Research on Children’s Persistence Shows Parental Role Modeling Critical
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published a study on how children persist in the face of challenges.
The authors of the research worked with 520 children ages 4 and 5 years old. The goal of the research was to examine how adult role models impact a child’s ability to persist.
The premise of the study is that having persistence is the key to learning and academic success. Persistence is a characteristic closely related to resilience, which I write about often. This is why this research caught my eye. I believe the findings of this research would match if the same premise was applied to studying a child’s resilience.
With that said, the researchers published the following outcomes in their results:
- Children tried harder after they saw adults succeed than after they saw them fail at a task.
- Adults’ efforts affected children’s persistence, but only when the adults succeeded at their task.
- Children’s persistence was highest when adults exerted effort at their task, succeeded, and talked about the value of making that effort.
According to the authors, these findings show that young children are attentively watching the adults around them and actively learning from their words, efforts, and outcomes… The study suggests that to encourage children’s persistence, adults should show children how hard work leads to success by demonstrating this in their own actions and by speaking about the value of effort.