The best advice a little league coach ever gave me was “rub
some dirt on it”. If you were hurt, don’t come off the field crying, don’t
reach for the ice pack - rub a little dirt on the wound and keep going.
Saturday at my daughter’s basketball game there will
literally 4 kids on the sidelines “questionable to return” with things as
serious as “cramps” “nail sprains” and “I can’t find my team photo”.
There is a growing body of research showing that resiliency
is one of the top predictors of success in life for an individual. Dr. Angela
Lee Duckworth calls it Grit in her Ted talk http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ted-talks-education/speaker/dr-angela-lee-duckworth/
·
Students with lower IQ’s but higher resiliency levels have higher GPA’s
· For
cadets entering the West Point Academy’s gruelling summer training program,
intelligence, physical ability and leadership ability were all less reliable
than a “grit score” in predicting success.
· For
children were victims of abuse, resilience levels seem to be the most concrete
measurable as to how they will overcome their challenges later in life.
Left right and centre though, our society seems to want to
coddle people rather than forcing young people into taking risk, experiencing
failure and giving them skills to learn how to rebound. Pain and failure, when
managed properly, can be one of life’s most powerful teachers. Protecting young people from early life
experiences where they fail or get hurt is handcuffing them as they age where
life inevitably throws them into situations where they will not succeed.
Instead of being able to utilize skills of resiliency that they developed when
they were growing, they shut down and are unsure of how to react… of how to get
back up and try again. Winston Churchill phrased it this way - Success is the ability to go from one
failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
In 2010, 80% of students moved back or remained in their
parents houses after graduation, too risk adverse to try to make a go of it on
their own. The MacArthur foundation reported that many kids today will not feel
ready to fully embrace adulthood and all it’s responsibilities until they are
34 years old.
Let’s let our kids fall down, cry… and keep going without
having to scoop them up.
How about letting them fail a grade in school.
How about being OK with letting them know that they are not
the best on the team. We love them the most, but some kids are better.
Let’s put our youth into roles they are unequipped for, let
them fail, and then debrief what went well, and what didn’t.
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