[M]any parents, … while pushing their children to excel, inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As [Karen] Fierst put it, “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.” …
It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, … we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we know—on some level, at least—that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense. [Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, p. 84]
Of course we’d all like our children to be happy, but we also know (albeit reluctantly) that … the growth (emotional, psychological, cognitive, and spiritual) needed to make one’s way through life comes out of challenge, and challenge can bring disappointment, anger, and frustration. It would be foolish to want only “happiness” for our children. This would leave them stunted and poorly prepared for life’s inevitable difficulties. [Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, HarperCollins, 2012, p. xvi]
Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn. [M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values And Spiritual Growth, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1978, p. 16]
In a supportive and respectful family, children go about the business of forging a “sense of self” by being exposed to, and learning to manage, increasingly complex personal and interpersonal challenges. …
[I]t is critical for the adolescent to fumble with difficult tasks and choices in order to master the art of making independent, healthy, moral decisions that can be called upon in the absence of parents’ directives. We all want our children to put their best foot forward. But in childhood and adolescence, sometimes the best foot is the one that is stumbled on, providing an opportunity for the child to learn how to regain balance, and right himself. [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 8-9]
It is precisely the activities that are difficult but fun that provide the best training for a productive and personally fulfilling career. One implication for educators is that teenagers must be encouraged to see that starting any activity presents difficulties and that overcoming these will yield great dividends in experience and the development of new skills. Parents and teachers must also help ease teenagers’ transitions during the discouraging period in which the activity seems too difficult to be worth a try and before intrinsic rewards make the activity self-sustaining. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 76-77]
Experiencing high levels of challenge and skill is part of an important dynamic in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Whenever teenagers report being in high challenge, high skill situations, the quality of their experience is positive. …
Teenagers, bear in mind, usually say that they don’t like challenges, that they prefer things to be easy. Given a choice, they would usually prefer to be in the state of relaxation … Yet … despite these preferences, it is when adolescents are challenged to get the most from their skills that they truly get the most from their experiences. [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 111-112]
[I]t is not in children’s natures to find challenge stressful, as long as they are given support while facing the challenge. In fact, what children find far more stressful is the expectational vacuum created by a lack of challenge. This is the real risk for today’s children—nothing to strive for, … “nothing to believe in” … Children are natural stivers, but they need settings where they are both engaged and challenged. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 120]
[I]f you want to keep your children as safe as possible, the best thing to do is to give them experience and teach them judgment. Let them climb that tree and fall when they’re six—it will teach them important skills about risk and about being in their bodies. … Your kids need practice managing and taking nonlethal risks. After all, life isn’t exactly risk free—we take risks in love, in work, in finance all the time. Learning how to recognize and manage risk is part of growing up. Remind your children that you are not always watching them and that you cannot always keep them safe, so they will take some of that responsibility on themselves. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 100-101]
It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.
And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting)—that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? [Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Random House Canada, 2018, p. 47]
It is our own sense of superiority over our children that makes us think they are too little to solve problems or to take frustrations in their stride. This false impression must be acknowledged and replaced with trust and confidence in the child’s abilities, and with our desire to provide guidance. Certainly we don’t abandon a child to his fate, nor do we let him experience the full impact of life all at once. We use our heads! Instead of being a front behind which the child basks in innocence, we become a sieve, which filters life experience in amounts which the child can meet. We are constantly on the alert for opportunities to step back and allow our child to experience his strength. We stand ready to step in at the point at which the problem becomes too much for him. We can start this procedure at the day of his birth. Little by little, with care and guidance, we hand our child life and its problems, challenges, and satisfactions. [Rudolf Dreikurs with Vicki Soltz, Children: The Challenge, 1964, Plume / Penguin, 1990, pp. 191-192]
Shelter your children when young, but if the sheltering goes on through the child’s teens and twenties, it may keep out wisdom and growth as well as pain. …
For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD). Each life course is so unpredictable that we can never know whether a particular setback will be beneficial to a particular person in the long run. … Go ahead and erase some of those early traumas, but think twice, or await further research, before erasing the rest. [Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Basic Books, 2006, pp. 152-153]
We know that people are happiest when they’re appropriately challenged—when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach. Challenge and threat are not the same thing. People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened. [Matthew Killingsworth, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2012:88] quoted by [Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, 1990, Bantam, 2013, p. xxxviii]
[W]hen kids seem to be reluctant to try the harder test items because they’re afraid of failure … [Bill] will say, “The items you’re working on now are actually for older kids. You’ve already done the ones for kids your own age. I don’t expect you to get these, but you’ve earned the right to try them, and I’d love to see you give them a shot.” After hearing this message, 100 percent of Bill’s clients give enormous effort to solve problems they are not expected to solve. …
On the surface, it seems that statements like these communicate low expectations, right? But actually what they do is lessen the feeling of threat. We’ve known for over thirty years that the best learning environment for kids is one of high challenge, but low threat. This means that kids learn, and perform, best when they feel challenged (and not bored), and when parents and teachers express confidence in their abilities—but when it’s safe to make mistakes, to not understand at first, or to struggle a bit. When kids are fearful, the main task is to take that threat away. Communicate confidence, but not rigid requirements for performance or achievement. Emphasize both “I believe in you” and “you’re safe—you’ll be okay no matter how you do.” [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, p. 159]
Students learn and perform best in an environment that offers high challenge and low threat—when they’re given difficult material in a learning environment in which it is safe to explore, make mistakes, and take the time they need to learn and produce good work. When students know it’s all right to fail, they can take the kinds of risks that lead to real growth. …
Many of the kids we see aren’t learning in this environment. They’re learning in a brain-toxic environment, where their days consist of stress and fatigue, often accompanied by high levels of boredom. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 178]
What all too often happens [in school] is that [children] learn to see school challenges as threats, which they usually are, not just because you have a good chance of failing to accomplish them, but because if you do fail you are almost certain to be criticized, shamed, or even punished. They become so used to dodging and escaping these daily threats that they fall more and more out of the habit of challenging themselves, even outside of school. Their school-learned fears infect the whole of their life. The world, which had once seemed at least neutral if not actually friendly and tempting, begins to look more and more like an unpredictable and dangerous enemy. [John Holt, How Children Learn, 1964, Da Capo Press, 1982, p. 164]
[A] teacher, asking a student to do an easy task so that he may later do a harder one, must be careful not to be too rigid about this. If the student can’t hurt himself doing the harder task, let him try it if he wants. The most valuable and indeed essential asset the student brings to any learning task is a willingness to adventure, to take risks. Without that, he can’t learn anything. The teacher must not kill this spirit, but honor and strengthen it. Thus, one of the stupidest things the S-chools do is insist that children “comprehend” everything they read, and read only what they comprehend. People who read well do not learn to read this way. They learn by plunging into books that are “too hard” for them, enjoying what they can understand, wondering and guessing about what they do not, and not worrying when they cannot find an answer. Few children in S-chool are allowed to act or feel that way. They are made to feel that not to “comprehend” is a kind of crime. They stop thinking of themselves as adventurers and explorers, and books as exciting territory to explore. They read only what they can be sure of, which means that it is dull, which means they will stop reading as soon as they can. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 71-72]
In order to learn something, we have to shift our nervous system into states that are somewhat uncomfortable. These should be safely uncomfortable states, but they should be uncomfortable states. … Any kind of successful learning or goal pursuit is going to involve errors, failures, frustration, anxiety. All of those states of mind and body, in fact, shift the brain into modes of so-called neuroplasticity—they give it the ability to change. And that should make perfect sense, because if you can complete what you need to do easily, there is absolutely no reason for the neural circuitry in your brain or body to shift in any way. Why would it? [Andrew Huberman, “Goals Toolkit: How to Set and Achieve Your Goals,” Spotify, uploaded by Huberman Lab, 23 Aug. 2023, 10:20, https://open.spotify.com/episode/0sFYKmVjh2gEfBWfj25DNk]
Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. …
Not only must we honestly announce that pain and work are the irremovable and irreducible accompaniments of genuine learning, not only must we leave entertainment to the entertainers and make education a task and not a game, but we must have no fears about what is “over the public’s head.” Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 234-235]
If life is to continue, one cannot linger for ever in a state of oceanic tranquility. … Boeotian bliss is not conductive to invention: the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness. …
Jung thought that the achievement of optimum development of the personality was a lifetime’s task which was never completed; a journey upon which one sets out hopefully toward a destination at which one never arrives. …
“[T]he flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all … In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them.” [The Transcendent Function: Collected Works, VIII, 1969] [Anthony Storr, Solitude, Free Press / Macmillan, 1988, pp. 197-198]
Related:
– How do adult expectations influence young people?
– How can parents improve their influence on their children?