Had I been around to seek opinions a century ago, such would have been the perspective of John Watson, then chair of psychology at Johns Hopkins University.
In his best-selling 1928 parenting guide, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, Watson holds forth on how to raise a child “who loses himself in work and play, who quickly learns to overcome the small difficulties in his environment . . . and who finally enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.”
Here’s Watson’s advice: “Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task.” Watson further recommends letting children cope with problems on their own “almost from the moment of birth,” rotating different caregivers to prevent unhealthy attachment to any one adult, and otherwise avoiding the coddling affection that prevents a child from “conquering the world.”
Occasionally, of course, people take the opposite stance.
They’re convinced that perseverance and especially passion bloom when children are lavished with unconditional affection and support. These champions of kinder and gentler parenting advocate big hugs and long leashes and point out that children are by their nature challenge-seeking creatures whose innate desire for competence needs only our unconditional love and affection to reveal itself. Once unfettered by the demands of imperious parents, children will follow their own intrinsic interests, and disciplined practice and resilience in the face of setbacks will follow.
On the continuum between supportive and demanding parenting, proponents of this permissive “child-centered” approach fall to the left of center.
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So which is it? Is grit forged in the crucible of unrelentingly high standards or is it nurtured in the warm embrace of loving support?
As a scientist, I’m tempted to answer that we need more research on the topic. There’s a lot of research on parenting, and some research on grit, but no research yet on parenting and grit.
But as a mother of two teenagers, I don’t have time for all the data to come in. Like the parents asking me this question, I have to make decisions today. My girls are growing up, and each day of their lives, my husband and I are parenting them, for better or for worse. What’s more, as a professor and a lab director, I interact with dozens of young people—and I’d like to encourage their grit, too.
So, as a step toward resolving the debate, I’ve probed the evidence for each side. An advocate of old-fashioned, strict parenting suggested I talk to grit paragon Steve Young, the record-breaking quarterback whose Mormon upbringing included a daily paper route, Bible classes before school, and absolutely no cussing or drinking. Meanwhile, an advocate with a more liberal bent pointed me toward Francesca Martinez, the outspoken British stand-up comic whose writer father and environmentalist mother allowed her to drop out of school when she was sixteen and didn’t bat an eye when she titled her memoir What the **** Is Normal?!
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Let’s begin with Steve Young.
The legendary quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers was twice named Most Valuable Player in the National Football League. And he was selected Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXIX, during which he completed a record-breaking six touchdown passes. At retirement, he was the highest-rated quarterback in NFL history.
“My parents were my foundation,” Steve has said. “Good parenting is something I wish everyone could have.”
Here’s a story to illustrate his point.
Though Steve had been the star of his high school football team and was heavily recruited by colleges across the country, he entered Brigham Young University as their eighth-string quarterback. Since seven other quarterbacks stood between Steve and playing time, his coach relegated him to the “hamburger squad”—a unit composed of the least valuable players whose primary role was to run plays so the BYU defensive line could practice.
“Man, I wanted to go home,” Steve recalled. “I went to school my whole first semester with my bags packed. . . . I remember calling [my dad] and just saying, ‘Coaches don’t know my name. I’m just a big tackling dummy for the defense. Dad, it’s horrible. And this is just not what I expected . . . and I think I’d like to come home.’ ”
Steve’s father, whom Steve describes as “the ultimate tough guy,” told him: “You can quit. . . . But you can’t come home because I’m not going to live with a quitter. You’ve known that since you were a kid. You’re not coming back here.” Steve stayed.
All season, Steve was first to practice and last to leave. After the team’s last game, he stepped up his private workouts: “There was a huge net hanging at the far end of the field house. I squatted behind an imaginary center; took the snap; did the three-step drop, and threw into the net. From the beginning of January to the end of February, I threw over 10,000 spirals. My arm hurt. But I wanted to be a quarterback.”
By sophomore year, Steve moved up from number-eight quarterback to number two. By his junior year, he was BYU’s starting quarterback. In his senior year, Steve received the Davey O’Brien award for the most outstanding quarterback in the country.
There were several other times in his athletic career when his confidence faltered. Each time, he wanted desperately to quit. Each time, he appealed to his father—who wouldn’t let him.
One early challenge came while playing baseball in middle school. “I was thirteen,” Steve recalled. “I didn’t get a hit the whole year, and it just got more and more embarrassing. . . . Game after game, I couldn’t get a hit.” When the season ended, Steve informed his dad that he’d had it. “My dad looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You cannot quit. You have the ability, so you need to go back and work this out.’ ” So Steve and his dad went back to the field. “I remember it being really cold and miserable and rainy and sleet and snow, and he’d be pitching the ball and I’d be hitting them.” By his senior year in high school, as captain of the varsity baseball team, Steve was batting .384.
The lesson that persistence eventually delivers rewards was one on which Steve relied in the four years he sat on the bench with the San Francisco 49ers. Rather than request a trade, Steve apprenticed himself to Joe Montana, the starting quarterback who captained the team to four Super Bowl victories. “If I was ever going to find out just how good I could get, I needed to stay in San Francisco and learn, even if it was brutally hard to do. . . . I many times thought about quitting. . . . I heard boos during my sleepless nights, but I feared calling my dad. I knew what he’d say: ‘Endure to the end, Steve.’ ”
* * *
At this point in my narrative of Steve Young’s improbable ascent, you might conclude that parents of gritty children are authoritarian. You might leap to the conclusion that they’re centered on their own standards and fairly insensitive to their children’s particular needs.
Before you issue a final verdict, though, sit down with Steve’s parents, Sherry and LeGrande Young. And before you do, take note that LeGrande prefers the childhood nickname that aptly captures his approach to life: “Grit.” “He’s all about hard work and being tough and not whining,” Steve’s brother Mike once said of his father. “The name really fits him.”
As a corporate attorney, Grit Young seldom missed a day of work. About twenty-five years ago, Grit was working out at his local YMCA when a fellow gym-goer challenged him to an ongoing sit-up competition. After a year, each man could do about a thousand sit-ups each, at which point the challenger bowed out. By then, Grit was competing against himself. He kept on, for years, until he could do ten thousand sit-ups in a row.
When I called to talk to Steve’s parents about their famous son and the way they’d raised him, I expected sternness and formality. The first thing Sherry said was “We’re delighted to talk to you! Our Steve is a great kid!” Grit then joked that, given my chosen
field of study, he was surprised it had taken me so long to get to them.
My shoulders softened a bit, and I sat back as each told me how they’d learned to work hard early in life. “We were one generation off the farm,” Sherry explained. “There were expectations.” Sherry was picking cherries by age ten. Grit did the same, and to earn money for baseball mitts and clothes, he mowed lawns, delivered newspapers on his bike to houses miles apart, and picked up whatever farm work he could.
When it came time to raise their children, both Sherry and Grit very deliberately set out to provide the same challenges. “My goal was to teach them discipline,” Grit said, “and to go at things hard like I learned to do. You have to learn those things. They don’t just happen. It was important to me to teach the kids to finish what you begin.”
In no uncertain terms, Steve and his siblings were made to understand that, whatever they signed up for, they had to see it through to the end. “We told them, you’ve got to go to all the practices. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m tired of this.’ Once you commit, you discipline yourself to do it. There’s going to be times you don’t want to go, but you’ve got to go.”
Sounds strict, right? It was. But if you listen closely, you’ll discover that the Youngs were also tremendously supportive.
Steve tells the story of getting tackled playing Pop Warner football as a nine-year-old and looking up to see his mom, still carrying her purse, striding right past him to grab a boy on the opposing team by the shoulder pads to tell him that he would not be illegally neck tackling Steve again. As Steve and his siblings got older, their home became a favorite hangout. “Our basement was always filled with kids,” Sherry says.
As a corporate attorney, Grit traveled often. “Most guys I knew would stay for the weekend, wherever we were, because you wouldn’t be finished with your business on Friday, and you had to start again on Monday. Not me. I always, always did everything I could to get home for the weekend.” Occasionally, weekend trips home were also demonstrations of the character that had earned Grit his nickname: “Once I was in Montana negotiating with an aluminum plant. Friday night, I take a taxi down to the airport, and it’s all fogged in. All the flights were canceled.”
I considered what I might do in the same situation, and then blushed a bit as I listened to the rest of the story. Grit rented a car, drove to Spokane, took a flight to Seattle, then a second flight to San Francisco, and finally a third flight—a red-eye that arrived at JFK the next morning at dawn. He then got in another rental car and drove back to Greenwich, Connecticut. “I’m not patting myself on the back,” Grit said. “It’s just that I thought it was important to be with the kids, to support them, whether it was athletic activities or anything else.”
Sherry and Grit were also attuned to their children’s emotional needs. Steve, for example, was especially anxious. “We noticed there were things he wouldn’t do,” Grit said. “When he was in second grade, he refused to go to school. When he was twelve, he wouldn’t go to Boy Scout camp. He never slept over at another kid’s house. He just wouldn’t do it.”
It was hard for me to square the image of Steve Young, fearless all-star quarterback, with the timid boy Sherry and Grit were describing. Likewise, neither Sherry nor Grit had any idea what to make of their oldest son’s fearfulness. One time, Grit says, he went to pick up Steve from school to take him to his uncle and aunt’s house for the day, and Steve simply couldn’t stop sobbing. He was petrified to be away from his own home. Grit was flabbergasted. I waited to hear how he and Sherry reacted. Did they tell their son to man up? Did they remove some of his privileges?
No and no. Grit’s description of the talk he had with his son when Steve refused to go to school makes it clear Grit did more questioning and listening than lecturing and criticizing: “I said, ‘Well, is somebody picking on you?’ He says, ‘No.’ Do you like your teacher? ‘I love my teacher.’ Well, why don’t you go to school? ‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to go to school.’ ”
Sherry ended up sitting in Steve’s second-grade classroom for weeks until, at long last, Steve felt comfortable going to school by himself.
“It was separation anxiety,” Sherry told me. “At the time, we didn’t know what to call it. But we could tell he was all tight inside, and we knew that he needed to work through all that.”
Later, when I asked Steve to elaborate on his first troubled semester at BYU, I pointed out that, if someone heard only that anecdote and nothing else, they might conclude that his father, Grit, was a tyrant. What kind of parent could refuse a son his plea to return home?
“Okay,” Steve said. “All right. Everything is contextual, right?”
I listened.
“The context was that my dad knew me. He knew all I wanted to do was sprint home, and he knew that if he let me do that, it would be letting me give into my fears.
“It was a loving act,” Steve concluded. “It was tough, but it was loving.”
But it’s a fine line between tough love and bullying, isn’t it? What’s the difference?
“I knew the decision was mine,” Steve said. “And I knew my dad didn’t want me to be him. Number one, a parent needs to set a stage that proves to the child, ‘I’m not trying to just have you do what I say, control you, make you be like me, make you do what I did, ask you to make up for what I didn’t do.’ My dad showed me early that it wasn’t about him and what he needed. It truly was ‘I’m giving you all I got.’
“There was an underlying selflessness to the tough love,” Steve continued. “I think that’s vital. If any of the tough love is about the parent just trying to control you, well, kids smell it out. In every way possible, I knew my parents were saying, ‘We’re looking to see your success. We’ve left ourselves behind.’ ”
* * *
If getting to know the Youngs helps you understand that “tough love” isn’t necessarily a contradiction in terms, hold that thought—and meet Francesca Martinez and her parents, Tina and Alex.
Named by the Observer as one of the funniest comics in Britain, Francesca performs to sold-out audiences around the world. In a typical routine, she breaks the no-cussing rule of the Young family, and after the show, she’s sure to violate the drinking prohibition. Like her parents, Francesca is a lifelong vegetarian, not religious, and politically, somewhere to the left of progressive.
Francesca was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age two. She prefers the term “wobbly.” Told that their brain-damaged daughter would “never lead a normal life,” Tina and Alex quickly decided that no doctor could foretell who their daughter might become. Achieving comedic stardom takes grit no matter who you are, but perhaps more so when it’s a challenge merely to enunciate your consonants or walk to the stage. So, like other aspiring comics, Francesca has endured four-hour drives (each way) to perform for ten minutes for no pay and made countless cold calls to impassive and busy television producers. But unlike most of her peers, she needs to do breathing and voice exercises before each show.
“I don’t take credit for my hard work and passion,” she told me. “I think these qualities came from my family, which was very loving and very stable. Their overwhelming support and positivity are why there is no limit to my ambition.”
Not surprisingly, counselors at Francesca’s school were doubtful of entertainment as a career path for a girl who struggled to walk and talk at a normal cadence. They were even more wary of her dropping out of high school to do so. “Oh, Francesca,” they’d say with a sigh, “think about something more sensible. Like computers.” The thought of an office job was about as horrible a fate as Francesca could imagine. She asked her parents what she should do.
“Go and follow your dreams,” Alex told his daughter, “and if they don’t work out, then you can reassess.”
“My mum was just as encouraging,” Francesca said. Then, with a smile: “Basically, they were happy for me to leave formal education at sixteen to act on television. They let me spend my weekends clubbing with
friends, surrounded by leery men and cocktails with sexually explicit names.”
I asked Alex about his “follow your dream” advice. Before explaining, he reminded me that Francesca’s brother Raoul was also allowed to drop out of high school—to apprentice himself to a renowned portrait painter. “We never put pressure on either of them to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that. I truly believe that when you do something you really want to do, it becomes a vocation. Francesca and her brother are incredibly hard workers, but they feel passionately about their subjects, so to them it’s not at all oppressive.”
Tina agreed entirely: “I’ve always had an instinctive sense that life and nature and evolution have planted in children their own capabilities—their own destiny. Like a plant, if they’re fed and watered in the right way, they will grow up beautiful and strong. It’s just a question of creating the right environment—a soil that is nurturing, that is listening and responsive to their needs. Children carry within them the seeds of their own future. Their own interests will emerge if we trust them.”
Francesca connects the unconditional support that her “absurdly cool” parents lavished on her to the hope she maintained even when hope seemed lost: “So much of sticking with things is believing you can do it. That belief comes from self-worth. And that comes from how others have made us feel in our lives.”
So far, Alex and Tina seem the epitome of permissive parenting. I asked them whether they see themselves as such.
“Actually,” Alex said, “I think I’m allergic to spoiled children. Children must be loved and accepted, but then, without complications, they need to be taught: ‘No, you cannot hit your sister on the head with that stick. Yes, you must share. No, you don’t get to have everything you want when you want it.’ It’s no-nonsense parenting.”
As an example, Alex pushed Francesca to do the physical therapy exercises prescribed by her doctors. She hated them. For years, she and her father battled. Francesca couldn’t understand why she couldn’t simply work around her limitations, and Alex believed his responsibility was to stand firm. As she says in her book: “Though happy in many ways, the next few years were punctuated with intense rows replete with door-banging and tears and the throwing of objects.”
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