Austin Scholar #213: How to talk to your kid when they want to quit

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. How to talk to your kid when they want to quit

2. Scholar’s Sources: Be a creator, not a consumer

It’s the end of session four at Alpha New York, which means a few things:

• We received the student feedback surveys and will be using them to make session five EVEN COOLER

• We’re launching new life skills workshops next week (which I’ve had so much fun helping the guides plan)

• I get to work from home this week! (aka I don’t have to wake up at 7am for school)

Such exciting things, so stay tuned for more on the new life skills workshops!

This last week I’ve been thinking a lot about grit.

Tuesday at our NYC campus, our students had a test to pass. The whole thing was built around grit, growth mindset, and, more specifically, bouldering.

Quick aside for newer readers: at Alpha, a “test to pass” isn’t a paper test. It’s a real-world assessment where students prove they’ve internalized a life skill they’ve been training for weeks. For this test, the kids (K-8) had been bouldering every Tuesday. They’d been learning both the technical stuff (footwork, body positioning, how to read a route) and the mental stuff. The growth mindset part. What to do when your fingers are shaking and the hold is just out of reach.

Kids started this workshop too scared to take both feet off the ground and pass their test by sprinting up routes I would not have even dared to attempt. I watched a girl freeze halfway up the wall, cry, hang there for a full minute, and then keep climbing. I watched another kid fall off the same problem maybe fifteen times and try harder each time. By the end I was tearing up in the corner like a soccer mom.

Then – and this is the part that made me actually want to write about grit – I went to a Stanford in New York alumni event the very next night. I asked an entrepreneur there what life skill he’s found most valuable. Without missing a beat: resilience and grit. Then he told me Angela Duckworth’s Grit is the single most useful book he’s ever read and that he hopes every student in the country reads it.

So: two days, two completely different rooms, the same lesson. That’s hard to ignore.

I covered the actual science of Duckworth’s research a few newsletters back (#208, if you missed it). This one is different. This one is for parents who already buy the premise that grit matters and that you want your kid to have more of it, but want to know what to actually do at home.

We’ll start with a quick refresher on the book, then get into practical steps you can take.

Most people familiar with Duckworth’s work know the headline: grit beats talent over the long run. They’ve seen the TED talk. That’s fine, but you can miss a lot of the core insights layered throughout the book.

Here are the parts that don’t make the rounds, and that I think actually matter more for parenting.

Grit is mostly about staying interested, not about toughing it out. This one caught me off guard the first time I read the book. We picture grit as gritted teeth and clenched fists. Duckworth’s research keeps pointing the other way. The grittiest people she studied are weirdly, persistently fascinated by their thing. The toughness comes downstream of the interest. If your kid is white-knuckling through something they hate, that isn’t grit. That’s compliance motivated by the desire to follow rules or adhere to expectations.

Hope, in Duckworth’s framing, is not optimism. Optimism is “things will probably work out.” Hope is “I can do something about this.” Gritty people, even after they fail, keep believing their effort changes the outcome. Optimism is passive. Hope is operational. Worth the distinction.

Parenting style matters less than parenting consistency. The book pretty firmly debunks the “you have to be tough on them” story. What Duckworth’s research actually shows is that gritty kids tend to come from homes that are both warm and demanding (high support, high standards) applied the same way on Tuesday as on Saturday. Not one or the other. Not different on different days.

There’s a “Hard Thing Rule” she runs in her own family. Everyone in the Duckworth household, kids and parents, has to be doing one hard thing. You get to pick it. You have to practice it. You can’t quit in the middle of a season — when the season ends, you can pick something new. I think about this rule constantly.

So what can you actually do this week to help your kid build grit?

You don’t need to send your kid to Alpha to build grit (though we’d love to have you). Here are six things that work, in rough order of how easy they are to start tomorrow.

1. Pick a hard thing as a family. Duckworth’s Hard Thing Rule, but lower stakes to start. One thing each. It can be Spanish on Duolingo, learning to skateboard, weekly piano. The only constraints are that it’s voluntary, it’s practiced regularly, and it has a defined endpoint (a recital, a belt test, the end of a sports season) so that quitting is a decision and not a drift.

2. Failure is fuel. When something doesn’t go well for you, narrate it out loud at dinner. “I gave a presentation today and it bombed. Here’s what I think happened. Here’s what I’d try next time.” Modeling matters way more than lecturing. Your kid is also watching how you treat your own failures, not just how you talk about theirs. The kids at Alpha learn the saying “failure is fuel,” and they loudly exclaimed it before they started their bouldering test to pass. That might be a good saying to teach your kid :)

3. I can’t do it YET. One of the Alpha NYC mascots is our Yet Yeti, which reminds kids that if they’re struggling with something, it’s not that they can’t do it, just that they can’t do it YET. It can be natural for kids to fail at something and lament that they just can’t do it. (I was guilty of this too, trust me!) But it’s important to remind kids that, if they continue to work at it, they will be able to do it. They just can’t do it yet. You, too, can buy your kid a Yet Yeti and set it next to them at the dinner table when they’re trying to solve math problems or messing up a part of their piano piece to remind them that they just can’t do it yet.

4. Find them one coach who’s harder on them than you are. Sounds counterintuitive coming from a school famous for not having teachers, but it’s not. The point is exposure to an outside adult whose feedback they trust and who won’t soften the truth. A piano teacher, a wrestling coach, a chess club mentor. Someone who can say “that wasn’t your best” without it turning into a Thing.

5. Schedule the part they want to skip. The deliberate practice research is unambiguous on this: meaningful gains come from working on the part you’re worst at, not the part you already enjoy. Help your kid identify the specific weak link (e.g. the F# barre chord, the second mile, the long division step) and put fifteen minutes of practice on it on a specific day. If there’s more scaffolding put in place to help get through the hardest parts, they’ll continue building up the skill.

6. Take them somewhere their body has to keep going. Bouldering, hiking, open water swimming, long bike rides. Something where the body is the proof. I’ve watched too many kids walk taller into school the day after they finished a route they were scared of to think it’s a coincidence.

Now, to get to the question most parents have: how should I talk to my kid when they want to quit?

This is where most well-meaning parents I talk to get stuck. The kid is in tears. They want to quit. You don’t want to be the parent who broke them, but you also don’t want to teach them that crying gets you out of hard things.

A few scripts that work, drawn from the families and guides I’ve watched do this well.