In addition to academics, athletics are a major nexus for teaching resilience, in schools and out. In the United States, 60 million children and teenagers participate in organized sports every year, and when they do, they are immersed in cultures of resilience as mental toughness, grit, personal growth, high performance, and winning.
Athletics undoubtedly offers many benefits. Leadership, social competence, health, and feelings of purpose and belonging are all enhanced. Sports help children mentally and physically, reducing stress and mental distress. But these benefits exist alongside serious costs: pervasive physical overwork, psychological burnout, feelings of failure and shame, and an inability to know when and when to not apply resilience lessons.
The pressure to be ‘resilient’ can have consequences
For many athletes, leaving lessons about strength, grit, challenge, dominance, and perseverance on the field can be difficult, especially when resilience is taught as a skill to carry into all aspects of life. Sometimes, knowing when to abandon a goal is the resilience skill worth cultivating.
On October 29, 2022, the Michigan State Spartans, a college football team, played a game against the University of Michigan. Only two weeks before the game, media applauded the Spartans for “finally showing resilience” and breaking a four-game losing streak. But on the 30th, they lost again.
As the teams withdrew from the field and entered a stadium tunnel, up to 10 Spartan team members attacked a Michigan player. Some hit him repeatedly in the head with their helmets. After the incident, which was caught on video, Michigan State was fined $100,000, six players were suspended, and five were subsequently charged with aggravated assault.
Like grit, having a growth mindset also applies to athletics. But what happens when children — even strapping adolescents — want to stop, rest, or opt out because they are tired or no longer find pleasure in sports? Parents and coaches often encourage students to “stick with it,” teaching, in effect, that they should overlook their feelings, desires, or discomforts, prioritize specialization and performance, and sacrifice for the win.
Knowing when to stop is a good thing
Children who want to stop a sport or “give up” a pursuit often feel like failures. Every year, for almost 15 years straight, a period that coincides with the rise of resilience and performance programming in schools and sports, sports-related injuries among children have increased. Specialization, overtraining, and overuse all contribute to injuries and to burnout.
What do we even call the virtue of knowing when to stop? Curious, I searched TED Talks, one of the most viewed of which, featuring Professor Angela Duckworth, is titled “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” Duckworth’s viral Talk has garnered more than 25 million views. The only one I could find that seemed related was made in 2012 and titled “Forbearance.” In it, 85-year-old Thelma Gibson, who, fate would have it, is also a Bahamian American, uses forbearance to affably describe how she resisted decades of systemic and interpersonal racism.
It has 1,247 views.
If every obstacle, problem, or hardship can be turned into an opportunity to learn and do better next time, when does your improving end? Are you ever enough as you are? One of the reasons that 70% of kids drop out of sports by the age of 13 is that both school and extracurricular sports are designed to filter them out in order to cultivate high-performing athletes.
The older children get, the more pressure they feel to succeed, which means not just doing your best, but being the best. In recent years, perfectionism among adolescents has been on the rise, a problem, researchers believe, tied to growing parental pressure in an increasingly individualistic and competitive society.
Children who swim against the tide and change course often think deeply about their decisions, coming to know themselves better. They gain agency and self-confidence, learn to be satisfied by their choices, and frequently achieve happiness. It takes bravery and confidence to make these decisions.
Change also teaches children the valuable lesson that resilience is variable over time. As with adults, children can be resilient in one part of life — academics, for example — but not in another — forming strong friendships. They are capable of coping at certain times, but not at others. When they take risks, they gain the insight that relying on others for support when they need it isn’t only acceptable but necessary.
Changing paths is a risk, and when supported, they learn that people around them value them regardless of how they perform.
Excerpted from The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma by Soraya Chemaly. Copyright 2024, Soraya Chemaly Published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books.
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