How to Raise Kids Who Can Handle Hard Things

Have you ever wondered why some kids seem to handle challenges better than others? They recover more quickly from setbacks and disappointments. They solve problems on their own without looking for an adult to provide the answers. They come up with a Plan B when Plan A falls through. Today, I'm going to share with you 5 science-backed ideas about how kids develop these skills and why 4 of these skills ask less of parents Not more. Let me explain. We start on a windswept beach on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. A plane has gone down and the only survivors are a group of schoolboys. There are no adults, no rules, no way home. At first, the boys play on the beach. Then they organize. They elect a leader. They get a fire going. But then it all falls apart. They split into warring tribes. They undermine each other. harm each other. By the end, 3 of the boys are dead. That's the plot of Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel by William Golding. Over the years, it's become something of a cautionary tale. Leave children on their own without adults watching, and they will descend into chaos. There's just one problem with the story. When something almost identical happened in real life, the plot unfolded very differently. In the 1960s, a group of boys at a boarding school on the Pacific island of Tonga got tired of school. They set out on a fishing boat, got caught in a storm, and were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Nobody found them for 15 months. The boys did not go to war. They found food. They planted a garden. They kept one person on watch for passing ships at all times. When one of them broke his leg, The others said it and it healed. When they were finally rescued, every one of them was alive. In other words, what happened in real life was nothing like the dystopia imagined in Lord of the Flies. The gap between fiction and reality points to an important finding from the field of child development. It's a finding that cuts against almost every parenting instinct we have. Children are far more capable and far more resilient than we assume. Today, I want to talk with you about how that resilience gets built. Technique number 1, let your kids do things without you. At Boston College, psychologist Peter Gray studies how childhood has changed. He starts with a blunt observation about what happens the moment a parent walks into the room.

In many ways, adults have taken over children's lives. I think in some sense with good intentions,

Peter has surveyed anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer societies, 7 different cultures across 3 continents. In every single one, children are free to play and explore on their own for most of the day. No school, no constant supervision. Kids learn by watching, trying, figuring things out. Then Peter looked at what's happening in the United States and other developed nations. Over the past half century, children have had less and less opportunity to be independent of adults. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression among young people have skyrocketed. Peter is quick to point out that this is a correlation, not proof of a connection between increased adult supervision and higher rates of childhood mental health issues. But he says that when children have more independence, they develop more of what psychologists call an internal locus of control. It's the deep belief that you can affect what happens to you, that when a problem lands in your lap, you can solve it. This is not a belief you can simply hand to children. They can only build it by doing things when you're not there, getting hurt and deciding what to do about it, getting lost and finding their way back. Each of these small, unsupervised moments gives them an opportunity to practice the skills they'll need once they become adults. And

that's how they learn, I can deal with problems. I don't have to be afraid of the world because I can solve these problems.

So here is Peter's suggestion, and it's small enough to try this week. Ask your child a single question. What is something you would really like to do on your own? Then find the version of that activity that you can both live with. Maybe it's walking to a friend's house. Maybe it's cooking dinner. The task itself is almost beside the point. What matters is the message you're sending. I trust you. So that's technique number 1. Technique number 2, be a gardener, not a carpenter. Alison Gopnik is a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She says there are 2 archetypes for parents. Either we're carpenters or we're gardeners. The carpenter starts a task with a blueprint. He knows exactly what the finished piece should look like, and he shapes the wood until it matches his plan. Alison says that a lot of modern parents are carpenters. Read the right books, apply the right techniques, and you can shape your child into a specific kind of adult. The gardener works nothing like that. She provides rich soil, plants some seeds, and then makes room for things to grow in directions she never planned.

It's much more about providing a protected space in which unexpected things can happen than it is like shaping a child to come out to be a particular kind of desirable adult.

Here's why that matters for resilience in particular. Researchers once built a robot and gave it an early phase where it did nothing useful at all. It just moved around at random, Discovering what its own body could do. Then they gave it a real task, like picking up a piece of cloth. The robots allowed to play before given a task turned out to be far more resilient. You could take off one of the robot's arms or tip it over on its side, and it would still find a way to reach the cloth. Not so for the robots that had been drilled on the immediate task at hand. Rigid training produces performance in a world that never changes. Play produces resilience for the world we actually live in, where things will go wrong and plans have to change. So the shift here has less to do with a specific parenting technique than a change in your goal. The carpenter is anxious because the outcome is never guaranteed and every deviation feels like failure. The gardener can breathe. Your job is not to manufacture a particular adult. It's to cultivate rich soil, And let your child grow in ways that may surprise you. Parenting technique number 3, let your child make up their own rules. Think about the difference between a pickup baseball game and an organized one. In Little League, adults run everything. The rules are fixed, an umpire enforces them, and the kids follow along. Now picture a handful of kids on an empty lot with a bat, a ball, and no adult in sight. Before anyone can play, they have problems to solve. There are never exactly enough players. The space is half the size of a regular ballpark. So the kids make up their own rules. Inevitably, there are disagreements. Peter Gray argues that these disagreements and the messy negotiations that follow is how important learning happens. When kids play on their own, they discover that rules are inventions made by people and that other people can change them. That's a big important concept for a child to understand. There's research that captures this phenomenon. When you record young children's speech, their language during free play with other kids is more complex and more sophisticated than when they're talking to a teacher. Why? Because play is a long series of negotiations. Whose turn is it? What happens if you step out of bounds? Did someone step out of bounds? With every decision, they're practicing how to disagree, how to persuade, how to reach an agreement without anyone stepping in to referee. That is resilience developed in real time. A child who has experience settling her own disputes tends to become an adult who doesn't come undone the first time she meets a difficult boss or a difficult romantic partner. You don't need to engineer any of this. You mostly need to get out of the way. When kids are deep in some elaborate game with rules you cannot follow, And nobody's in danger, the best strategy is to go away. Just leave them alone. Parenting technique number 4: resist the urge to show kids how things work. This one runs against instinct because explaining how the world works can feel like a big part of what it means to raise a child. But Alison Gopnik points to an experiment that should give every parent pause. Researchers once gave young children a toy that could do many different things. It could squeak, it had a mirror, it lit up. When the children were simply handed the toy and left to figure it out, they explored it thoroughly and found nearly everything it could do. Then the researchers changed one small thing. With a second group, an adult told the children, this is my toy, let me show you how it works. Then the adult demonstrated just one feature: the squeak. The children in that group mostly squeaked the toy a few times, And then stopped. They had learned that a grown-up was handing them the answer, and so they stopped searching for any other ways to use the toy. Sit with what that means. The instruction didn't just teach children one feature, it switched off the hunt for everything else. When we rush in to demonstrate the right way to do something, we inadvertently shrink a child's world. We close off a potential avenue for learning. Alison's point is not that you should never teach. It's that for young children, the deepest learning comes from doing, not from watching. So the next time your child is wrestling with a problem, try sitting on your hands a beat longer than feels comfortable. Let her fumble the zipper, the sentence, the puzzle. The fumbling is where the learning lives. Technique number 5 in our parenting toolkit is to tell children about the people who came before them. The first 4 lessons we've talked about today are This last one is the opposite of that, and it comes from the work of Robin Fybusch. Robin is a psychologist at Emory University who studies family stories. Robin once went to a genealogy conference and had her own family history traced back generations. She saw the manifest of the ship her grandfather arrived on, the census records with her father's name written on them. These were, as she puts it, just facts. But then she saw the story. And yet the experience moved her more than she expected. What she felt was a sense of being anchored, having a place, coming from somewhere. Robin argues that this is exactly what children and adolescents need most, because this time of life is one of shifting sands. Who am I? What do I believe? A young person wrestling with those questions is far better equipped to answer them if they have a solid foundation of Having that rooted identity really allows them to explore more freely. These stories do not have to be grand, dramatic sagas. In fact, Robin found that the most powerful family narratives are usually made up of smaller moments. These stories get told in fragments, a sentence while you chop vegetables, a few lines during a commercial break. Robin finds that even the teenagers who roll their eyes when you tell these stories are actually taking them in. More than 95% of the adolescents she interviewed could recount stories from their parents' experiences growing up, stories they had only ever heard at home. So here is one practical way you can introduce a family story to your child. When she is struggling, maybe after a fight with a friend or a tough day at school, resist the urge to solve the problem for her. Instead, try talking about a time when something similar happened to you. In doing so, you're giving your child 2 important things at once: comfort and proof that she comes from a line of people who have survived similar challenges. Think back to those boys shipwrecked on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. For 15 months, no adult told them what to do. In the end, very little of their story echoed the fictional account in Lord of the Flies. They built a garden. They set a broken bone. They took care of each other. They weren't extraordinary. They were children doing what children have been capable of for almost all of human history. Their resilience was already inside them. It was just waiting for an opportunity to show itself. Our task as parents, as educators, is not to make our children strong enough for the world. It's to get them to trust that they are already strong enough. Thank you for watching this video. If you'd like to go deeper on the science of the mind and how it can help you as a parent or a partner or as a friend, check out the Hidden Brain audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, or hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. See you soon.