Effort counts for a lot in learning—and it's eroding

Photo: Vince Fleming for Unsplash

“How do I know when to push my daughter, and when to support her?” a mom asked me at a recent event. She herself came from a traditional Mexican family, she explained, where expectations were clear: she needed to do well in school, respect her elders, and follow whatever rules her parents set. “It feels so different now,” she said. “I worry more about her mental health, I don’t know what’s too much.”

I have been asked versions of this question hundreds of times.

It’s the parenting paradox of our day. We feel the need to toughen kids up, set expectations higher, and give them more autonomy and independence. But when we look at the kids in front of us, we wonder if it’s too much. Maybe we’re misjudging what they are capable of; or maybe we’re living in such radically different times than those we grew up in, that the models our parents followed (the 1990s-bull-market-end-of-history one, in my case) aren’t fit for purpose with the kids we actually have to parent.

We want to push our kids but we don’t want them to break.

We want them to succeed, but not at all costs.

We want them to be kind and to have good values, but not be so naïve they get stepped on and elbowed aside.

We want them to excel in school, but not also find things out of school that light them up; their spark.

We want them to feel prepared for a crazy uncertain job market…but they’re teenagers! How on earth did we get to a place where we are talking about employment in the 6th or 8th grades?

We want them to be savvy with tech, prepared to use it and understand it, but not reliant on it.

In the face of all our efforts, we see a lot of kids doing less well in school by many measures, and struggling with many issues: mental health, social media to simply, how to spend their time. (A minority of kids are doing even more school/extra curriculars, with the bar for excellence rising higher and perfectionism soaring).

It’s not an easy moment to be a teen, or the parent of one.

Tim Daly of wrote a great piece trying to deconstruct why so many kids are performing worse in school.

He didn’t find it was all screens, but rather a complex cocktail of causes. He looked at what happened to kids who entered school in 2010, and tested off the charts in 2015, but whose performance then plummeted. Was it phones? Edtech?

Daly discovered that it was a lot of things, and then studied those causes using newly-released data from the Education Scorecard, a partnership between the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University and the Educational Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University.

Daly found four trends in the kids whose school performance had significantly fallen:

• The children read a lot less for fun, outside school

• They used more screens in school

• They were assigned less homework

• Teachers focused less on tests.1

Do the four things above have anything in common? (Especially given that being assigned less homework, and teachers caring less about tests, might read as positive for some parents, and indeed there are teachers and schools that advocate for that approach.) In Daly’s assessment, there is a clear link between all four:

“The common thread is effort,” he wrote. “Reading a book requires sustained effort. Homework requires sustained effort. Showing up every day requires sustained effort. Preparing for tests requires sustained effort. These are ordinary habits that build a student’s mental capacity over time.”

Daly argues it started, not in school, and not with kids, but with parents. “First, grown folks modeled screen infatuation and less reading. Then, young folks increasingly did the same.” Schools followed suit making changes he said were “understandable — perhaps unavoidable.”

Daly argues that adults, throughout the system, adapted as kids’ effort dropped. Parents also adapted. In a vicious cycle, we caved to the screentime, schools/teachers caved to edtech, and expectations dropped. In the US, many colleges lowered entrance requirements, and grade inflation soared.

As a result, achievement fell. A lot.

It seems like we are lowering standards and expectations everywhere: with phones and behavior, with grades and with testing.

We don’t want to push kids to achieve at all costs. But we do certainly want them to be able to put in effort where and when it matters because that’s how anyone learns anything. And that requires practice at putting in that effort: at home, with parents pushing and supporting, and in classrooms, where teachers stretch kids, and scaffold the journey.

The fact is, learning is hard.

To learn something you first have to not know and not understand it, and be bad at it for a while, often in front of your peers. Then, you do the work to get better at it. Hopefully, you achieve competence, and possibly even mastery of it, eventually. Mastery feels good. But slogging toward mastery can be a drag. Especially when everyone else is watching.

“Productive struggle” or “desirable difficulties” are well-worn terms in education. Kids often have to struggle, productively, toward a goal, or face a certain amount of difficulty, to learn anything meaningful.

Too often, parents circumvent this struggle. They help with the math to alleviate the pain of watching a child flounder, or they edit the essay to make it sound better, and maybe get a higher grade or mark. But that short-term help creates long-term challenges. The kid has finished the page of equations and might have an A for their essay, but they haven’t mastered the math skills, or shown their teacher where they are struggling. As far as that teacher knows, the kid gets it all, because the homework doesn’t bear the signs of struggle.

Perhaps most importantly, this parental approach reduces the effort a kid needs to make. This feels good as a parent. To fix something, to alleviate math-induced misery, to seem smart about writing. But the effort is the point. It’s the muscles. Take away the reps and the kid will not get stronger.

If there is one thing we need kids to do, it’s to generate effort: to care and to put forth the energy to do the work and dig in. One of the greatest threats of AI is that it reduces effort. The effort needed to make friends, to write an essay, even to ask a question. That’s exactly what we don’t need right now.

Big tech does not care. They want engagement with their products. So they make LLMs that are sycophantic (who doesn’t love to be loved?), non judgemental, and remove friction.

Effort can feel complicated in school. My girls told me the worst thing you could be in classes was a “pick me” - the ass kisser, the suck up. That’s not what effort is. Effort is about grounding oneself in why something matters and going for it. It requires bravery which is why it is so bloody hard.

While I like to think of myself as a “tough love” kind of parent, I’m not. I’m more of an “unconditional love kind” of parent.

I have very high expectations around effort, and do offer a lot of freedom (the lines in my forehead are testimony to that). But I try not to have too many expectations around outcomes; we can only control what we can control.

I am also in unfamiliar terrain: British schools which have zero grade inflation — kids come home with 60s and 70s all the time — and are obsessed with tests. Effort is recognized on school reports, but not on anything that is used for college admissions or signalled to anyone but parents. After two years of high school, a kid’s “record” is made up of their existing test scores, which are submitted to universities along with the predicted outcomes of tests they haven’t yet taken (A-levels or the International Baccalaureate). If a GPA is used in the US reflects achievement and effort, GCSEs and A-levels reflect how well you learned two years of content for 22-25 tests, and how well you take that battery of tests — arguably a measure of stamina and support received, along with effort and intelligence.

As a parent, I’ve found this system confounding. It’s all about outcomes, and hardly at all about process. So I have stuck to my mantra: Give it everything you’ve got, but don’t worry about the outcome. (My kids find this message annoying: “The outcome matters mom. Stop saying that.” But what else am I going to say? “You better get top grades or else no dinner”?)

This is the line I struggle to walk. I try to support them with presence, with interest and coaching, with suggestions to always reach out to teachers or subject experts if they need more help. We can model effort, but we can’t extract it from them. I often get it wrong, (usually on the side of being too gentle, too willing to accommodate, and not tough enough). The result? Two kids who work very impressively hard but know there’s a lot of love whatever happens.

Where I err, it’s often on the do-too-much for them side. At 13, my daughter was diagnosed with celiac. It’s life-changing for her, and also for us, and we tried to protect her. We called restaurants ahead of time and spoke with other parents. When we were out, we took the lead explaining the situation to waiting staff or friends. (Celiac is an autoimmune disease. That means any trace of gluten sets the system alight, ultimately destroying the villi in the upper intestine. These villi absorb nutrients, and are essential for good health. If a knife has touched bread and then is used to cut a tomato, that tiny trace of gluten will negatively affect the celiac in the same way eating a piece of bread would. Food therefore needs to be prepared separately and cooked in different pans, with untainted utensils).

It’s hell for her and hell for us helping her navigate it. But a few years into having the diagnosis, our daughter told us she wanted to do it all herself: she would manage cooking her own lunch, and often our family’s dinner; talk to servers; navigate the dance of not wanting to be a burden to others, while being desperate to stay safe.

I had wanted to take it all on for her. I thought it was too much for a 13-year-old to have to explain to a 25-year-old waiter that he needed to go to the kitchen and find out whether the fries are cooked in the same oil as breaded chicken. I wanted to relieve her of the effort. But it was only when she took it on that she felt empowered.

With trial and error. With love. But always erring on the side of pushing them harder, not for the outcomes, but for the process and the effort.

Some more things that help, and please bear with me if they seem obvious:

• Don’t compromise on sleep. That’s where you can intervene and help them regenerate and get ready for effort in the days to come.

• No screens at bedtime, which rob them of sleep and mental rest.

• Put down your own phone. Model trying hard. You may be doing this on your device, but it’s not obvious and never will be, so do it in other ways.

• Read. The whole family, as much as you can. Order magazines in print and leave them around. Have a recommended book list written and pinned up and tick them off as you read them (I did one last year for teens.)

• When it comes to homework, suggest they make a plan. Have them evaluate that plan. Do not be frustrated when the plan fails, even if it fails a lot. Help them start early so they have plenty of time. Try to make sure it’s done well. Do not shame them, ever. This process builds what’s called metacognitive skills or the ability to think about one’s own thinking.

• Help them research and navigate the awkwardness of getting into the real world, doing things that get them off of screens and doing stuff, whether it be getting a job, playing flag football or painting, joining a choir or dog walking. Activities they enjoy will spark effort, and hopefully show them reward for that effort. For more on many ideas around how to do this, see Mike’s great CTF blog. He looks at the mechanics of this and does not sugar coat how hard it is to get a kid who does NOT want to do things to try and do them.