Grit (29 page)

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.”

Whether these skirmishes could have been handled more skillfully is an open question—Alex believes he could have done a better job explaining to his young daughter
why
he was so insistent. That may be
so, but what really strikes me about this aspect of Francesca’s childhood is the notion that an affectionate, follow-your-dreams parent can nevertheless feel compelled to lay down the law on matters of discipline. Suddenly, the one-dimensional view of Alex and Tina as hippy-dippy parents seems incomplete.

It was telling, for example, to hear Alex, who is a writer, talk about the work ethic he modeled for his children: “To finish things, you have to put the work in. When I was younger, I’d meet many people who were writing stuff. They’d say to me, ‘Oh yeah, I am a writer as well but I’ve never finished anything.’ Well, in that case, you are not a writer. You are just somebody who sits down and writes things on a bit of paper. If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it and finish it.”

Tina agrees that as much as children need freedom, they also need limits. She’s a tutor as well as an environmental activist, and she’s watched a lot of parents engage in what she calls begging-and-pleading negotiations with their children. “We taught our children to live by clear principles and moral guidelines,” she said. “We explained our reasoning, but they always knew where the boundaries were.

“And there was no television,” she added. “I felt it was a hypnotic medium, and I didn’t want it to replace interactions with people. So we simply didn’t have a television. If the children wanted to watch something special, they would walk over to their grandparents’.”

What can we learn from the stories of Steve Young and Francesca Martinez? And what can we glean from how other grit paragons describe their parents?

In fact, I’ve noticed a pattern. For those of us who want to parent for grit, the pattern is a helpful blueprint, a guide for making the many decisions we must grapple with while raising our children.

Before I say more, let me repeat the caveat that, as a scientist, I’d like to collect many more data points before coming to firm
conclusions. In a decade, I should know a lot more about parenting for grit than I do now. But because there’s no pause button for parenting the people we care about, I’ll go ahead and tell you my hunches. In large part, I’m encouraged to do so because the pattern I’ve observed matches up with dozens of carefully executed research studies on parenting (but not grit). The pattern also makes sense, given what’s been learned about human motivation since John Watson dispensed his
Don’t Coddle
’em
advice. And, finally, the pattern I see matches up with the interviews of world-class athletes, artists, and scholars completed by psychologist Benjamin Bloom and his team thirty years ago. Though parenting was not the explicit focus of the Bloom study—parents were originally included as “observers to verify” biographical details—the importance of parenting ended up as one of its major conclusions.

Here is what I see.

First and foremost, there’s no either/or trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting. It’s a common misunderstanding to think of “tough love” as a carefully struck balance between affection and respect on the one hand, and firmly enforced expectations on the other. In actuality, there’s no reason you can’t do both. Very clearly, this is exactly what the parents of Steve Young and Francesca Martinez did. The Youngs were tough, but they were also loving. The Martinezes were loving, but they were also tough. Both families were “child-centered” in the sense that they clearly put their children’s interests first, but neither family felt that children were always the better judge of what to do, how hard to work, and when to give up on things.

Below is a figure representing how many psychologists now categorize parenting styles. Instead of one continuum, there are two. In the upper right-hand quadrant are parents who are both demanding and supportive. The technical term is “
authoritative parenting,” which, unfortunately is easily confused with “authoritarian parenting.” To avoid such confusion, I’ll refer to authoritative parenting as
wise parenting
,
because parents in this quadrant are accurate judges of the psychological needs of their children. They appreciate that children need love, limits, and latitude to reach their full potential. Their authority is based on knowledge and wisdom, rather than power.

In the other quadrants are three other common parenting styles, including the undemanding, unsupportive approach to raising children exemplified by neglectful parents. Neglectful parenting creates an especially toxic emotional climate, but I won’t say much more about it here because it’s not even a plausible contender for how parents of the gritty raise their children.

Authoritarian parents are demanding and unsupportive, exactly the approach John Watson advocated for strengthening character in children. Permissive parents, by contrast, are supportive and undemanding.

When psychologist Larry Steinberg delivered his 2001 presidential address to the Society for Research on Adolescence, he proposed
a moratorium on further research on parenting styles because, as he saw it, there was so much evidence for the benefits of supportive and demanding parenting that scientists could profitably move on to thornier
research questions. Indeed, over the past forty years, study after carefully designed study has found that the children of psychologically wise parents fare better than children raised in any other kind of household.

In one of Larry’s studies, for example, about ten thousand American teenagers completed questionnaires about their parents’ behavior. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, social class, or parents’ marital status, teens with
warm, respectful, and demanding parents earned higher grades in school, were more self-reliant, suffered from less anxiety and depression, and were less likely to engage in delinquent behavior. The same pattern replicates in nearly every nation that’s been studied and at every stage of child development. Longitudinal research indicates that the benefits are measurable
across a decade or more.

One of the major discoveries of parenting research is that what matters more than the messages parents aim to deliver are the
messages their children receive.

What may
appear
to be textbook authoritarian parenting—a no-television policy, for example, or a prohibition against swearing—may or may not be coercive. Alternatively, what may
seem
permissive—say, letting a child drop out of high school—may simply reflect differences in the rules parents value as important. In other words, don’t pass judgment on that parent lecturing their child in the supermarket cereal aisle. In most cases, you don’t have enough context to understand how the child interprets the exchange, and, at the end of the day, it’s the child’s experience that really matters.

Are you a psychologically wise parent? Use the
parenting assessment on the next page, developed by psychologist and parenting expert Nancy Darling, as a checklist to find out. How many of these statements would your child affirm without hesitation?

You’ll notice that some of the items are italicized. These are “reverse-coded” items, meaning that if your child agrees with them, you may be less psychologically wise than you think.

Supportive: Warm

I can count on my parents to help me out if I have a problem.

My parents spend time just talking to me.

My parents and I do things that are fun together.

My parents don’t really like me to tell them my troubles.

My parents hardly ever praise me for doing well.

Supportive: Respectful

My parents believe I have a right to my own point of view.

My parents tell me that their ideas are correct and that I shouldn’t question them.

My parents respect my privacy.

My parents give me a lot of freedom.

My parents make most of the decisions about what I can do.

Demanding

My parents really expect me to follow family rules.

My parents really let me get away with things.

My parents point out ways I could do better.

When I do something wrong, my parents don’t punish me.