General Life and Parenting Books
Grit by Angela Duckworth
I've been reading the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, and it's given me food for thought as we start our homeschool year. According to the book, the method of parenting most likely to result in children who hit normal benchmarks for success (community involvement, college success, etc) is both supportive and demanding, meaning that children get a healthy mix of challenges and support. I think that the way we put this into practice will vary from family to family, and from child to child, but in my own life I can see a few practices that have helped develop grit in our children.
1. Regular chores- Having children contribute in some child appropriate way to the running of the home, is both developmentally beneficial and self esteem building.
2. Community involvement-Whether it's merely hosting people for dinner, volunteering as a Sunday School helper, caring for a younger sibling, or helping build a home for the poor, helping others is a beautiful way to develop grit and compassion.
3. Engaging in extracurriculars- Music lessons, dance, sports, or art classes all give our children the opportunity to learn something new, and to have fun in the process. We give our young children few extra activities, and lots of opportunities to dabble and to switch gears, but research noted in the book Grit, shows that high school students who engage in the same extra-curricular over multiple seasons, are some of the highest achievers over the long term. This means that by the time our children reach the high school years, our hope is that they will start to narrow down a field of interest and put effort into pursuing their passions. At this point, we also start expecting them to work to pay for some of those pursuits.
There are so many ways that families navigate parenting, but I appreciate a well written and researched book like Grit, and the opportunity it gives me to evaluate what we are doing in light of the research. There are many other facets to family life, and I would personally rate love and a healthy spiritual life much higher than grit, but there are also many facets to healthy and happy people and I'm happy to keep learning as we undertake this big job of raising children.