Need to Teach Perseverance to Your Child or Teen?
Perseverance is what will fundamentally change their view on effort, schoolwork, or a future career. But it’s often one of the hardest qualities to nurture; children or teens can quickly become discouraged or lose interest in the face of difficulty.
But notice this: when it comes to playing a video game for three hours straight just to beat a level, there’s no problem. Only, multi-contextual perseverance is much better. So, no, I’m not about to recommend video games as a method to teach this quality—because you’re likely already searching for ways to manage their screen time, which will actually be the topic of my next article. But it’s a similar concept: they need to learn the gameplay to win, although, ideally, the goal is to get them away from the screen.
Perseverance for something addictive, driven by peer pressure and many other factors, is not the same as perseverance in the face of real, prolonged challenges.
Between your teen glued to their game and a YouTuber like Inoxtag climbing Everest, the level of perseverance and effort is on a whole other level.
The solution lies in balancing delegation with an approach that flips the paradigm: they need to be the ones putting in the effort to learn from it.
Classic mantras like “You have to give it your all,” “Nothing comes easy,” or “If you think it’ll just fall into your lap…” simply don’t work, as you’ve probably noticed. We’ve been discussing this for over 20 years, and these old sayings have too much at stake; they define effort as inherently difficult. Right away, it feels like an insurmountable task, and you end up going in circles trying to motivate them.
One effective approach is to encourage them to engage in a challenging activity, ideally a sport or manual task that appeals to them. This should be something in which they’re aware of the difficulty of progressing.
The goal isn’t necessarily for them to succeed. Even failure or quitting can be a perceptual milestone. They need to experience it beyond the conceptual level.
What matters is that they come up against a challenge that requires them to gain skills to succeed, and that they understand this is necessary.
The key factor here is that they’ll need to push themselves and demonstrate perseverance. That’s the real goal.
Football, tennis, or table tennis won’t necessarily allow them to grasp difficulty in the same way, as improvement may come too quickly.
Here are two ideas, though there are many other possibilities:
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Skateboarding: Mastering even a simple trick like the ollie (jumping the skateboard by a simple leg movement) takes hours, weeks, or even months of practice.
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DIY Model Building: To get from assembling the car kit to actually driving it, they’ll have to go far beyond what they could achieve with a standard Lego set.
These two activities teach transferable skills that can help in other areas as well.
Their deep motivation should be respected, or they’ll likely lose interest. You have to be ready to let them quit if they find it too hard—and resist the urge to rescue them.
Remember, perseverance is learned through experience. And a bit of passion doesn’t hurt, either.
