What You Never Realized You Were Teaching Your Child About Grit & Resilience: MIT Study Captures Techniques That Work for Babies as Young as 13 Months
Even within the prestigious institution of MIT, no one has managed to create a computer that rivals the immense power of a baby’s brain.
According to Julia Leonard, a graduate student at MIT, babies possess a unique ability to learn quickly from just one or two examples, surpassing the capabilities of current computer algorithms. This has sparked significant interest among researchers at MIT, as they strive to develop computers that can learn in a similar manner to infants.
Inspired by this curiosity, Leonard embarked on a study involving over 200 babies, aiming to analyze their remarkable intellectual capacities. Specifically, she focused on understanding how babies acquire skills like resilience and a growth mindset from adults. This research is particularly relevant as schools increasingly prioritize the development of students’ character and social-emotional competencies.
Leonard’s study, published in the journal Science, revealed that babies are capable of persisting in challenging tasks if they witness an adult struggling and eventually succeeding. This suggests that grit and perseverance can be taught through example, tapping into the highly observant minds of young infants.
To conduct her research, Leonard worked with babies aged 13 to 18 months old. She divided them into two groups: one group observed an adult’s struggle for 30 seconds to retrieve a toy from a tomato container and remove a key chain from a carabiner, while the other group witnessed an adult effortlessly completing the same tasks. Following this observation, the babies were presented with a toy that played music, with only the researchers aware of how to activate the sound. The researchers noticed that the babies who had witnessed the adult struggle made more attempts to press the button on the toy in an effort to make it play music. Conversely, the babies who had observed the adult without any struggle exhibited less effort and pressed the button fewer times than their counterparts.
Leonard emphasized that the babies’ actions were not merely imitation since they were provided with a completely different toy from the ones they observed the adults struggling with.
These results indicate that babies’ brains possess a remarkable ability to learn the value of effort and perseverance in just a short period of observation. According to Leonard, this study suggests that grit is not an innate and unchanging trait but can be learned and influenced by social context.
However, the long-term effects of these observations and whether they apply outside the laboratory remain uncertain. For parents who wish to model grit, the most effective approach involves engaging the child through eye contact and using their name while demonstrating the process of overcoming a challenging task. Leonard’s study found that adults who employed these cues while struggling with the toys had a greater impact on the children’s perseverance compared to those who intentionally did not engage with the children but simply showcased effort-filled behavior.
According to researcher Angela Duckworth, author of the book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance," character traits like grit and perseverance can be taught. She suggests that an effective parenting style for cultivating these qualities involves being both demanding and supportive. Duckworth highlights that individuals cannot force themselves to become interested in something they have no passion for, indicating that grit is best developed in areas where individuals already have a natural inclination.
Author Paul Tough, who wrote "How Children Succeed," echoes this sentiment in an article for The Atlantic. He believes that developing these skills cannot be achieved solely through a curriculum but rather through a child’s environment. He emphasizes that qualities such as grit and resilience are not instilled through traditional teaching methods.
Researcher Carol Dweck has further explored the importance of praising children for effort rather than just success in order to foster a growth mindset. Several studies have shown that children who are praised for their intelligence are less likely to persist after experiencing failure compared to those who are commended for their hard work. A study conducted on middle school students in New York City revealed that students who believed their intelligence was malleable, rather than predetermined, performed better in math over time.
Next, Leonard aims to investigate how long the effects observed in the laboratory setting might last in young children.
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