Friction often slows progress.
Adversity in your child’s life can be a risk factor for healthy development. But resistance in the right dosage can build strength.
In fact, adversity can lead to growth when parents reframe it as an opportunity to grow and learn.
How human beings react to adversity — whether in the form of resistance, failure, threats, challenges, or setbacks, is normally distributed. On the left end of the distribution are unhealthy responses. Most people respond with a brief period of sadness or depression and then return to normal form. The right end of the distribution reflects those who respond with growth and learning (Seligman, 2011).
Teach your kids how to be on the right end of the curve by understanding and applying three concepts.
Resilience
The ability to respond to adversity is often referred to as “resilience.” Responses are multi-dimensional; they include thoughts, emotions, and physical responses. Resilient children respond in all dimensions “without lasting detriment to self, relationships or personal development” (Walklate, McGarry, and Mythen. 2014).
The study of resilience in complex systems, like ecologies and political systems, has revealed that healthy systems — whether ecological, economic, political, or social — persist and grow stronger after resistance, rather than simply returning to a state of equilibrium (Walklate, McGarry, and Mythen. 2014).
The same is true for humans.
For example, if your child gets a bad grade a school paper, they have the opportunity to get feedback, reflect, and develop a plan for doing better on the next one. Some children might feel defeated, but your child will take valuable insight from the experience and come up with new study techniques and renewed determination to be their best.
It’s more than bouncing back. It’s bouncing forward. And it can lead to greater things.
Growth
Healthy and resilient responses require a mindset that looks for growth opportunities.
That mindset has been popularized in academic and professional literature as a “growth mindset.” You can teach your children how to develop such a mindset.
Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, coined the term. She sums it up like this: “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts)” (Dweck, 2016).
When your children face setbacks, teach them to recognize it as a step on their path to achieving something bigger. They have unlimited potential. The only constraint on their capacity to grow is time, and you will teach them how to choose to spend it wisely.
One way to expand their view of their potential is to harness their creativity. Karl Weick, an expert in high-performance teams, attributes individuals’ resilience in part to their willingness to improvise in the face of adversity.
“When situations unravel, this is simply normal natural trouble…and they proceed with whatever materials are at hand” (Weick, 1993).
For instance, one of my sons recently struggled to keep up with schoolwork. He said he felt like he was drowning, and just when he started to get his head above water, another assignment would pull him down.
What a lonely, unsettling feeling.
As parents, we collaborate on new ways to stay organized and prioritize. Some of these ways required his creative input, like how and when to attack certain projects. He has since gotten much better at managing his time and expectations. He still has the same workload, but he isn’t feeling suffocated by it.
Showing children how to stretch themselves, think in new ways, and recognize opportunities to develop skills will lead to personal growth.
Learning
True learning is ultimately a change in behavior.
Just as adversity can lead to resilience and growth, struggle is an integral part of the learning process.
“Some difficulties that elicit more effort…will more than compensate for their inconvenience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring,” according to the latest learning science (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, 2014).
They are called “desirable difficulties” (Bjork and Bjork, 2020). The same principle holds true in life experience.
Moreover, when you come upon gaps in your knowledge, you’re on your way to closing the gap. As distinguished cognitive psychologist John Meacham put it, “ignorance and knowledge grow together” (Meacham, 130).
These difficulties aren’t limited to academic experiences. Adolescence is packed full of them, and they don’t often feel so desirable. For instance, one of my children has a heck of a time getting up in the morning. Once, during a particularly difficult morning waking up I politely advised him that he should remember his sleepiness at night when he resists going to bed. “But I’m not tired at night,” he said.
Still, discussion and reflection have given him new insights into the importance of sleep.
Through painful experience, your children can learn better ways to live and behave. You can accelerate these learning opportunities by helping them identify them, reflect on them, and plan through them.
Adversity is here to stay. Understanding how it plays into you own growth and opportunity will help you take advantage of it for a more fulfilling life.
References
Dweck, Carol. 2016. “What Having a ‘Growth Mindset’ Actually Means.” Harvard Business Review. January 13, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means
Bjork, Robert. A., and Bjork, Elizabeth. L. 2020. “Desirable difficulties in theory and practice.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Vol. 9, Iss. 4. 475–479.
Brown, Peter C., Roediger, Henry L. III, and McDaniel, Mark A. 2014. Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
Seligman, Martin. 2011 “Building Resilience.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/04/building-resilience
Walklate, Sandra, McGarry, Ross, and Mythen, Gabe. 2014. “Searching for Resilience: A Conceptual Excavation.” Armed Forces & Society. Vol. 40, Iss. 3: 408–427.
Weick, Karl. 1993. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” Administrative Science Quarterly. Vol 38. 628–652.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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