Teaching Children to Be Persistent

This post will deal with the task of teaching children to stick to a task in the midst of trials and tribulations.  I have written a post on diligence.  Persistence deals with sticking to something when the going gets tough.  Diligence, on the other hand, deals more with simply sticking with something until it is finished.

The "Fragile" Generation
Children in today's society have been referred to as the "fragile" generation.  When they meet with the least little resistance, they crumple and give up entirely.  What has caused this upcoming generation to be so fragile?  There are many related culprits.  However, the main one has to be our overemphasis on positive reinforcement.  We are raising a generation that does not know how to deal with negative reinforcement.  Is that such a bad thing?  Absolutely.  Negative reinforcement just happens to be built into our universe.  We cannot escape it.  When you jump off a building, you will go down whether or not that happens to be what you intended.  It is called gravity.  When you choose to ignore the laws of nature, you will become acquainted with negative consequences.  Maybe that is why for thousands of years, parents have used negative reinforcement to train their children.  It has only been in the last 50 years or so that childhood "experts" have decided that children must be trained solely using positive reinforcement.  I would say their grand experiment has been been an utter failure.  Children must have positive and negative reinforcement in equal measures to develop into functioning adults.

The Idealist View of Childhood
Another culprit on the list of causes involves our society's idealistic views of childhood.  According to the "experts" children should be allowed to do what they want without having restraints put on them.  Instead of being told what to do, children should have choices and be the one in charge of their activities.  Childhood should be a magical time full of wonderful ooey gooey moments without any thoughts of the bad realities of our world.  All of this sounds so wonderful in theory, however, it does not produce functioning adults.  What it does produce are young adults with no sense of reality that come into adulthood in need of almost constant counseling in order to deal with the realities of the adult world.  That might be wonderful job security for the counseling profession, but it does not bode well for our society at large.  We know we are in trouble when a college student cannot deal with getting a "C" that they fully deserve without going into the depths of despair so hard they require medication.  I remember getting my first "C" in college.  It really bummed me out, but I also had to admit that I put almost no effort in that class and fully deserved what I got.  Therein lies the huge difference.  I was used to negative reinforcement and therefore, put the blame where it squarely belonged - on me.

A Society of Victims
That brings me to the last major culprit - our society of victims.  In this society it is always someone else's fault.  Children blame their parents.  Parents blame their children.  Students blame the teachers and on and on and on.  People do not take responsibility for their own actions, which is one of the most basic components of persistence.  In order to be able to persevere, a person has to understand his/her part in the failure.  A person cannot fix something unless he/she knows what is broken.  That takes a great deal of self-awareness and self-acceptance not self-esteem.  Self-esteem and our overemphasis of it has caused our society of victims.  We feel good about ourselves without understanding ourselves at all.  That has to be the most useless trait in a person.  When we take a honest evaluation of ourselves, we put ourselves in a place where we can change.  Changing for the better produces a self-esteem that actually does good rather than harm.  The self esteem that has no bearing on positive results makes children believe that the world owes them.  That produces a society of victims.  Victims crumple to the ground and do not persevere through adversity.

The Need for Negative Reinforcement
Let us take this into the early childhood realm.  If we want persistent children instead of fragile children, we must use negative reinforcement in equal measures with our positive reinforcement.  Children cannot gain experience in dealing with the negative aspects of our world if we constantly protect them from it.  I wish that were not the case, but wishing does not change that we live in a fallen world and all the wishing in the world will not make it a utopia.  If you want to think deeply about a philosophical topic, every time a society has tried to build a utopia on this earth, they have caused the opposite to evolve instead.  Guess what?  The same is true about trying to build a perfect childhood.  You end up creating people who have great difficulty growing up.  We must let children have struggles and trials and tribulations.  If we do not, we deprive them of the ability to deal with the life in which they were born.  Persistence comes from working through difficulties.  We cannot attain this particular character trait without problems.  Let children work through their own problems as much as possible.  Above all, please restrain yourself from saving a child from their consequences.  Those consequences are vitally important to that child's development.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!! Check out Natalie's children's books at:  https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457