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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
I maybe erred on the side of supportive as well, for the same reason, some perceived lack of support as kids. My parents weren’t entirely unsupportive, but I’d wanted a little more support at times and all the parents around me at the time seemed to ignore their kids most of time and just make sure they were fed.
Now we seem to have a whole generation of over-supportive ‘helicopter parenting’, and sometimes I worry I was too supportive in the sense that my kids didn’t get the free-roam exploration that I had as a child. Screens and games and internet are a non-trivial factor in there too.
Bias indeed! The article’s perhaps over-confident in its simplistic prescription. Parenting doesn’t fit onto a 2d axis, and parental demands and support vary wildly across activity and time and financial availability and probably a long list of other things. None of the “studies” the article mentions (without citing!) are showing parenting strategy outcomes even according to the article. Grit isn’t something you can actually reduce to 4 words, it depends on past successes and belief in one’s self and sometimes the ability to discount the social judgements of others. For that matter, knowing when to quit is an important skill that needs to sit right beside grit.
One of the few things I actually learned as a parent is that almost all parenting advice is completely bad, and that goes double for me when giving parenting advice. My wife and I shared things we knew about kids only to find out we were wrong. What works on one kid doesn’t work on the next… in the same family with the same parents. My wife eventually came up with our parenting prime directive, and it was simply to always show the kids love and talk to them a lot about their lives. It seems like that was helpful, but we’ll see in 20 years…
You can prepare your kids for their natural pendulum swing. I told mine it's natural to rebel and do the opposite of what your parents do, make sure you understand, and don't unintentionally swing too far in the other direction.
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.
This could easily be misread as a culture war tangent, but at the risk of "explaining the joke", it's a reference to the song "A Boy Named Sue" (which TIL the Johnny Cash version is a cover, with the original artist being Shel Silverstein).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scien...
reply