Is grit and resilience really the answer?

[Grittymadness]

The DC's school has been doing lots and lots of work on the importance of having emotional grit and resilience. Growth mindset and determination to achieve.

There seems such a focus on this in schools and I have a problem with it I'm struggling to articulate. It's like it's all down to the individual - if your not achieving or coping you just need to toughen up, work harder etc. (This is hard to process when say your child has learning difficulties, poor mental health etc).

Does anyone else agree, or am I just being overly sensitive and need a bit of resilience myself 😂

I remember going on training at work about being resilient a few years ago , I was so angry to be told it was my fault that I wasn't coping with the feeling of not coping and that I just needed to learn to live with feeling crap and only doing half a job. Meanwhile the up aboves just load on the pressure and expect you can prioritise without anyone saying it is ok to not do something. This style of management was the end of me because it left the burden with me. So yes it can feel very victim blaming . But in day to day life within reasonable expectations we do need to be able to cope with the odd set back.

It is a bit like the 'don't let trying to be be perfect get in the way of being good' great, that is fine except when the every person who receives the good version then tells you how you could've made it perfect. Soul destroying !!

This is being good for me and helping me to see why I couldn't carry on with my job any more. It was the change to this mindset ,and actually I would say I am naturally a person who values resilience , interesting !!

@Stichintimesavesstapling that’s absolutely appalling! Your poor DD. The whole point of mindfulness meditation is to not ruminate but rather stay lightly focused on something like your breath or a neutral thought.
I think that’s the awful thing about some of these programmes, they come from a good place and even good evidence sometimes but just knowing about the concepts is not the same as having skill in them, and certainly very far from having the skill AND being able to teach it. The is especially true of mind training, it takes a lot of skill to “be mindful” and if you can’t walk the walk it becomes so empty and pointless.

I wonder if the school are trying (and failing at) a technique I was taught during some CBT which was to identify my worries, isolate them and then imagine them disappearing. The set up was a river, surrounded by trees - each of my concerns was a leaf, which I would watch drop into the river and then slowly float off down stream. All done whilst focusing on breathing and shutting out the outside world. I found it incredibly helpful, but it was taught by a professional therapist rather than a teacher who has been given a workbook (nothing against teachers!!) to read through.
It's important we learn to confront our concerns rather than 'ignoring' them but the idea of creating and encouraging worries in the name of teaching mindfulness is concerning!

It sounds like this emphasis is to counteract the prevalent snowflake mentality: 'I have anxiety therefore can't be expected to do x, y or z.' At the end of the day, resilience is all there is. Individuals cannot expect other people to shoulder responsibility for their lives.

I do understand the problem with snowflakery and trying to counteract it, but it’s not really helping people who have been raised to be snowflakes to tell them to just “be resilient” when it’s not easy for them. This is why it’s important to help kids deal with disappointment and unfairness from a very young age, and let them experience things that upset them, like not winning at everything, so they can learn to deal with it.

I think it would be better as part of general life skills lessons where learning to be resilient goes alongside learning to manage stress, listen to your feelings and recognise when you’re really struggling too.

totally agree mindfulness is badly misunderstood and misused too. It’s not about making people focus on their worries at all. There’s also evidence that it can cause mental distress if not done properly and I don’t think it should be in schools.

Yes, this.

resilience does not mean “endurance” of poor conditions with no complaint.

nor does it mean be tough and bully others into being tough

it means, finding ways around a problem, including being aware of the problem in the first place, making others aware of the problem so you’re not alone, asking for help but NOT expecting others to solve your problem for you, brainstorming possible solutions with others, trying first one solution, then another, knowing when it’s better to walk away, having a plan B, seeking healthy ways of relief etc etc etc

Yes, this!

I find people who already know you're not the tops at something are very quick to say it's all about effort and then provide the most pernickety perfectionist feed back. Teachers who mark based on perfectionist tendencies can be utterly soul destroying. I don't think everyone should get constant gold stars but those who seem oblivious to all effort outside of perfection and never, ever reward it don't exactly foster much goodwill or love of subject.

I’d like to know what is protecting children ‘too much’, as I often swing the other way and possibly don’t protect them enough. Does anyone have any examples of what they think is excessive mollycoddling resulting in young people lacking resilience?

I wish the younger generation were a bit more resilient to be honest.

I work in a stressful environment and us ‘older’ (30-40) ones are constantly propping up the younger (16-20s) ones who mostly all suffer from anxiety, mental health conditions, aren’t coping, need a break.

Us oldies all have problems but manage to control ourselves in the workplace and get on with it, the others can’t. Not sure what happened in 10 years to make that happen?

Teachers and other educators are being asked to do more and more MH work that they are not trained for. We had a one-hour training session on working with trauma responses,,and then were expected to have the tools to 'support' any young person with severe trauma. More and more young people and young adults are presenting with MH difficulties and it's irresponsible to expect untrained staff to support in this area.
Resilience in general is something we ideally all have. But society's failings are put onto teachers (and police) to deal with far too much.

Having said that, I do think young people in general have become much less resilient, and it's a problem.

I think society as a whole has become less resilient, but it’s very convenient for older generations to pretend it’s just “the young” with the problem (the “young” generally being anyone at least a decade younger than the person making the claim). Turning a blind eye to the mess you are making of the world around you is no more resilient than running around in a blind panic admitting you don’t know what to do to fix the situation. True resilience does not involve kicking everything into the long grass rather than dealing with the issues, but that’s what older generations have done for decade after decade with problems they consider too difficult to cope with.

For me part of resilience is the ability to realise your not coping or doing well and seek help or support or learning to help yourself through different techniques

Placemarking

I suppose also we grew up (if in the UK) when each generation was expected to do better than the last, since WW2, due to improved social mobility etc. Class, sex, and race became less of a barrier. But that stagnated and is now going backwards, and young people are picking up on that. And if parents are stressed about money, children pick up on that, and get stressed and anxious.

This is the most interesting thread I have read in a long time.

Bollocks.
The last few generations fought for the rights of women, homosexuals, racial minorities. The ones before that fought against war, and nuclear weapons. The ozone layer was the environmental issue and got CFC’s taken out of sprays.

Every generation has its own issues. It’s no good banging on about fast fashion and consumerism to people who grew up in 70’s as there wasn’t much. Let’s see how you guys enjoy living in 70’s type conditions now you are used to 24 hour shops, what you want when you want it and at every price point.

You’ll be old one day and the kids will be telling you it’s not environment but food or population growth or something else you got wrong in the 2020’s.

Life is generally much more complicated and pressured for everyone including children for a whole host of reasons. Childhood is very different from when I was a child . Expectations from children at school are very different. Social media and the pressures of this, we are still getting to grips with how to manage. I feel really sad that mh issues are identified, lots of talk about support or lack of, very little discussion about what needs to change to prevent this.

I know my view on this certainly won't be the most psychologically healthy, but I do think resilience and grit are essential for the young ones.
I try not to say it because I feel judged, but I genuinely feel that you cannot rely on ANYONE but yourself. No matter how many people love you, you are all that you have. Even people that love you unconditionally have priorities and their own problems, so your fight HAS to come from within.

There is a lot more stress put on children in schools since League tables became the biggest buzzword. The resilience schools are pushing isn't for the biggest part for the pupil's own good, it is to make the schools look good. You can see every year when exam results are out all the schools showing off the pupils who get top results but the pupil who maybe only passed a couple of subjects can have worked harder than a pupil who got straight A results.

And bollocks back to you. You can’t separate the young from the rest of society and claim they lack resilience but that society as a whole doesn’t lack resilience. Previous generations created the current generation and invented fast fashion, fast food, global capitalism, a reliance on fossil fuels, etc, so previous generations can’t abdicate responsibility for creating the status quo, or try to separate themselves from it and its inevitable consequences. Have the resilience to take on your share of the responsibility, rather than trying to claim how amazingly resilient you are, and how unbelievably hard the 1970s were, as though that proves it’s only the young who lack resilience, not modern society generally (bollocks the 1979s were hard… just ask someone born in the 1930s….).

It’s perfectly possible to fight for things that you believe will benefit you and future generations whilst simultaneously turning a massive blind eye towards other issues and consequences that you find inconvenient, or that you consider too difficult to deal with so choose to leave to later generations to suffer the consequences of. Enough self-congratulation about the amazing things you think your generation achieved and accept also some of the problems caused alongside it. The problems of the young are the problems of us all and the young reflect our own inadequacies back at us. If the young are less resilient now, therefore, society as a whole is less resilient. That’s just a fact. And yes, of course subsequent generations blame previous generations - nothing would change if that were not the vase. What would be abnormal would be the young fawning after the older generations for making everything so lovely for them.

Schools (and most work places) don't understand resilience and it is sometimes used as a means to blame people.

If you look at it from evidenced based point of view there are protective measures you can take to improve your ability to navigate and bounce back ftom adversity. That's what they should be teaching and the most impactful of these are sleep, nutrition and emotions.

Growth mindset is something different...yes learning from what's worked and what hasn't is helpful but it's one factor and is hard to do if your brain isn't getting enough sleep...

And grit is willpower really, and the thing that runs out first...

It's not great, tbh.

And I’d like to see someone who was a young person in the 1970s go back to the 1970s as an old person to see how resilient they actually are, rather than how resilient they remember themselves to have been once upon a time.