Teaching “Grit” Starts with Learning Myself

I can still remember it, clear as day even though I was only 8 years old. The smell of chlorine on white tile, the dark grey grout, the bright aquamarine of the pool water, the nasty swim cap with the pink fish on it stuck to my cranium. It was my 2nd lesson and I was terrified but I leaped off and held my breath underwater, doing a frog swim, just a few feet. The too-green water filled my eyes and ears and I hated it, but I could see my goal. I remembered to hold my breath, to push forward, to swim like a frog. It was scary and painful, but I came out of the water in front of the young blonde swim teacher, and the joy on her face equaled my own. I could do this! I could swim! It was one of the first times that I felt real pride in my life and my beloved teacher was part of the reason.

The next week I came back and the young teacher was gone. Instead, there stood an older, larger, woman with a pinched face like a drill sergeant. Terrified to jump in off the edge, as usual, she barked at me come in. Her voice only scared me even more – and all the joy and pride of the week before slid down a long dark hole. She continued to harass me to “jump!  jump!” but the more she did, the more I backed away until she gave up and ignored me. There was no love, no sympathy, no encouragement in those eyes, just a look of disdain for another stupid kid who couldn’t do a simple thing. I huddled in a ball on the side of the pool, while the other kids moved ahead, and sniffed back my tears.

Later that day, I learned that my former teacher had quit. I never went back.

To this day I can’t swim.

This is not a story about teachers, though, it’s about challenges. This weekend I was introduced to a “new” idea, courtesy Maria Montessori in an article called “I Can Do Hard Things,” about teaching your kids “grit.” That is, giving your kids hard tasks and compelling them not to quit or give up but to power through to a sense of accomplishment. It turns out overcoming challenges may be the best way to guarantee your child’s future successes.

And while I bet that sounds intuitive to most of you, I’m going to make a terrible admission that I’ve only recently come to understand: I never learned to embrace and conquer challenges.

And just in case you think I’m being too hard on myself, I took a grittiness test put together by UPenn, and scored a little over a “1,” also known as “NOT AT ALL GRITTY.” I answered those questions honestly, so I’m super embarrassed right now. But, it’s something I always knew in the back of my head. I feel like I’ve never done anything hard.

I quit too easily.

This is a very difficult admission but honestly, it fills in the blanks of a LOT of things: Why such a successful student would never finish college. Why I can never complete a novel I’m working on. Why I’m stuck in a gear over my blog. Why I can’t skate or ski or highway drive.

All those why’s have that one answer.

I don’t have grit.

It’s not always fear or a lack of courage. Often, I honestly don’t KNOW what to do when the going gets tough. I don’t know how to climb over stumbling blocks in my writing, how to “unstick” the hard parts, and then I give up.

The only places I have this conquered is in raising my kids (although there’ve been LOTS of times of “stuckness” and I’ve backed away from many options) and in my faith. The first is because I take my job as a parent extremely seriously, not just as a responsibility I owe the people I love, but the rest of the world, and as a spiritual responsibility. I’m not as great as all that, but I’m getting there.

The second is because once you walk on the path towards really believing in Jesus, God kind of SHOVES you out of the airplane. So you learn to trust or flail really fast.

How do I learn to master the hard things?

This is the next issue I have to tackle: mastering challenging so I can train up my kids. And maybe, it’s something we can pursue together. Maybe I’ll find a project the girls and I can tackle together and work with them through the pain to get it done.

Where do I go from here? How does a grown up overcome a lifelong aversion to doing hard things? And how do I go from that to setting an example very soon as I’m painfully aware that Amelia is 3 years old than my swim failure and Zoe is the same exact age?

Naturally, I started with Google and got about a million hits on teaching kids grit, but only a few for adults. The first one discussed a mindset of “not being good at it.” That’s not true here; I know I’m a gifted fiction writer. Moving on to article #2, “Got Grit? Start with Mindset,” I got many more clues:

• I’m pretty dang sure I have that fixed mindset of effort being a bad thing. Where did I get that? I fit the description, though.
• Short term tasks – and reward – can help. This is actually hand-in-hand with the efforts for my blog and is exactly what I planning to do anyway.

How have you overcome difficult challenges in your life? How do you share that knowledge with your kids?