The Power of Perseverance

Ask any successful person and they’ll tell you how much of what they’ve achieved came down to simply sticking to their task in spite of the obstacles.  Whether it be in pursuit of academic success or sporting glory, most parents would agree perseverance is one of the more important qualities for kids to have; but how to acquire it is not so clear cut.  How do we teach our kids not to give up?  Is it even something which can be learnt or are some people just born with it?  And, if it can be taught, how do we do so?

Where does perseverance come from?

How much of what we are is our nature versus nurture is an old and endless debate and it may actually be beside the point.  In the end, it’s not so much where perseverance comes from, but where your child believes it comes from. 

One of the key beliefs of motivated and successful children is that they feel that they are in control of whether they succeed or fail.  They rarely credit ‘natural’ ability, luck and outside influences with much of a role in their success or failure.  Rather they tend to believe that they can overcome obstacles with enough effort and persistence.  In a sense, perseverance is a state of mind that can be attained.  

Perseverance will undoubtedly come more easily to some children than others but there’s no doubt that everyone is born with more than enough.   If you think of how many bruising falls the average infant has in learning to walk it’s clear that we’re all allocated a healthy dose of perseverance at birth.

The natural

But what about talent, surely that has to count for something?  Possibly a lot less than you might think.  Although our culture tends to revere the ‘natural’, born with gifts that always shine through, there is less truth in this myth than many people believe.

Studies of world class performers in a wide range of fields from music to medicine tend to show very few signs in childhood that would point to their later degree of success.  What they do have in common is intensive practice, devoted teachers and strong family support.  Talent will undoubtedly play an important role, but perhaps it’s more useful to think of that role as providing the fuel for motivation.  A child is more inclined to keep up with difficult tasks if they have an aptitude for them.  

Perseverance at Play

Developing perseverance can start at a very early age.  For instance, giving younger children too many toys to play with is a good way to teach them to drift from activity to activity in search of new stimulation.  A little boredom can be beneficial; it helps develop imagination and persistence.
For older kids, distractions will often come in electronic form.  Too much TV and video game time can be the enemy of sustained attention spans.  On the other hand, kids who learn a musical instrument or a second language are building a great framework for lifelong patience and dedication.  On the sporting field, individual endurance sports in particular are associated with persistent personalities.

The myth of multitasking

While internet savvy kids might think they’re good at multitasking, the reality is that there’s no such thing as multitasking.  The brain can only properly focus on one thing at a time and anything additional is mere distraction.  Attempting to do two things at once affects learning and mental abilities quite sharply in both the short and long term.

To quit or not to quit?

Kids try lots of different activities on for size; it’s the nature of childhood.  Many won’t stick and some may go on to be lifelong interests but most kids will have a natural tendency to just want to do what they find fun.  There’s a constant balancing act between the huge range of extracurricular choices available and the need to stick to the few things that will give your kids the most benefit and happiness.  At some point, every parent will be confronted by the problem of when it’s appropriate to allow a child to give up on an activity.
Everyone will have their own opinions on this one.  Somewhere there is a spectrum with an abusive ‘tennis parent’ on one end and the laid back parent who does their kids a disservice by never pushing them at all on the other.

While there are no hard and fast rules, here are some general guidelines suggested by psychologists and education experts.

• If you take up a team sport or activity, you commit to your teammates for the season.
• Set an example.  Tales of your past glories are likely to be far less motivating to your kids than watching you participate in something yourself. Remember that sport and after school activity is not child minding.
• Get involved and show some interest. But not too involved.  This is their youth after all, not yours.
• Don’t try to take on too much at once.  Kids also need time to be bored and make up their own activities.
• Not being a ‘natural’ is not necessarily a good reason to quit.  Being constantly miserable probably is.
• Try to develop motivation that isn’t based entirely on performance.
• There will come a time when they chose to quit.  As long as they’ve given it a fair shot and have good reasons for it, let them.  Learning to make a choice is all part of the game.

The pitfalls of praise

When your child excels at something do you tend to praise their results, their talent or their effort?  The difference might seem subtle but the effect can be profound.  Shocking as it sometimes seems, kids believe what their parents tell them.  Up until around mid primary years they tend to believe almost unquestioningly, but even after that your words will have a profound effect.It stands to reason then that praise should be the best way to encourage perseverance.  Not quite; it may actually depend on what you praise.  Contrary to popular wisdom, behavioural studies have repeatedly shown that praising children for their talent can actually have a negative effect on their effort, performance and enjoyment of learning.

That is, while being told they are smart or gifted may give children a temporary boost to their self esteem it also seems to make them less willing to try (and potentially fail) and, if they do fail, more likely to regard that failure as a fundamental flaw in themselves rather than an obstacle to be overcome.  Praising for effort, on the other hand, helps kids to attain that state of mind where they believe they have control over their success.  

It also seems that children who focus on how ‘smart’ or ‘talented’ they are tend to become overly concerned with the measures of performance and the status it gives them.  They will actively avoid opportunities to learn if they think there is a good chance of damaging their reputation by hurting their performance.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t tell our kids that they are smart or praise them for a good report card, but try to focus more on good effort and self motivation.  

The subtle art of bribery

Let’s be honest, children are almost infinitely corruptible.  When all else fails, many parents turn to some judicious bribery to get them to persevere.  Whether the ‘incentive’ of choice is a new toy, TV or computer time or cold, hard cash the real question is “does it actually work”?  Well, yes and no.  

There’s an aversion among many education experts to using bribery to achieve results.  They cite research which shows that, while it may give a temporary boost, in the long term it does more harm than good.  

Harvard economist Roland Fryer explored the idea in a controversial study by giving cash rewards for academic results in some of America’s toughest neighbourhoods.  What he found was that incentives didn’t tend to work when they’re given as a pure reward for results.  On the other hand, when the actions which tend to be a prerequisite for success were incentivised, like rewards for reading books or completing homework and behaving in class, the students got more noticeable and lasting benefit.  

Part of the problem is that kids don’t always know how to succeed at something even when they really want to.  Use the same principles for more tangible rewards that you use for praise: reward them for actions and behaviour and the results will take care of themselves.  

“I don’t have a brain for maths”

If Western culture tends to have too much reverence for natural talent, what would an education system which tried to emphasise effort over ability look like?  Probably quite like the Japanese and Chinese primary systems.

The diligence of Asian students is a stereotype with a strong grain of truth to it, particularly in areas which are easily compared such as maths and science, as psychologists Harold Stigler and James Stevenson found with their legendary comparative study of Asian and American schools.  But how do they achieve it? 

Stigler and Stevenson found that, when questioned, American students rated their overall ability much more highly than their Asian counterparts despite the fact that standardised testing showed the opposite was true.  This tallies with the theory that the wrong kind of praise may not help performance.  In the Asian schools, self esteem was ‘task specific’.  Kids weren’t given an artificially inflated or overly general sense of self worth but instead felt rewarded for achieving steps along the path.  Also Asian schools tended to instil the belief that performance is very closely linked to effort rather than innate ability.

This may help to understand the Asian domination of mathematics in international testing.  It’s a field which rewards patient application to a task.  How many of us have made the claim that we ‘just aren’t naturally good at maths?  This is a concept somewhat alien to Asian educators, who follow the philosophy that anyone can get a math education with the right teaching and the right degree of effort.

Some education experts point to the importance of giving students problems without solutions, or difficult problems that require lengthy working to reach a solution.  It’s easy to forget that learning is as much about a process as it is achieving a certain result.  

Is perseverance enough?

The ’10 000 hour rule’ is often cited and almost as regularly misunderstood.  The popular version states that, to achieve mastery of an activity (playing an instrument, brain surgery, being a carpenter) around 10 000 hours of practice is required.  Think of that as 20 hours a week for 10 years, or a full time job for five years.  If that seems like a lot, consider that the average Australian child has logged that much TV time by somewhere in their mid-teens. 

The rule is based on research which found that violinists could quite accurately be categorised into exceptional, good and mediocre based purely on how much practice time they’d logged over the past 10 years, with 10 000 hours appearing to be the magic number that separated the elite from the rest.  Further studies in different fields appeared to confirm the rule.

The truth is a little more complex than just showing up and logging the time of course.  Although that might be perseverance of a kind, it’s not the right kind.  Not just any practice will do, it has to be deliberate, focused and closely supervised by an expert teacher who gives regular feedback.  It must be progressed at a challenging but achievable rate and it must concentrate on weaknesses and not just repeat the things which we find fun and easy.  This is the reason that most people who do something as a hobby will never achieve mastery no matter how long they try; instead of progressing and improving, they are happy to do what amounts to the same hour 10 000 times.

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