In recent years, there has been widespread interest across both the research and public sectors in understanding how to promote children's lifelong success in a range of domains. While a focus on promoting success in children remains salient, equally salient in the research is how children fail—specifically, how children prevail in the face of failure, adversity, and other challenges over time. The chapter explores parenting and family factors that predict grit. This chapter investigates a range of parenting and family factors, including demographic characteristics, parenting behaviors and styles, and family cultural and environmental factors. Based on this research, the chapter provides overarching recommendations to researchers seeking to understand grit in a family context.
TopIntroduction
In 2012, Dr. Paul Tough published the renowned book, “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character,” contributing to widespread interest in why “some children succeed, while others fail” across the research and public sectors. In this book, Tough synthesized research that emphasizes the critical role of “character” in child development, which catalyzed efforts among families, practitioners, and researchers to explore the mechanisms underlying character development and how children succeed more broadly. While Dr. Tough’s focus on promoting success in children remains salient, equally salient is how children fail—specifically, how children prevail in the face of failure, adversity, and other challenges over time.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore parenting and family factors that predict a key element of character— grit, i.e., “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007), a construct that has been substantially developed and explored by Dr. Angela Duckworth. This chapter will provide a rationale for the importance of grit; review research on parenting practices and aspects of families’ environment that may promote grit in children; and synthesize findings to provide overarching recommendations to families, professionals, and researchers. Specifically, this chapter will address the following objectives:
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Review the research on grit across developmental contexts to underscore its significance in the empirical research and highlight the rationale for exploring predictors of grit;
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Investigate the role of specific parenting characteristics in predicting children’s grit, including demographic characteristics and parenting behaviors and styles;
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Explore the impact of broader family factors in promoting grit, including cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental factors; and
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Provide overarching recommendations to researchers interested in understanding and cultivating grit in the family context.
TopBackground
Rationale for Investigating Grit
The last decade has witnessed an emergence of numerous research studies on grit, defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). Grit has garnered widespread attention, largely due to the finding that it accounts for an average of four percent of the variance in lifetime success outcomes and has been found to be more predictive of success than traditional measures of IQ. Moreover, research has found that outcomes associated with grit are wide-ranging and diverse. Grit has been found to be predictive of numerous educational outcomes, including educational attainment in adults, grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates, and ranking in the National Spelling Bee (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). In addition, grit has been identified as an important predictor of professional success due to its role in predicting retention in United States Military Academy West Point cadets, success among entrepreneurs, and overall career decision self-efficacy (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007; Mooradian, Matzler, Uzelac, & Bauer, 2016; Vela, Sparrow, Whittenberg, & Rodriguez, 2018).
Further, the implications of grit extend far beyond educational or professional success, predicting a range of non-cognitive skills including the Big Five conscientiousness component, forgiveness, and positive well-being (Arya & Lal, 2018; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007; Walker, 2017). In fact, Eskreis-Winkler, Duckworth, Shulman, & Beal (2014) investigated “the grit effect” by exploring grit in four contexts: the military, the workplace, high school, and marriage. This study found that grit was a more effective predictor of retention in these contexts than more traditional predictors of retention, including intelligence, physical aptitude, the Big Five personality traits, and job tenure.