​​Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
​
We are one nation -- and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

​​Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now

We are one nation -- and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

We all know that confusion doesn’t feel good. Because it seems like an obstacle to learning, we try to arrange educational experiences and training sessions so that learners will encounter as little confusion as possible. But as is so often the case when it comes to learning, our intuitions here are exactly wrong. Scientists have been building a body of evidence over the past few years demonstrating that confusion can lead us to learn more efficiently, more deeply, more lastingly—as long as it’s properly managed.

First, not knowing the single correct way to resolve a problem allows us to explore a wide variety of potential explanations, thereby giving us a deeper and broader sense of the issues involved. Second, the feeling of being confused, of not knowing what’s up, creates a powerful drive to figure it out. We’re motivated to look more deeply, search more vigorously for a solution, and in so doing we see and understand things we would not have, had we simply been handed the answer at the outset.

When we use confusion strategically, students will be frustrated. Some of them will get angry. But they will also be engaged. More importantly, they will be empowered. They will slow down and think deeper about the content. The end result is a more humble, nuanced, and ultimately deeper learning of the subject.

First and foremost, there's no either/or trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting.  It's a common misunderstanding to think of "tough love" as a carefully struck balance between affection and respect on the one hand, and firmly enforced expectations on the other.  In actuality, there's no reason you can't do both. There is something to be said for Angela Duckworth's opinion, based on her grit research and displayed in her best-selling book, Grit:  the Power of Passion and Perseverance.  I say that because she agrees with my common sense approach to using balance​ in our methods.

If you want to bring forth grit in your child, first ask how much passion and perseverance you have for your own life goals. Then ask yourself how likely it is that your approach to parenting encourages your child to emulate you.  If the answer to the first question is "a great deal," and your answer to the second is "very likely," you're already parenting for grit.

Not only this, but in a separate chapter, the author describes the research we have about the effect of "extra-curricular" activities.  Kids - who participate in organized, outside-of-school activities, with adults in charge, and endure for multiple years while making progress - tend to be more gritty than their less active counterparts. The bottom line of this research is this:  School's hard, but for many kids it;s not intrinsically interesting.  Texting your friends is interesting, but it's not hard.  But ballet?  Ballet can be both. The amazing part of her findings and opinion is that kids can develop their perseverance by following their passions.  They can strengthen themselves by pursuing their interests.

Notably, the particular pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school didn't matter - whether it was tennis, student government, or debate team.  The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress​.