Winning Versus Effort
Scroll through social media today, you often see an abundance of proud parent postings of pictures of their children and their achievements - first place trophies, winning tournaments, honor rolls. I was one of those proud parent social media posters. For some strange reason, I felt better as a parent if my child got first place in …..fill in the blank. It feels more fun when my child is successful at their activity and I often find myself living vicariously through my children, especially if they are winning! My daughters spend extensive time in gymnastics as their primary hobby. However, there was an incident a year ago during a gymnastics meet that really made me reflect on what success really was.
For those unfamiliar with competitive gymnastics, the teams compete in various events for an overall team score. However, each girl competes individually, receiving deductions for each mistake they make. At the completion of the meet, girls’ scores are ranked and then displayed in descending order to determine who gets a medal or not. When describing this process to other adults that are unfamiliar with gymnastics, I liken it to a hypothetical scenario in the workplace where at the end of each day/task each employee is scored on their performance and then paraded in front of the public in rank order according to their score. This concept seems terrifying.
Last year, my youngest daughter had a gymnastics meet. She was terrified because she was still developing a skill in her floor routine. As a result, she was in tears and did not want to compete. With a lot of encouragement, support, and acknowledgement of fears, she ultimately competed and performed the floor routine and the gymnastics skill to the best of her ability. She didn’t win. Not only that, she didn’t even come close to doing well. However, I was REALLY proud of her for working hard and being brave to go through with the floor routine despite being extremely scared.
As a parent, I want my children to be successful. Furthermore, it is my duty as a parent to help them be successful. I want them to succeed in academics, hobbies, as people, and ultimately, as a contributing member of society. It is my job to shape and guide my children to be successful, despite the fact that they never want to listen to me. This constant pursuit of success forced me to think about what success really is and what that meant for my children.
Because of my new perception of success, I stopped posting pictures of the 1st place trophies and performance-based proud parent moments. Now I focus less on outcome of achievements like competitions, and tests. Rather, I focus more on the behaviors, attitude, preparation, and especially effort. This shift also helped me shape my parenting conversation with my children.
Focusing on effort, rather than outcome can be essential in developing your child’s perception of who they are and how hard they work. THIS brief video describes how a child’s identity is influenced by feedback and praise. It states that praise of outcome can stymie effort and self-efficacy in times of failure. Focusing on effort can build perseverance, resilience, and a more positive self-identity in our children. As parents, we often think of failure as a learning and motivation opportunity. If we solely focus on outcome, it can be counter productive to motivation and resilience. For example, when we praise a positive outcome, we state that students are smart, good at sports, or a good musician, depending on the activity. However, if they fail, they attribute it to NOT being smart, good at sports, or a good musician. Therefore, they are less likely to work harder to overcome the failure next time because they feel like they don’t have the capacity to improve.
As stated in the book The Gift of Failure, by Jessica Lahey, “Instead of ‘Great job on that test! You are so smart!’ Try, ‘Great job on that test! What did you do this time in your preparation that worked so well?’ Instead of ‘I love that drawing! You have real talent in art!’ try ‘I’m proud of you for working so hard on the shading and perspective.’ Kids who believe that intelligence grows with effort and diligence will be less distraught about failure, more likely to stick with tasks through those failures, and may even more fun as they do so” (p. 68).
Pete Kurty, Ed.D
Lahey, J., & Lahey, J. (2015). The gift of failure: how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY
