Hi, welcome back to The Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. You know, this week I was listening to the radio to a version of the TED Talks. And in those TED Talks, I just heard something that just made me stop in my tracks.
And that was a talk by a woman called Angela Lee Duckworth. And it was a talk titled, The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Now, this young woman had been a teacher in the Chicago School District.
And she was convinced that learning and success wasn't all about IQ. And she came across, she basically studied, left her teaching position, went into doctoral studies and found that there was one key aspect that she could find that was a common denominator, no matter how intelligent in terms of IQ you were, and that is grit. She found that kids with grit did well across the scales, not just with their academic outcomes, but in many other walks of life.
And she, she describes grit like this in the talk. I'm quoting now. Grit is passion and perseverance for a very long term goal.
Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
And I was so struck by this term grit. And I was also struck that she was very honest and saying she didn't actually have the answer on how to build grit. She, she goes on to say, now I'm quoting again, To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows.
But building it every day, parents and teachers ask me, how do I build grit? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run? And the honest answer is, I don't know. And at that point the crowd really laughed, but I didn't, because we do know. And here's the amazing thing is that we actually do know how to build grit.
Because I put this together, you know, sometimes we join the dots, you know, there's a study that comes out or something we read, and then we join the dots with something else we've heard or another study. Now, the answer to how grit is built, or at least more, moreover, how grit is eroded, lies in a study that was published in the American Journal of Family Therapy. And also it was sort of extracted and later grew into a book called The Learning Habits.
And this Learning Habits examined family routines of 46,000 kids in homes across the U.S. It was a K through 12 survey. It was conducted by Brown University of Medicine, Brandeis, and the Children's National Medical Center, and actually the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology. I mean, really, you know, heavy hitters, right? And a huge study.
And the thing that my mind immediately went to when Angela said, you know, we don't know, we don't know enough about grit. Well, actually, we do. And one of the things in this book that I read that was outstanding for me was the relationship between grit and screen viewing.
In this book, it actually reported, and here I'm quoting directly from a Huffington Post report from that book. It was a woman, Mrs. Jackson or Ms. Jackson, actually, who was the author of the co-author of the book. She said this.
One thing that parents often overlook when it comes to screen time is grit, said Jackson. The research found that grit, defined in the study as the ability to perform a strenuous task or difficult task without giving up, decreased as children's screen times increased. When children in the study had limited screen time and were given things to do, for example, like chores and so on, they performed better academically, socially, and emotionally.
Now, I looked up the tables of that, went back into the study in the journal, and as screen time increases, grit decreases. They are directly related. Now, think about it.
Angela Duckworth is pointing out to us that one of the most single hallmarks of success in her studies, very reputably done, was grit. And grit decreases as screen use increases. I mean, this is adjoining the dots of some intense interest to any parent.
In other words, if we want our kids to be successful academically, socially, and emotionally, that depends on grit. Therefore, we must, and I seldom say must, but if we want that outcome, we must limit, significantly limit, the amount of screens our kids are exposed to. It's just a direct relationship.
And you can see these studies. As I said, you can see, if you want to check this out, Angela Duckworth, if you just look up her at the TED Talks, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and then if you look up and just search on the learning habit, you'll find research widely cited about grit. And for me, this is somewhat of a, you know, it's almost startling how basic this is, but how we as a society seem to think that we need to have screens in order to increase our kids' learning, when the opposite is actually true.
And this unraveling or this pulling back of the screens between reality and the Wizard of Oz-like megaphone saying we need screens for our kids to be successful, when actually it's the exact opposite. And the basic message for us all is if we want our kids to have grit, determination, problem-solving, autonomy, we've got to think really seriously about screen use for them if we want to achieve our aim. It's kind of just that basic, at least it is for me.
Well, thanks for listening to this. Really, I think this is one of the most important questions of our time, and I sure hope this has been useful. Okay, thanks.
Bye-bye. Bye.
