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This episode is brought to you by the university of Louisville.
Greg Wright:
Hi, this is Greg Wright. Welcome to Social Work Talks. What is grit and why is it important for children to develop it? And how can parents and social workers help them do this? Today, we are talking about grit with NASW member, Elisa Nebolsine. Elisa is author of the book, The Grit Workbook For Kids. Welcome to Social Work Talks.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Thank you, Greg. It's great to be here.
Greg Wright:
So I said your name right, right?
Elisa Nebolsine:
You said it perfectly. It was lovely.
Greg Wright:
Thank you. Thank you. Exactly what is grit and why do our children need it?
Elisa Nebolsine:
So grit is the ability to stick with something and keep going, even when it's hard, even when it's uncomfortable. So it's having that ability and that choice to persevere with something, even though you may want to give up and you may not want to keep going, but knowing that you have that skill, that ability. And it matters for kids because so often kids feel like if they start to feel uncomfortable that they have to quit, that they don't have the ability to keep going, that they can't tolerate moving forward, and that's not accurate. We know that grit is a skill that you can learn and there's some really nice CBT ways we can teach that. And kids who have a sense of grit tend to feel like they can do more things and therefore get a better sense of competency about their own abilities.
Greg Wright:
Do our children now have less of it?
Elisa Nebolsine:
No, not universally, but it does look like that's happening. It looks like we are parenting differently. And it's funny, if you look at Martin Seligman, out of University of Pennsylvania, the guru of positive psychology, one of the things he talks about in, I believe it's Learned Optimism, is in the fifties, the number one book for kids was The Little Engine That Could, it's all about that little train using positive self-talk, "I think I can. I think I can." And it really is shifted now to all about self-esteem in the children's books, that we're all about, "Oh, you're great just because you're you," and there's nothing wrong with that inherently, but we're not letting kids learn that they can persevere, that they can tolerate discomfort and that they can build their own abilities, that this is something that can be learned.
Parents, I'm a parent so I put myself in this category, it's so easy to not want your kids to feel any discomfort. It's so easy when they struggle or they fall down to kind of just want to hug them and hold them close. And again, nothing wrong with that. But then there's that next step of, "But you got to keep going." One of my daughters did horseback riding and I remember at her stable that she was riding at, when you fell off a horse, you got a cupcake. And I was like, "That is crazy." But they explained it to me that they wanted the kids to learn that this is okay, this is part of it, and you get rewarded for keeping going. And I thought that was a great lesson, that are going to happen, but you have the abilities to keep going and we want you to, we want to encourage your independence, your stamina and your perseverance.
Greg Wright:
When I was a child, we actually had a lot more free time. Our parents were like, "Look, it's summertime, go out, play. I'll see you when all of the streetlights are on." I've actually raised two of them myself, and they had soccer, dance, they had lacrosse here. I mean, it was a much more structured childhood. Is that a good thing or is it preventing them from gaining grit?
Elisa Nebolsine:
What are your memories like from being a child and just being kicked out of the house to run around?
Greg Wright:
I had a ball. I mean, I explored, I built forts, I fell down, I busted my knee, I got up and I kept on at it. I loved it.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Yeah. And it's funny, because if you talk to people who had a childhood where they had that, "Just get out of the house," or even after school, "Go play, come home when it's dark." Universally, I hear that that's a great experience, that that was really awesome. And I think we all have experiences from childhood, when we were playing with friends, when we were off in a group somewhere, that the adults in our life never knew anything about. We have these private experiences and when you fall down and you're just with kids, you got a little more incentive to keep going rather than to run and get the band-aid and have it be a whole thing. It's like we push ourselves a little more. So it's a difficult question because I think there are a lot of great things about organized sports, but that idea of having free play and even having boredom is so crucial to development. Boredom in and of itself is a form of discomfort.
And to be able to tolerate that kind of boredom and discomfort and find ways to connect with other people, keep yourself busy, explore, invent, create, be uncomfortable. Those are all really important skills and tasks of childhood. And I think if we over-schedule kids, we miss out on a lot of that. It's also so much trickier in so many ways because some kids can't go outside and play, it's not safe, because screens are so readily available and have become this kind of babysitter that we all have used in ways we probably wish we hadn't, but there are just so many things that make that harder. But I think that's a crucial part of childhood, is independent play, mastery of skills, peer relationships, and peer development and grit, and building that grit.
Greg Wright:
If I'm a parent, how can I help my child develop this?
Elisa Nebolsine:
There are skills that we know, and I am a cognitive behavioral person, so I use CBT skills. So it's looking at, well what are the things that kids who are gritty can do? And one thing they can do is they can recognize how they feel. They can figure out what's going on with how they feel. They can recognize that feelings are temporary, that just because something feels terrible, it's not going to feel that way forever, that's going to pass and that they can persevere through that, they can push through that. Discomfort is annoying, it gets in the way, but you can keep going, and that it feels really good. For parents, I always like to look at the narratives of the child and what their past experiences with grit have been. It's funny, it's so different for each kid, but you can talk to people and kids will be like, "Well, it was the time that often I fell down off my bike and I got back up and I kept going."
Or, "It's the time that I studied really hard for a test that I thought that I wasn't going to put any effort into, and I actually found I did well." You find these narratives, and those narratives, the personal narrative of the child, becomes the best tool to help build up their future grit, so they can rely on that. And then there are lots of ways we can learn about just the basics of how our brain work and how it tries to trick us a bit into being more reactive, versus more thoughtful and how we can push through that and keep moving.
Greg Wright:
If I want to push things and actually keep moving, how is that done?
Elisa Nebolsine:
Okay. So if you're in a state of arousal, if you're really stressed, if you're really angry, if you're really anxious, then absolutely, we would probably use some kind of self calming technique. But the other thing we can do, if we're not in that state, that high arousal, that high stress, that high discomfort, it's more mild, that we can use really nice, positive self-talks, not unlike The Little Engine That Could,. one of the exercises I have in the book that I really love is based on bender, that kind of modeling positive self-talk. So what it involves is a little girl who is struggling with... I can't remember what the thing she was struggling with was, but she started talking to herself differently and coaching herself. And she went even further to imagine herself as a coach, in that outfit, with the little whistle, kind of ready to go, she's got her clipboard.
And then we took the research out of University of Michigan or Michigan State, of the sports psychologist, who found that when we use self-talk, if we use our own name when we're talking to ourselves, it's even more effective. So she's this little coach, she's got her clipboard, she's got her whistle, she's using her own name. And she's saying, if it's me, she's saying, "Elisa, you can do this." And then she's like, "Well, wait, that's not helpful enough." So she thinks about, well, what would a coach really say? A coach would be really positive and a coach would be really instructive. So it would be, "Elisa, this is hard right now, but remember the time when you did blah, blah, blah, you can do this now by remembering that and drawing on that strength," or "Elisa, you have the ability to do hard things. You've done it before. This is temporary. It's going to end and you'll get through it." Or, "How will you feel when you're done?" And again, using your name in there and that imagery, makes it a lot more fun and a lot more powerful.
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Greg Wright:
Elisa, what are things that a parent does that stymies that growth of grit?
Elisa Nebolsine:
I think parents are so well-intentioned, and I teach graduate school and I was just talking to my students, we were talking about parents and they were so frustrated with some of the parents they were working with, and the thing I always think of with parents is, I used to get so frustrated when I was really young, too, but as a parent and when I'm older, I realize, oh my gosh, we are all just doing the best we can. So we've got to respect the parents, because parents are operating from a place of love, but there are some things that, unintentionally, parents do that make it a little bit harder to build grit.
And those things tend to be around not letting their kid be bored, not letting their kid be uncomfortable, quitting the soccer team after one difficult practice or getting out of things that they really could do and probably would feel good if they went through, or feeling like if they are bored and don't have something to do, that they will fill that void right away, that they will entertain, that there will be a lacrosse practice right after the soccer practice, right after the music lesson, that there's always something to keep them busy and entertained.
We really want a little more space in there, we really want allowing independence and self-discovery and discomfort, so that kids can build up those skills. So I think that's how parents do it unintentionally, just not giving enough space to the kid to be in the feelings, all of them, not all of them are bad, but sometimes they are bad and that's okay because we all feel bad and we need to learn that we can feel bad and get better, that's part of life
Greg Wright:
Boredom might actually be a good thing.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Yes, absolutely.
Greg Wright:
Explain that to me.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Okay. So when you were little and you were bored, before screens and all of this, what would you end up doing?
Greg Wright:
I would draw or read, I would find an activity, but also back then smartphones weren't there, so I mean, I did not have that then.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Right. Right. And imagine if you did? Imagine if you had an iPad, that you were a little bit bored and you knew that you could just touch the screen and you could learn all about the social life of beavers, or some crazy facts about something really random. Right?
Greg Wright:
Yeah.
Elisa Nebolsine:
I was just watching that with my son. Right? And you would turn to that, we all would, because we've now got these tools that in a second take away that boredom and it moves us away from what you were talking about, where you would read, or you would draw, or maybe you would go outside and explore. I mean, I can remember as a kid building little moss houses out of the twigs and moss that grew in the yard, and putting flowers on it. It's much more possible to do those kinds of things when we don't have the immediate gratification of all of those screens there.
And boredom, I think somebody said necessity is the mother of invention, when we're bored, we actually tend to explore a lot more and learn a lot more. But parents, as a parent I can say this, it's kind of annoying when your kids are bored, right? They're kind of like, "I don't know what to do." And when we solve that for them, that's not helping them. We need them to be able to push through that and find those things, without resorting to the quick fix of the iPad or the phone.
Greg Wright:
Yeah. Yeah. So are the smartphones and the iPads and other things, are they actually preventing our children from developing grit?
Elisa Nebolsine:
Yes.
Greg Wright:
Wow.
Elisa Nebolsine:
I truly believe that. I truly believe that, because it's all reinforcement. I was just talking with a friend who's a psychiatrist about this, about Zoom school and about what are we doing to kids that they're online all the time now? The games that they play, if you get into them, you'll see, there's just constant reinforcement because that keeps you hooked on it. That's not how most of life is. I think we all know that in our work and in our lives, there are things that are monotonous, that don't give us that big dopamine burst right away, and we have to know how to deal with those. And in fact, the more we deal with that, the more creative we become, the more we explore the world around us. So I do think that all of the electronics and devices take away from grit, because they are all about reinforcing us, rather than letting us explore.
Greg Wright:
You are the author of the book, The Grit Workbook For Kids. What prompted you to write this book?
Elisa Nebolsine:
So I wrote it because of the work I do with kids. So I've been in private practice for 25 years and I've been working with kids and adolescents the whole time, doing cognitive behavioral therapy. And what I kept seeing is parents would come in with these kids, and they're like, "They won't stick with anything. They won't do anything. They don't feel like they can complete it. They're not feeling good about themselves." And it started to Dawn on me that the kids didn't really realize that they could keep going, that they could learn skills, and parents didn't realize that there were skills that can be built up to help kids learn to keep going. Angela Duckworth, the kind of mother of all things grit, talks about how talent counts once in building grit and success, but perseverance counts twice, right?
So talent counts once, perseverance counts twice, or effort, I think she uses effort. And that idea to me was so exciting, because it's not just that you have the highest IQ, so you're going to do the best, it's the people who are working hardest at something they are truly interested in that persevered to a higher degree, and that's very exciting. So if kids can learn this, we're doing a lot of preventative work for the future, it's that they are learning, "I can do hard things. I can tolerate discomfort. I have skills and tools and techniques that will help me keep going when I want to give up, and therefore I have a choice. I don't have to quit when I'm uncomfortable. I know what I can do to keep going." To me, that's enormously exciting.
Greg Wright:
What does exercise have to do with grit?
Elisa Nebolsine:
John Ratey, who's done so much great work on kids and exercise, and what we've seen in the literature around anxiety and depression and even attention issues, is that exercise has a huge preventive factor. I would say, at this moment in time, that is even more true because kids are so much more sedentary with online schools, so many kids are just kind of stuck at home right now. But what we know is that your brain will function better when you exercise, you will be more flexible in your thinking. You will see new solutions to problems that you might not have seen before. And they did that even with schools where they were doing exercise programs, and I think this is where Dr. Ratey's research started, they were doing exercise programs before school, and they were seeing that the kids were performing higher on cognitive tasks at school.
And so that flexibility that you need for grit comes up, academic success is higher when you're exercising and that tends to make you feel better and more competent, and when you feel better and more competent, you tend to be more able to tolerate the discomfort that you need for grit. So it all kind of leads into each other. But exercise, I talk about being able to see clearly, so you have to have enough sleep, you have to have enough exercise and you have to eat well to really master all these grit skills, and just to develop in the way you need to, as a child. One of the things that's become really clear is that those three things, without those, we're really in trouble. It's hard to build up grit, it's hard to build up a lot of things if kids aren't sleeping, exercising, and eating well, those are just crucial needs of childhood.
Greg Wright:
You are a social worker, obviously, are you hoping that other social workers are using this in their practices?
Elisa Nebolsine:
Oh, yes, I would love that. That would be so cool if they were using it. I think it's really set up to be used in practice. It's written for kids and parents, but it's all the exercises that I, as a clinician, use in my practice. And I've talked to some friends who, maybe they're just being nice, but they've told me they'd been able to use it in practice. There are tools like the feelings thermometer or the grit thermometer that let you track things, printouts that are very similar to what, in cognitive behavioral therapy, we call a daily thought record. So you're getting information and the kids learning to record their thoughts and how that relates to their feelings and how that relates to their behaviors.
There are a lot of different tools that are very practical, that are in the book. And there are also a lot of illustrations explaining the brain through a dog that is maybe a golden retriever and an owl, using illustrations to break down some complex ideas and try and make them a little more simple, but I do hope that social workers can use this in their practice. It was written for them, for us.
Greg Wright:
It was a wonderful conversation.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Thank you.
Greg Wright:
And I wish you well with your book. Thank you.
Elisa Nebolsine:
Thanks, Greg. I really appreciate it.
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