‘Great parenting’ often comes from this simple habit
If you want to raise successful and resilient children, help them find activities they really love, says psychologist Angela Duckworth.
Instead of pushing your kids to try a particular sport or instrument, spend time introducing them to a variety of extracurricular activities and note what they spend most time thinking about, Duckworth said Oct. 13. section “The Mel Robbins Podcast.”
Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies mental and emotional “grit,” said getting kids involved in activities they’re interested in can help them find their passions, hobbies and perhaps even future careers.
“I think great parenting is, in large part, noticing what your teenagers are thinking,” Duckworth said, adding, “When we start noticing where our minds live, when we start noticing what spontaneously captures our attention, that’s the beginning of discovering interests that can make us kind of geniuses at what we’re doing.”
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Duckworth said that children who learn to stick to their interests even on difficult days can improve their self-confidence and resilience, and these two characteristics can help them achieve success later in life. Your child may pick a sport or hobby and decide he doesn’t enjoy it, but it’s important for him to finish that sport season or continue rehearsing that musical instrument through his next concert, she added.
Duckworth touched on her own experience as a parent. Her child, Lucy, “hated doing homework and practicing the viola,” but when Duckworth looked at Lucy’s iPad, she noticed “all the tabs were open to cooking videos.” Duckworth also noted that she saw Lucy reading their family’s cookbooks.
Lucy eventually “volunteered to wash dishes in restaurants, [then] Duckworth told CNBC Make It that she was allowed to assist the pastry chef. “From 8th grade until I think 12th grade, she was baking every weekend and every summer… Her lifelong interest in food and cooking is still evident.”
Not every interest needs to be a full-fledged career. If you only pursue what you enjoy doing, you may not gain much. Money, bestselling author and New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway told CNBC Make It in 2019.
“Don’t follow your passion,” Galloway said. Instead, his advice was: “Find out what you’re good at and then invest 10,000 hours in it and become great at it.”
According to Duckworth, interest is just one of them. four building blocks On the path to building grit, research shows that it is the most common trait among successful people in all fields. Others include hard work, purpose, and hope.
“Anyone who excels at what they do has a curiosity in their mind, right? Their mind comes to that and wants to stay there,” Duckworth said. “You’re a genius when you start talking about something you really care about [on it]Because that’s where your mind lives.”
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