"… I study and write about resilience in young adults, and I’m noticing a troubling spike in students like this athlete. Their faith in their own sweat equity confers a kind of contingent confidence: when they win, they feel powerful and smart. Success confirms their mindset.
The problem comes when these students fail. When they fall short of what they imagine they should accomplish, they are crushed by self-blame. If my accomplishments are mine to control, they reason, my failures must be entirely my fault, too. Failing must mean I am incapable, and maybe will be forever. This makes it incredibly difficult for students to move on.
We talk often about young adults struggling with failure because their parents have protected them from discomfort. But there is something else at play here …" …
“Hard work” builds character, resiliency, etc. It’s benefits are not about individual successes or failures, but rather teaches one a skillset that will bring about a lifetime of outcomes. There are likely to be failures along the way, but that resiliency instructs one how to respond. That breeds success.
Hard work, being a good person,taking care of self tend to statistically pay off. Like bad driving gets you into accidents and s number of bad situations, but good doesn’t mean zero chance of such things, stats are clear on that.
Every horrible driver I’ve known have had done horrible things happen.
When my kids were doing scholastic chess tournaments their afterschool teacher used to tell them if you weren’t losing games you weren’t learning anything. I like chess because as soon as you get good your rating goes up and you have to play against better players. I think it helps teach kids to be resilient, along with a lot of other good things.
Part of life is learning how to cope when despite your planning and hard work, things don’t work out as you’d thought.
You don’t make the team, you don’t get the job, you can’t get pregnant, you become ill, you lose your spouse… Learning to set yourself up for success and then dealing with failure is a critical life skill.
I think it’s fine to praise kids for effort but equally important to help them understand that there is a lot they cannot control. What they can control is how they process both their successes and failures.
I question the headline: Why would anyone tell their kids that hard work “always” pays off? Obviously, it’s more likely to than not. But looking around, anyone with a clue can see that plenty of people make it though without having worked hard, plenty of people make it because of privilege plus hard work, and plenty of people work darn hard and don’t “make it” in a clear, obvious way, either because of basic barriers, or because of accidents of life, which can affect anyone. If you give your child the message built into this topic, you’re not paying attention.
“Adults help students pursue success in healthier ways in part by redefining failure as a feature, not a bug, of learning.”
This! Failures are often the biggest learning tools, not just in academics but in life. We don’t let our kids fail enough when they are little and when they grow up, they have no healthy coping mechanisms.
I’m guilty of that. I’ve used sweeping generalities. My husband has always stressed that the process, the journey, the way you are is what’s important.
My husband and I have gone back and forth about this for years. His party line to my kids is always “you can be whatever you want, achieve whatever you work for” and I’m always the downer telling them that life doesn’t work that way, that you work hard because you value the effort and work you’re doing, but there are no guaranteed outcomes. My kids generally get this naturally from experience in their sport, gymnastics. They both know that they can practice 10, 20, 30 hours a week, but they aren’t guaranteed a medal or placement at any meet. They can (and have) given it their all and come in last place. They still went back and put in more work anyway.
The harmful thing is the implication that if you “fail”, i.e. don’t come first, then you didn’t work hard enough, and that’s because you are morally defective. I think this is effectively the common Tiger Parent message.
Yes, the subject line is a bit strawman-ish, but I was interested to see in that there had been a recent study of whether these growth mindset interventions are effective. Helping students develop a growth mindset can be a pretty cheap way to improve academic success but the 2018 article referenced (a meta analysis that combined hundreds of studies of growth mindset interventions) suggested they were more effective for students from lower-income families and not effective for others. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617739704
Sometimes you get what you deserve, good or bad, and sometimes you don’t, merit or mercy. Redefine success and failure. Ask where you ready, did you prepare, did you give it your all, did you stand when you wanted to run away?
My son has had to withdraw from two universities due to mental illness. He will probably never get a college degree. But this week, he told me, “I’m proud of what I did at X and X. I succeeded in my classes [he was always on Dean’s List] but knew college was more than I could handle.” He has no regrets about the past, which blows me away. He’s happy to be working in a furniture factory. He gives his all to his job.
Sometimes not trying – or making the decision to stop trying – can be a good idea.
I was a biology major in college and was surrounded by people who aspired to careers in medicine or veterinary medicine. Many realized by the end of their first or second year that they weren’t getting the kind of grades necessary for admission to medical or veterinary school.
Some of them chose to continue trying to achieve their original goal, and practically all of those who made this choice did not succeed. At the end of college, they were at loose ends because they could not pursue their chosen career path and had never considered other options.
Others dropped the idea of trying for medical or veterinary school early, looked around for other options, changed their majors if necessary, and prepared themselves for different careers. They were not at loose ends at the end of college. They had set themselves on a different path and knew what they wanted to do.