Encourage Experimentation: Branch to explore interests or try new skills without fear of failure. Abandon a branch if it doesn't work.
Merge conflicts: calmly analyze, resolve, and move forwards, just like merge conflicts in git.
Commit early; commit often: break challenges down into smaller parts, just like with git.
Accountability: Pull Requests and code review but in real life.
Autonomy: Fork the project and make it your own.
Working with others: be open source.
Acknowledge Mistakes: git keeps a history of changes, so that we can look back and then improve on what didn't work.
Ahhh "Wise" parenting. No bias there, ha ha.
My wife and I no doubt were in the upper left quadrant, permissive parents. For better or worse, we weren't going to have any of the demanding side of the spectrum. Could we have been more demanding "for their own good"? Perhaps. But I think neither my wife nor I were raised with demanding parents and we turned out fine — so we went with that. I think for both of us it was the "supportive" axis we felt lacking in our own childhoods so that is where we doubled-down.
When my kids grow up though, if they have kids of their own, and the pendulum swings the other way, I will not be surprised. Life seems to be like that. When I was raising the girls I tried not to overthink it.
Now we seem to have a whole generation of over-supportive ‘helicopter parenting’, and sometimes I worry I was too supportive in the sense that my kids didn’t get the free-roam exploration that I had as a child. Screens and games and internet are a non-trivial factor in there too.
Bias indeed! The article’s perhaps over-confident in its simplistic prescription. Parenting doesn’t fit onto a 2d axis, and parental demands and support vary wildly across activity and time and financial availability and probably a long list of other things. None of the “studies” the article mentions (without citing!) are showing parenting strategy outcomes even according to the article. Grit isn’t something you can actually reduce to 4 words, it depends on past successes and belief in one’s self and sometimes the ability to discount the social judgements of others. For that matter, knowing when to quit is an important skill that needs to sit right beside grit.
One of the few things I actually learned as a parent is that almost all parenting advice is completely bad, and that goes double for me when giving parenting advice. My wife and I shared things we knew about kids only to find out we were wrong. What works on one kid doesn’t work on the next… in the same family with the same parents. My wife eventually came up with our parenting prime directive, and it was simply to always show the kids love and talk to them a lot about their lives. It seems like that was helpful, but we’ll see in 20 years…
In general, one has to be careful using conceptual advice for things like parenting- as it can lead to justifying some pretty awful, even abusive behaviors. I’ve seen adults angrily or even violently forcing a child to do “power poses” so they would “grow up successful” - a fad idea based on discredited research that seems ridiculous and clearly fails the common sense test. Said child is now an adult and does not speak to that parent anymore.
Why not just use this directly? It seems better than redefining an existing word.
Or, if you're a country rebel, just name them contrary to their most probable gender identity. /s
- Openness to Experience (curiosity, creativity, willingness to try new things)
- Conscientiousness (organization, dependability, discipline)
- Extraversion (sociability, energy, positive emotions)
- Agreeableness (compassion, cooperation, trust)
- Neuroticism (emotional stability, anxiety, moodiness)
That's basically what it is, because the dimensions were found through statistical analysis of personality surveys. They lack conceptual neatness because they weren't constructed in "concept space", unlike a lot of models in psychology. The thing is, this model has generally held up pretty well to a wide variety of empirical tests (also unlike a lot of models in psychology). I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's the leading model of personality for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scien...
After studying more than 2,000 pairs of twins and administering the Grit Scale, researchers concluded that the hereditability of the two factors contributing to Grit is as follows: Perseverance: 37% Passion: 20%
This idea of quantifying "grit" into separate components with ratios as if it's a freaking cookbook is patently absurd.
I'll throw my general advice into the mix - raising a dog can also help teach young children responsibility, follow-through, and this ephemeral quality "grit".
That said, I’m a fairly gritty person. I run everyday outside, whether its raining, snowing or the outside temps are in excess of 110F(43C). I’ve gone on many long alpine backpacking trips, thin air, wet weather, blustery passes, crossing ice fields. I usually camp with just a tarp if I can get away with it. Type II fun is my fav, most people I know think of me as exceptionally gritty.
I’ve worked grueling hours on businesses I had interest in, doing heavy manual labor for 10 hours before moving on to office work, spending my weekends on maintenance and catching up on paperwork. Doing disgusting work no one wants to do is kinda my specialty.
That test put me in the bottom 10% of US adults. I just answered it honestly, not aspirationally.
That said, there are some giant red flags for this not being real science. Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset (linked at the bottom) famously doesn't replicate and is considered, in some cognitive psychology circles, like their version of homeopathy. A TED talk, a popular science book but no peer-reviewed paper behind it is a common sign of a particular kind of work.
For someone interested in digging deeper on a similar topic, I recently read the Psmiths' review of "Math from Three to Seven" https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven... about Alexander Zvonkin's attempt to teach children more advanced math. He got a group of children together, devised puzzles and experiments and games, and tutors and mentors a group of children for four years and it goes really well and he describes his methods and approaches in detail.
It's all both demanding and supportive, and works wonderfully. Has he found THE METHOD? The one in the appendix on "How to teach this stuff" in Erdos' vision of God's book ?
The punchline is that he tries it again with a different group of kids, and it completely fails.
The reviewers sum it up with a reflection on their own experience:
> This is just an extreme version of the universal experience of being the parent of more than one child.
Have a healthy distrust for any book that comes even close to suggesting a way that works for all children, everywhere.