podcast

This episode of Mental Mosaic discusses the challenge parents face in teaching perseverance to their children. Grit, defined as passion and perseverance towards a long-term goal, is important for success. Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties, while perseverance is pushing through challenges. These qualities are important for children to develop. In a hypothetical situation where a child is struggling in dance class, the parent would ask if they enjoy it and potentially encourage them to quit if they don't. Welcome to Mental Mosaic, piecing together the puzzle of psychology presents episode one. When the grit gets hard. This episode is about how as a parent, how do we face the challenge of continuing perseverance skills that do not match our children's capabilities. For example, we all want to see our kids succeed, but perseverance can often become hard and brutal on a child's health. I'm a parent myself, I've actually never heard of grit. Peyton, do you mind explaining what grit is to me? Yeah, so psychology today defines it as a construct that is said to summon both passion and perseverance in service of a long term goal. Passion is what drives this idea while still filtering out negative mindsets. Perseverance and resilience. What does that mean? So the definition of resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. And then the definition of perseverance is continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure or opposition. So as you can tell, the definitions are super similar, but a good way to highlight their differences is that resilience is when you are at your low and handle the difficulties while perseverance is pushing through those lows and overcoming them. Now that it's a little clearer the difference between the two, these are definitely qualities that we want our children to have for when they go through struggles and when they face adulthood. So my question, Jackson, is if your son is partaking in dance and you know he won't go far in that sport, what would you do to implement grit in this situation? So hypothetically speaking, Jackson, if your son was in dance and he went to class every week to advance class and he was just horrible, couldn't get the hang of it, didn't know what he was doing, stumbling around, how would you continue to implement grit in this situation? Well, I would ask him if he was enjoying himself and if he wasn't, I'd tell him to quit.