How to raise kids who don’t give up

Getting my kids ready for school and out the door in the morning always feels like chaos. You’d think that since we do this every day, I wouldn’t have to remind them to put on socks, brush their teeth, and eat some breakfast. Yet, without fail, every day, they need reminders.

The most frustrating part is usually when we have to get out the door. I’ve never seen children move as slowly as they do when we need to get somewhere on time. Because of the hustle and bustle, we avoided getting shoes with laces that they have to tie and add yet another several minutes to our day. When we finally broke down and got them sneakers with laces, I would often interrupt their efforts to tie their own shoes to just do it myself so we could get going.

This didn’t turn out well for me in the long run. What I ended up with was two kids who refused to tie their own shoes.

I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation where we are watching our kids try to do something, and we just get frustrated and do it for them. I do it all the time. But research suggests that this behavior may be setting up our kids to give up easily. One study, for example, had parents and children engage in a puzzle task and then had parents rate how persistent their kids were. Parents who tended to take over and do the puzzle for their kids had kids who were rated as less persistent (Leonard et al., 2021).

In a follow-up study, the same researchers found that interfering and doing kids’ tasks for them also lessens children’s persistence on other unrelated tasks. In this study, 4- to 5-year-old children were again presented with really difficult puzzles. But this time, for some of the children, an experimenter stepped in to help solve the puzzles by asking questions and giving hints, but not by doing the puzzles for the children or even touching any of the pieces. For other kids, instead of helping, the experimenter just took over, saying “This is hard, why don’t I just do it for you?”

After finishing the puzzles, the kids were presented with a wooden box with a toy inside to play with. Unbeknownst to the kids, the box was actually glued shut and impossible to open, but the experimenter challenged them to get the toy out, nonetheless.

The kids who had the experimenter who did the puzzle for them persisted less in opening the wooden box than the kids who simply had the experimenter who helped them (Leonard et al., 2021). This suggests that doing something for your kid won’t just make them give up on that task, it will also make them less persistent in general—on tasks that are completely unrelated to the one you interfered with!

So interfering makes your kid less persistent. How do we make them more persistent?

Research suggests that watching you put effort in might help. In a study by the same research group, preschool-aged children were given the same impossible box used in the previous study and watched the experimenter (1) succeed at opening it without effort, (2) succeed at opening it with lots of effort, (3) give up without effort, (4) or give up after a lot of effort.

Kids persisted the most when the adult tried hard and succeeded; however, they were least likely to persist when the adult failed, regardless of whether they modeled effort or not (Leonard et al., 2020). Further research shows that this is even true of babies (Leonard et al., 2017). Altogether, this work demonstrates that when kids know that something is going to be hard, they persist more when they see an adult try hard and succeed. But when they see adults fail without trying, kids don’t try at all.

Research also shows that kids persist more when adults practice what they preach. In other words, when adults say something like, “You know what the best thing to do when something is tricky? To try your best and not give up.” In a follow-up study where children heard adults talk about the importance of persistence and then went on to succeed on the box task, children persisted the most (Leonard et al., 2020).

The moral of the story is, if you want to raise kids who do things for themselves, first you need to let them do things for themselves, even if it’s painful to watch. By not letting my kids tie their own shoes, it gave them the message that they couldn’t (and shouldn’t) do it on their own, so they stopped trying. On top of that, I might have also given them the message that I don’t think they can do anything on their own, leading them to give up more easily on other tasks, especially if they think I’ll jump in and do it for them.

Besides letting them do things on their own, modeling persistence is important as well. Indeed, when kids see you persist and succeed, or talk about how not giving up is important, they will follow suit, even if it takes them forever.