personality dimensions didn't already have, and it's even less clear that we know how to increase it.

It's certainly a well meaning article, but:

After studying more than 2,000 pairs of twins and administering the Grit Scale, researchers concluded that the hereditability of the two factors contributing to Grit is as follows: Perseverance: 37% Passion: 20%

This idea of quantifying "grit" into separate components with ratios as if it's a freaking cookbook is patently absurd.

I'll throw my general advice into the mix - raising a dog can also help teach young children responsibility, follow-through, and this ephemeral quality "grit".

This article made me reflect on my own upbringing. My parents weren't particularly well-educated, but their parenting style actually had a lot in common with the fictional Andy Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show. While Angela Duckworth's research on grit wasn’t around back then, Andy Taylor modeled many of the traits Duckworth describes—compassion, high expectations, and letting kids learn from mistakes. My parents seemed to naturally follow a similar path, and it served as a kind of guardrail for them—a common-sense approach they likely picked up because it felt right, not because of any research.

I'm not claiming my success today is solely due to this upbringing, but I do feel like it had a meaningful impact. Especially when I see the outcomes of friends who had either very authoritarian or completely hands-off parents. There's something powerful in that balanced, "Andy Taylor" approach: patient guidance, firm boundaries, and leading by example.

It’s interesting to consider that despite all the developmental psychology and theories on parenting we have today, a lot of the fundamentals were demonstrated in simple, accessible ways by a character on 1960s TV. It’s a reminder that, at its core, effective parenting often just requires consistency, empathy, and a healthy dose of common sense.

> In the top right quadrant is what psychologists call ‘authoritative’ parenting (not to be confused with authoritarian parenting). Perhaps because of this confusion, Angela has labelled this quadrant as ‘wise parenting’, which is a much better word for it.

Ahhh "Wise" parenting. No bias there, ha ha.

My wife and I no doubt were in the upper left quadrant, permissive parents. For better or worse, we weren't going to have any of the demanding side of the spectrum. Could we have been more demanding "for their own good"? Perhaps. But I think neither my wife nor I were raised with demanding parents and we turned out fine — so we went with that. I think for both of us it was the "supportive" axis we felt lacking in our own childhoods so that is where we doubled-down.

When my kids grow up though, if they have kids of their own, and the pendulum swings the other way, I will not be surprised. Life seems to be like that. When I was raising the girls I tried not to overthink it.

That “grittiness” test is a joke, right? Task saliency is a poor marker for grit. If that were true the grittiest people would be workaholics, which just isn’t what I think of when I think gritty. Also, you can’t expect people to honestly self-report about something as character defining as “being a hard worker”. lol. Might as well ask, “are you, on the whole, a good person?” My observation is that in the USA, being a hard worker is considered the basis of being a good person. Like I literally get told, “you are a hard worker” as a baseline compliment all the time, even though I don’t believe it. I personally do!’t really like being called a hard worker, and strive to work smart, not hard.

That said, I’m a fairly gritty person. I run everyday outside, whether its raining, snowing or the outside temps are in excess of 110F(43C). I’ve gone on many long alpine backpacking trips, thin air, wet weather, blustery passes, crossing ice fields. I usually camp with just a tarp if I can get away with it. Type II fun is my fav, most people I know think of me as exceptionally gritty.

I’ve worked grueling hours on businesses I had interest in, doing heavy manual labor for 10 hours before moving on to office work, spending my weekends on maintenance and catching up on paperwork. Doing disgusting work no one wants to do is kinda my specialty.

That test put me in the bottom 10% of US adults. I just answered it honestly, not aspirationally.

I'm troubled by the premise that further right on the "demanding" scale makes parents "wise". At some point, an increase in demanding things of your children seems unwise to me.

Grit only gets you so far, and higher-than-normal levels of grit can be a real problem. Grit will counteract squeakiness (as in "the squeaky wheel gets the grease"), which is not what you want when the sources of most of the problems you're encountering by that point are external, rather than the kind of internal struggles that most people deal with—the kinds of people who are the target audience for gurus like Ryan Holiday and his takes on e.g. "winning the war with yourself". Those people definitely benefit from more grit. Some people might need less of it. (That is not to say smaller doses of the supplement, but rather to lower the latent levels of what's already on their system.)

How to raise children with git would be more apropos for hacker news.

Encourage Experimentation: Branch to explore interests or try new skills without fear of failure. Abandon a branch if it doesn't work.

Merge conflicts: calmly analyze, resolve, and move forwards, just like merge conflicts in git.

Commit early; commit often: break challenges down into smaller parts, just like with git.

Accountability: Pull Requests and code review but in real life.

Autonomy: Fork the project and make it your own.

Working with others: be open source.

Acknowledge Mistakes: git keeps a history of changes, so that we can look back and then improve on what didn't work.

I read this as “…with git” and thought to myself: this might be the level of technical solutionism where I draw the line!

To the extent that you can do some of this in your parenting, it's between net positive and neutral, but unlikely to be too harmful. "Have high expectations but be supportive" can't be a bad thing and certainly feels better than the other three quadrants, as long as your high expectations are something your child can actually achieve at their current level (psychologists also call this the "zone of proximal development").

That said, there are some giant red flags for this not being real science. Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset (linked at the bottom) famously doesn't replicate and is considered, in some cognitive psychology circles, like their version of homeopathy. A TED talk, a popular science book but no peer-reviewed paper behind it is a common sign of a particular kind of work.

For someone interested in digging deeper on a similar topic, I recently read the Psmiths' review of "Math from Three to Seven" https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven... about Alexander Zvonkin's attempt to teach children more advanced math. He got a group of children together, devised puzzles and experiments and games, and tutors and mentors a group of children for four years and it goes really well and he describes his methods and approaches in detail.

It's all both demanding and supportive, and works wonderfully. Has he found THE METHOD? The one in the appendix on "How to teach this stuff" in Erdos' vision of God's book ?

The punchline is that he tries it again with a different group of kids, and it completely fails.

The reviewers sum it up with a reflection on their own experience:

> This is just an extreme version of the universal experience of being the parent of more than one child.

Have a healthy distrust for any book that comes even close to suggesting a way that works for all children, everywhere.

> Duckworth defines grit as ‘passion and perseverance for long-term goals’.

Why not just use this directly? It seems better than redefining an existing word.

Excellence, consistency, boundaries, structure, periodic surprises to improve handling change, and confidence-building adversity.

Or, if you're a country rebel, just name them contrary to their most probable gender identity. /s