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Chapter 10: Parenting for Grit
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Grit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion, Perseverance, and Success
Developing Grit
Psychology and Human Development
Grit and Society
Summary
Analysis
When Duckworth saw her four-year-old daughter Lucy give up on opening a stubborn box of raisins, she started to worry that Lucy wouldn’t grow up to be gritty, so she signed her up for ballet classes. Extracurricular activities teach children to follow a supportive, demanding adult who isn’t their parent and develop the four key components of grit (interest, practice, purpose, and hope). This is why Duckworth strongly recommends signing children up for activities that they enjoy.
Duckworth’s panic over four-year-old Lucy’s box of raisins might seem overblown, but what really matters is her proposal that young people can develop grit by pursuing activities outside of school. Of course, the underlying principle behind this idea is that parents can raise gritty children by putting them in environments that are appropriately interesting, challenging, and supportive, all at the same time.
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There are relatively few studies on extracurriculars because research on children is ethically complex. One study has shown that children find school challenging but not interesting, social time interesting but not challenging, and extracurricular activities both interesting and challenging. Others have found a clear link between extracurriculars, higher grades, and better mental health. And all children have time for extracurriculars—most already waste many hours on TV, video games, and social media every day.
Duckworth again emphasizes the limits of the existing research in the psychology field. In this case, she points out how the ethical requirements of psychology research make adequately testing her hypothesis very difficult. Therefore, she encourages her readers to approach this chapter with more skepticism than the rest of her book. She argues that activities teach passion because they’re interesting and teach perseverance because they’re challenging. If young people don’t get to experience both halves of this equation together in the same setting, they might grow up to prefer interesting but easy things and avoid the kind of hard, uninteresting things that they’re asked to do at school.
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Sticking with extracurriculars for multiple years helps students set and stick with long-term goals (which are key to grit). Psychologist Margo Gardner found that teenagers are more successful in college and more likely to get jobs after graduation if they spend two years in the same high school activity (rather than one).
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Similarly, in the 1970s, the psychologist Warren Willingham studied thousands of students from the end of high school through college. Among the 100 traits he studied, follow-through was the most important in determining success. Specifically, high schoolers who stuck with several extracurricular activities over multiple years were more likely to graduate college, succeed academically, reach leadership positions, and make significant achievements in their fields. Duckworth noticed that the meaning of the term “follow-through” seemed to be pretty similar to the meaning of “grit,” so she decided to replicate Willingham’s research.
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Bill and Melinda Gates funded Duckworth to study whether involvement in high-school extracurriculars can predict college drop-out rates. She asked 1,200 high schoolers to describe their extracurriculars, then calculated a grit score from zero to six for each student. Two years later, students with higher scores were far more likely to stay in college: there was an apparent connection between high grit scores and heavy extracurricular involvement. Duckworth notices that following through with extracurriculars might build grit, though gritty people might also just be more likely to follow through with extracurriculars—but it’s probably both.
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Psychologist Brent Roberts has shown that people reinforce their personality traits through the “corresponsive principle.” People’s traits influence the situations they end up in, and these situations reinforce their traits. For instance, sociable teenagers are more likely to take well-paying, high-status jobs, and these jobs make them more sociable over time. Similarly, Duckworth suspects that young people who learn to quit difficult tasks (like opening a box of raisins) end up avoiding the exact situations that would help them build grit. In contrast, young people who succeed at difficult tasks (like ballet) learn to embrace other challenges in the future.
Harvard admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons told Duckworth that he agrees with Willingham’s research and strongly values follow-through in his applicants. Students who have made a sustained commitment to something they care about are likely to bring the same grit to Harvard, Fitzsimmons explained, even if they switch to different activities. In fact, he remembers admitting Duckworth because of her extracurricular activities. And even when a student joins an activity because of parental pressure, Fitzsimmons added, the activity can still transform the student. However, Fitzsimmons also worried that too few poor students get to participate in extracurriculars. In fact, this participation is actually declining, in part because extracurriculars are increasingly expensive and time-consuming. This explains why income strongly correlated with grit scores in Duckworth’s study.
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Geoffrey Canada runs the Harlem Children’s Zone, a supplemental education program for poor children in New York City. After giving Penn’s commencement speech, he met with Duckworth and told her that the key to getting children out of poverty is giving them “a decent childhood.” During a TED talk, Canada explained that extracurricular activities clearly help children grow, learn, and enjoy their childhoods—even if there still aren’t enough scientific studies to prove it.
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Duckworth agrees: the scientific evidence on extracurriculars isn’t sufficient yet, but their benefit is still obvious. And there are studies showing that people who work hard at one task tend to work harder at another. Robert Eisenberger has shown that if rats are assigned a hard task (like eating their food through dense wire mesh), they’re better at other hard tasks (like running on a plank). He repeated his experiment with his wife’s elementary school class: children who received hard memory tasks worked harder at a subsequent task than students who received easy ones. Just like Seligman and Maier discovered “learned helplessness,” Eisenberger discovered “learned industriousness.”
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As a new mother, Duckworth struggled to apply Eisenberger’s conclusions—rather than just rewarding her daughters when they worked hard, she tended to praise them all the time. But their ballet teacher had very high standards and taught them the key components of grit: interest, practice, purpose, and hope. Duckworth’s family follows “the Hard Thing Rule”: everyone has to do something hard (like yoga, running, or piano), nobody can quit in the middle of their season or semester, and everyone chooses their own hard thing depending on their interests. When Duckworth’s daughters reach high school, they will have to add a second activity for two years. Duckworth recommends using this rule to raise gritty children.
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