Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain. But instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it.1
—Brené Brown, researcher, author, motivational speaker
Some years ago my Stanford colleague Adina Glickman noticed that increasing numbers of our students lacked the wherewithal to cope with adversity (including Bs). Adina is an academic skills coach who oversees academic support programs and coaches students in time management, overcoming test anxiety and procrastination, note taking, and other study skills. Concerned by the increase in the number of students who were having trouble coping with anything less than the perfect level of performance that characterized their childhood, Adina consulted with Harvard’s Abigail Lipson, who had started the Success-Failure Project there and produced a booklet called Reflections on Rejections. Together, Adina and Abigail determined that more and more students today are “failure deprived.”
If students are in their late teens or early twenties when they first face their own very normal human trait of imperfection, they’ll lack the “brush it off, get back on the horse, try again, persevere through it” mentality they could—should—have cultivated in childhood. Adina went on to found the Stanford Resilience Project, which includes an online library of videos and PDFs from members of the Stanford community—including students, a Supreme Court justice, a favorite computer science professor, and me—who share their struggles, failures, and rejections, how they coped with them, and what they learned.2 The aim of the project is to “normalize” struggle—to give students a sense that struggle happens to everybody, and that they need not be ashamed when they experience it—and to demonstrate that struggle teaches us lessons and opens up new possibilities. Early studies suggest the Stanford Resilience Project is having a positive impact on undergraduates.
But a fear of failure and lack of ability to cope with struggle isn’t only a problem among young adults at Stanford or Harvard. It’s a growing facet of life in middle- and upper-middle-class America today as well as elsewhere in the world.
The internationally known educator Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED Talk on how we’re killing creativity in children is the number one TED talk of all time, clocking in at over 28 million views, said in that talk: “We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. [But] if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.”3 Even kids intending to be officers in the military are not immune. “We talk at West Point and in the army about young men and women today being less resilient than they ever were,” Colonel Leon Robert, professor and head of the Department of Chemistry and Life Science at West Point, told me.4 “With some of our new cadets right out of high school, if you raise your voice they get teary-eyed. Like no one has corrected them on a behavior before. You’ve got to be able to have a setback, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and drive on.” A lack of resilience is common among addicts. Harriet Rossetto of the Beit T’Shuvah rehab facility in L.A. says, “The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you’re prevented from feeling discomfort or failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all.”5 A lack of resilience will also impact young adults in the workplace. Phil Gardner, the Michigan State University collegiate employment expert, told me, “Employers like kids with work ethic and resilience, which can often be the middle- and low-income, or blue-collar kids.”6 Eric Scroggins, executive director of Teach For America–Bay Area, concurs: “We select for grit and resilience. We’re not just pulling randomly from the population of twenty-two-year-olds; we are taking the top 15 percent of the high achieving who show a record of perseverance.”7
Back at Stanford, my sense of what was happening went something like this: If you take a culture of high academic achievement at all costs and add a parent’s vigilance at smoothing the rough spots of life—in play, in academic outcomes, in interpersonal relations, and you heap on exaggerated praise like “great job” and “perfect” regardless of whether the task or accomplishment had any objective merit—you can actually set a kid up for a breakdown in college where consequences such as Bs, Cs, Ds, or even Fs will happen, along with misunderstandings with roommates, and rejection from teams, clubs, fraternities, and sororities and from opportunities, and where parents can no longer fix those outcomes.
Remember Stephen Parkhurst, the aspiring filmmaker who created the Millennials video? One day when he felt he was wasting away working as a valet while wondering when his stunning brilliance as a filmmaker would be recognized by others, he recalled his mother’s frequent refrain: “All you need is a positive attitude and great things will happen.” While as a kid it had made him feel good, when he was struggling out in the real world he resented it.8 “What she had been saying was bullshit; it was that coddling parent thing,” he recalls thinking. He knows his mother was only saying what parents in that era had been encouraged to say, and that she was doing her best. Still, his advice for parents today is that yes, of course, tell kids they can achieve greatness. “But remember also to tell them just how hard you have to work to accomplish these things.”
Colonel Robert at West Point agrees with Stephen Parkhurst on this point.9 “People need to take personal responsibility and accept the objective quality of their own work,” Robert says. “We are not all superstars and we’ve got to stop telling everyone they are.” Bill Deresiewicz also laments this superstar mentality. “You want to make it to the top?” he asks. “There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you.… I can tell you right now where you’re going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us.”10
Depriving our kids of the chance to struggle and to learn to persevere, while we focus instead on prepping them to be the number one at all things and tell them how awesome they are, is a prime example of our best intentions gone awry. Perhaps we didn’t realize that “protecting” our kids from falls and failures could hurt them. But it can. We need to redefine success as being a good and kind person, and as making a strong effort whether they ultimately win or lose. We need to help our children gain resilience to cope when things don’t go their way. But how do we do this, since none of us can easily stomach seeing our kids suffer?
Sometimes I joke that when parents in communities like mine get wind that colleges value skills like perseverance and resilience, they’ll start up a hardship summer camp instead of closely examining what it is about childhood that deprives kids of developing these traits naturally. Could this happen? Elite college admission seems like a holy grail and at times we do truly wacky things in order to obtain it—such as writing our kid’s application for them. But we can’t buy resilience for them in the way we buy tutoring, coaching, test prep, and college counseling. Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.
So how do we prepare middle- and upper-middle-class kids to thrive, then, to lean in to life, to persevere, when the rough edges of life have been sanded off by the very privilege we worked so hard to be able to provide for them? How do we raise them not to be veal running for home in the face of the world’s slaughter but to be warriors? How can they aspire to achieve excellence and hunger for success if they’ve been given so much and have never hungered for much at all? James Willcox, CEO of the Aspire Public Schools, who educates underserved kids at work while raising his own three daughters amid affluence at home, says, with a deep sigh, “We’ve got to let our kids fail. We’ve got to let them struggle. It seems really basic, but it’s very hard to do.”11
At an intellectual level we may understand the value of letting go and letting them make mistakes or fail, yet it’s a deeply unsatisfying directive because as parents we want so much to affirmatively do something. There is good news: There is something we can do to normalize struggle for our kids and help them build the toughness they’ll need in order to thrive as adults in the world. We can help them become resilient.
BUILDING RESILIENCE IN KIDS
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity. It’s what gives us the will to go on. Wisdom and advice on how to build resilience in children come from an abundance of sources representing various fields—from medicine, to psychology, to social work, to youth mentoring, to religion and spirituality, to literature. Here are a few examples:
Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychology professor who pioneered the concept and practice of “Growth Mindset” we discussed in Chapter 15 (“Teach Them How to Think”), is a great place to start.12 Focused on undoing the “fixed mindset” that comes from praising kids for being smart and results in kids avoiding harder challenges because they don’t want to receive results contradicting this “smart” label, Dweck teaches that we must instead teach kids that it’s their effort (something they have control over), not some innate level of intelligence (something they have no control over), that leads to ever higher levels of achievement. The mantra with growth mindset is to keep going, keep trying, and learn through effort that you can get where you want to go; in a sense, Dweck is teaching resilience when it comes to learning.
New York Times best-selling author, researcher, and beloved storyteller Brené Brown teaches what I think of as the resilience of spirit. In recent years, through inspirational works such as The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are and Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, Brown has become the nation’s thought leader on subjects most of us have a very hard time discussing: vulnerability, imperfection, and shame.13 These are the very emotions in which we stew when something has gone wrong or when we anticipate a bad outcome happening, and the very emotions that can erode resilience if we give in to them. Brown’s 2010 TEDxHouston talk (currently the fourth-most-watched TED Talk ever at more than 16 million views) touched this nation’s nerve.14 Through her research and empathetic manner of storytelling, Brown helps her audiences and readers appreciate how accepting our fears, imperfections, and vulnerabilities can lead us to a more joyful, happy life. She coined the term “Wholehearted Living” and describes a “Wholehearted” person as someone who can go to bed each night thinking, “Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”
University of Pennsylvania researcher Angela Duckworth developed the concept of “grit,” which is the ability to sustain interest in and effort toward a very long-term goal.15 Her research shows that a high level of grit leads to outcomes as diverse as surviving the arduous first summer of training at West Point, reaching the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee, retention in the U.S. Special Forces, retention and performance among novice teachers, and graduation from Chicago public high schools, over and beyond talent measures such as IQ, SAT, or other standardized achievement test scores and physical fitness. Grit also correlates with lifetime educational attainment and, inversely, lifetime career changes and divorce. I think of grit as resilience for the long haul.
Best-selling author of more than twenty-five books, Dr. Tim Elmore is the founder and president of Growing Leaders, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization. He writes and speaks about leadership training for young people and corporations. In his book Generation iY: Our Last Chance to Save Their Future, Elmore writes about “seven lies” we’ve told to the Millennial generation: “You can be anything you want to be; It’s your choice; You are special; Every kid ought to go to college; You can have it now; You’re a winner just because you participated; and You can get whatever you want.” He asserts that these “lies” have led Millennials to reach adulthood “emotionally unstable and socially naïve.”16 For Elmore, being honest and straightforward with kids build resilience.
Pediatrician and adolescent development specialist Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg has written a comprehensive and perhaps definitive text on building resilience in children—Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.17 In it he teaches that resilience is comprised of competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control, which he terms the “7 C’s,” and which emanate from the positive youth movement, itself an outgrowth of the positive psychology movement.
Taking a look at my Stanford students and their struggles, as well as what I’ve experienced over the years in my own life and in raising kids, and drawing upon the work of Carol Dweck, Brené Brown, Angela Duckworth, Tim Elmore, Kenneth Ginsburg, and others, my definition of resilience is simply this: It’s the ability to say to ourselves, “I’m okay. I can choose to figure this out, or figure out another way, or decide it’s not what I want after all. I’m still me. I’m still loved. Life goes on.” The following are my thoughts about how to build that kind of thinking in our kids.
TIPS FOR BUILDING RESILIENCE IN KIDS
1. Be present in your kid’s life. Overinvolved parents are known for hovering and swooping down when needed, yet, paradoxically, research indicates some are not making meaningful emotional connections with their kids or spending meaningful time with them. Here’s how you can build resilience in your kid by being present in their life:
• Show your love. When your kid gets home from school or activities, or you get home from work, set aside what you’re doing, step away from your computer, put down your smartphone, and let them see the joy their presence brings you. We need to know we matter to each other. We all need to know this. Something as seemingly simple as eye contact is enormously important; it’s the first step toward showing love, and feeling loved helps us be more resilient.
• Take an interest in them. Seek to get to know your kid a little bit more every day by taking an interest in their interests, ideas, experiences, and concerns. Choose your moment—after school, while cooking, over dinner, in the car, while walking the dog, at night before bedtime. Expand the stereotypical parent/child conversation from “How was your day?” “Fine,” into “How was your day?” “Fine.” “Really? Why was it fine? What happened that was great or not so great? And how did that make you feel?”
• Show them you care. Setbacks are a great time to demonstrate you love your kid unconditionally (no matter what). When they’ve had a setback, sit with them. Say that you can see it hurts. Perhaps do something to take their mind off of it. Help them think through ways they can achieve a different outcome next time. Tell them the story of something similar that happened to you. But don’t fall into the trap of blaming poor outcomes on someone else—the bad teacher, the biased judge, the unfair coach, the mean friend. And don’t try to take matters into your own hands. Instead tell them that sometimes these things happen in life, and yet, they also have a lot of control through their own efforts. Reassure them that you love them.
2. Also, back off. If we’re right there with them as they do everything (or checking up before, during, and after by cell phone), we’re undermining their confidence by indirectly sending the message “I don’t think you can do this without me.” Here’s how to build resilience in your kid by letting them have their own experience.
• Let them make choices and decide how to do things, such as: what to wear (if they’re small), whether it’s cool enough to take a coat (if they’re in middle school), in which order to do their evening activities, homework, and chores (if they’re in high school). Don’t micromanage them by checking in with them on every detail or nitpicking every piece of the outcome. It’s only through actual experience that kids develop skills and learn to trust their judgments, make responsible choices, and face difficult situations.
• Let them take risks and make mistakes. Making mistakes is the only way to learn. Unless your kid’s health or safety is truly at stake, risks taken and mistakes made when they’ve done something that was initially scary or hard will provide a tremendous sense of authentic accomplishment.
3. Help them grow from experience. You’re not meant to do nothing for them—you’re just not meant to do everything. Here’s how to help them grow from their own experiences.
• After the experience, decision, or choice has been made, engage in a questioning dialogue to unpack what your kid learned from the experience. If there’s a problem, help them think for themselves how to solve it. Say, for instance, Hmm, that sounds really tough. How do you think you want to handle that? We can offer advice. We can model a solution in our own lives. But we mustn’t do it for them.
• Continue to set the bar higher. Humans want to grow and learn, to be capable of more and more and more. As your kid demonstrates her trustworthiness and good judgment, you can give her more responsibility, opportunity, challenge, and freedom. This builds competence, which builds confidence, both of which build resilience.
• Combat perfectionism. The phrase “just do your best” is quixotic. Just do your best? The best is the very best you can give; there is nothing better. How is a child—or any one of us, for that matter—going to manage to always perform at that high standard without losing their minds? What we mean when we say “just do your best” is something more like “do the best you can in that moment” or the even more forgiving “try to give it your best effort.” These phrases acknowledge that in any moment a number of factors could weigh against our ability to do our actual best and that it’s the trying, the effort, that matters.
4. Build their character. Too often today our focus is on our kid’s academic and extracurricular outcomes and admissions results, instead of on who they are as human beings. Too many of us struggle well into middle age with whether our mothers or fathers are proud of what we’ve done with our lives. Everyone wants to be valued for who we are. A human’s worth comes not from our GPA but from our character, which is our degree of kindness, generosity, fairness, and willingness to work hard, among other things. Character boils down to what we do even when no one is looking or keeping score. People of good character are met with kindness, praise, and gratitude from the world, which helps bolster them against the inevitable setbacks they’ll experience. Let’s build resilience in our kids by showing them it’s not their grades and scores and trophies that make us proud; it’s their good character.
• Notice them being good. We can build character by noticing them being good and reflecting back on it with them afterward. For example, if they helped someone reach an item on a grocery store shelf, during the car ride home you can say, simply, “It was very kind of you to help that woman.” Or if they gave a sibling or a friend a chance to go first, or the extra turn, you can say, simply, “I saw when you [did that thing], and it was nice of you.” These are not the moments for “Perfect, wow, you’re amazing!” All you need to convey is: I saw you. I noticed. You’re a good person. When you do things like that it makes me proud. It will feel tremendously good to your kid to hear this, and they will seek to produce more of those moments.
• Help them develop perspective. Being aware that there are others who are worse off than they are allows your kid to recognize what they’re grateful for. Service doesn’t need to be done in a faraway country; in your local community there are people who are struggling to afford food and shelter. Doing service work as a family not only helps the person you’re serving, and feels good, but helps your kids develop perspective that will serve them in the moments of their own doldrums and over the long haul.
5. Give specific, authentic feedback. Late boomer, Gen X, and early Millennial parents are known for overpraising and for an inability to critique or discipline. Words like “perfect,” “brilliant,” “amazing,” “wonderful,” and “great” sound like compliments when they trip off our tongues, but over time they are daggers in the soul of a developing kid and end up undercutting resilience. Using terms like these at every turn gives our kids an inaccurate sense of their skills and talents, and leaves them fearful that any evidence to the contrary means that they are no longer good enough. As a result, as Dweck’s research shows, kids are motivated to play it safe in the classroom and in extracurricular activities rather than take on a higher-level challenge (which may lead to evidence that they are not so brilliant after all). Or they’ll push, push, push themselves to the extreme, becoming perfectionists who will do whatever you, their boss, or whomever else’s opinion they value wants. We want our kids to build real and lasting self-esteem that comes from making efforts and seeing good outcomes, not from what some third party (including a parent) seems to think of them. Here’s how authentic praise and constructive criticism can build resilience in our kids:
• How to praise. In the realm of school and activity-based accomplishments and achievements, it’s more loving and resilience-building to offer praise that is specific to the task accomplished. For example: (1) For a little kid—I like how you used all kinds of colors in that picture; (2) For an elementary schooler—I noticed how you pointed your toes throughout your whole ballet performance, just like your teacher asked; (3) For a middle schooler—You did a good job maneuvering the glue gun to make your school project. That can be so tricky; (4) For a high schooler—Your essay on Cyrano de Bergerac made such detailed references to Cyrano’s emotional turmoil. You really managed to get inside his head. Specific praise like this builds confidence because it shows we’ve paused for a moment to pay attention to what the kid has actually done.
• How to criticize. We want our kids to learn and grow, to better themselves, and to develop. The only way they can do that is by having a realistic assessment of their current performance. As with praise, we need to make sure to target the actions or efforts, not the person. Saying “You left your lunchbox in the hallway overnight and now there are ants swarming all over it. Please go wash it out. No, not later; it’ll only get worse.” is much more effective at correcting behavior than saying, “Why don’t you listen to me? I told you not to do that. Now we have ants.” And of course if we swoop in and handle the ants ourselves, we’ve taught them nothing. We want to criticize the action (which can be corrected) as opposed to saying or implying that our kid is a bad person (which can’t be changed).
6. Model it. As psychologist Madeline Levine said in her talk at our local high school, our kids see us as successful and aren’t aware of the twists and turns and setbacks we experienced—and continue to experience—in life along the way. One of the best ways to normalize struggle and build resilience is to let our kids know when we have, or have had, a setback—such as a failure or disappointment at work, or a falling out with a close friend—and that it got us down for a bit. Let them hear you say that maybe you did some things wrong, or could have done things differently, and you’ve learned for next time. Let them hear you reflect, and see you smile and move on.
LETTING THE BAD THINGS HAPPEN
Humans make mistakes. We always have, and we always will. Children are no exception; in fact, childhood is the training ground where mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and competencies including coping skills and resilience are developed. Deciding to allow our kids to have those essential experiences—to flail, fail, and fall—isn’t just a good way to help them learn and grow, it’s the best way. Mistakes can be life’s greatest teacher.
Jessica Lahey, teacher, writer for The Atlantic and New York Times, and author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed,18 has observed the phenomenon of overparenting in her classroom and written extensively about it. She says that when children make mistakes, parents must remember that “the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty.” She writes, “Year after year, my ‘best’ students—the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives—are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.”
And what about life’s so-called curveballs? We make mistakes. But sometimes negative consequences result even when we’ve done everything right. When life throws our kids a curveball, we do them no favors by jumping up and catching it for them unless it’s truly a matter of health and safety. They’ve got to be able to learn to catch those curveballs—or get out of the way—on their own.
In the 2000s, psychologist Michael Anderson and pediatrician Tim Johanson—both practicing in the Minneapolis area—began seeing kids and young adults who seemed to lack the perspective and perseverance that come from making mistakes and experiencing curveball moments. In their 2013 book GIST: The Essence of Raising Life-Ready Kids, they write that the main task for parents is to keep their children safe while raising them to adulthood, yet “in many homes, there is more concern about safety, followed by an emphasis on performance, but not nearly enough focus on preparation.”
“Preparation,” as Anderson and Johanson write about it in GIST, means being able to deal with whatever comes. They’ve fashioned the following list of the kinds of tough situations that offer kids the right preparation for adulthood. Caution: Things on this list might make you wince—which turns out to kind of be the point:
MISTAKES AND CURVEBALLS YOU MUST LET YOUR KID EXPERIENCE19
• Not being invited to a birthday party
• Experiencing the death of a pet
• Breaking a valuable vase
• Working hard on a paper and still getting a poor grade
• Having a car break down away from home
• Seeing the tree he planted die
• Being told that a class or camp is full
• Getting detention
• Missing a show because she was helping Grandma
• Having a fender bender
• Being blamed for something he didn’t do
• Having an event canceled because someone else misbehaved
• Being fired from a job
• Not making the varsity team
• Coming in last at something
• Being hit by another kid
• Rejecting something he had been taught
• Deeply regretting saying something she can’t take back
• Not being invited when friends are going out
• Being picked last for neighborhood kickball
Not only must you let your kids experience these things, you must appreciate their importance. Anderson and Johanson argue that parenting well means “learning to see events you might otherwise try to avoid or dread in your child’s life as growth-producing events” that build wisdom and perspective. When they occur, we parents should say silently to ourselves, “Perfect, that’s perfect—it’s just what he needed to happen at least once in his childhood.”
Best-selling author and psychologist Wendy Mogel would agree with Anderson and Johanson on this point. In The Blessing of a B Minus, Mogel says that letting these kinds of events happen to our kids is the equivalent of “giving them good suffering,” which prepares them to deal with the much more serious disappointments and difficulties that will arise in their adult life. By the time our kids leave home, Mogel says, our kids should be familiar with the “wave pattern of feelings” that will go like this: “I was feeling bad, but now, because I talked to my friend/went running/spoke to my professor/got some sleep/confronted my roommate about her boyfriend sleeping over/wrote up a plan to improve my soccer skills/went to the health center/actually finished some of my work, I notice that I feel better, and my parents had nothing to do with it.”20
“I feel better, and my parents had nothing to do with it,” the young adult in Mogel’s imagined scenario concludes. Indeed. Even though our impulse is to protect and prevent upset, we must step back, muzzle ourselves, and sit on our hands—whatever it takes so that they can figure out that they are capable of handling their discomfort, devising solutions, and moving on.
Eric Scroggins, executive director of Teach For America–Bay Area, has witnessed the right kind of parental engagement giving rise to resilience. “TFA is a tremendous opportunity for growth and leadership for the teacher. The most productive parents see that and try to serve as a sounding board for their children but not for excuse-making. They’ll say, kindly, ‘You signed up for this. Anything that is worth doing is challenging. What did you expect? How are you seeking out the resources you need and accessing the support available?’ The counterproductive parent—the enabler—will say, ‘You are in an unfair situation. I am going to do this and do that for you.’”21
HOW PRIVILEGE LEAVES US LACKING
In a rather ironic twist, poor and working-class kids, whose parents lack the financial resources, social capital, and sheer amount of time needed to engineer perfect outcomes at every turn, are sometimes fortified by their tougher life experiences and may end up much stronger than their affluent counterparts in the long run, a phenomenon Paul Tough considered in How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.22
At Aspire Public Schools, a national nonprofit headquartered in Oakland, California, the motto is “College for Certain.” The organization offers a comprehensive K–12 education to low-income kids, and Aspire’s motto is drilled into the kids beginning in kindergarten. By the time Aspire kids graduate from high school and go on to college, they’ve been hearing this phrase practically their whole lives. After fifteen years in the business, Aspire now runs thirty-eight schools in California and Tennessee, and has become one of the nation’s highest-performing high-poverty school systems. For the past four years, 100 percent of Aspire graduates have been accepted to college. Its teacher training program was profiled on the front page of the New York Times in October of 2014.23
At Aspire’s annual fund-raising gala in 2014, one of Aspire’s graduates, Rena Stone, now also a college graduate, spoke about how Aspire shaped her life.24 “Aspire became my home. It’s where I felt safe. Sometimes I would walk to Aspire Monarch Academy and sit in the parking lot. Or, I would sit in Ms. Reed’s classroom until eight p.m. bothering her while she tried to work. She never complained. Instead, she would offer to drive me home.” Rena then shared a very difficult time she faced in college at Fisk University, a historically black, private liberal arts institution in Nashville. “My sophomore year at Fisk University seemed a barricade, slowing my progression. It was my breaking point and the true test of both my strength and my resilience. The challenge was simple: I could not afford food and housing along with tuition. I had to make a choice between my future and the bare essentials needed to survive. At Aspire, they told me I could change the outcome of my life. Education was the key to changing that outcome.” Rena chose to be temporarily homeless and continue with classes. She graduated from Fisk and is now a teacher.
Aspire CEO James Willcox, a graduate of the United States Military Academy (West Point) who served in the army for close to eight years before heading to California to pursue a dual degree (MEd and MBA) from Stanford, has three daughters in their late teens and early twenties. He spoke with me about kids like Rena Stone and his “other (Aspire) kids.”25 He talked of the enormous, largely untapped potential that low-income students have and how they possess a degree of drive and perseverance that’s built through hardship and struggle. He openly shares that his own affluent, privileged children simply haven’t had the same struggle and hardship, and have never had the chance to build the same skills.
Willcox thinks of resilience as a toolbox with multiple trays of tools. One tray is filled with what your parents gave you. Another is filled with skills from your time in school, and the third tray is filled from life experiences. Every student goes off to college with a toolbox.
“Life experience is where I think students like Rena get an enormous number of tools that kids like mine will not have. The tools Rena has are forged through incredible hardship, and persevering over hard times, actually seeing hard times, experiencing them, experiencing very tough choices and tough trade-offs. Most middle-class and upper-income students just don’t face the same kinds of tough choices or truly hard times. Rena was homeless for a period during high school as well, and I am certain that experience is a piece of who she is. My children have never had an experience like that, and so they will lack that whole tray of tools when they go to college and start experiencing ‘hard times’ on their own, for the first time. Rena and every low-income student has huge untapped potential and incredible tools to navigate college and life. The rest of us need to figure out how we’re going to give our own children the same kinds of tools, in some other kind of less traumatic way.
“On the flip side Rena went off to college without a set of tools that the middle-income and upper-income kids do go with, which is the expectation that they will succeed, the belief system that they belong in college. If we can prepare students like Rena with those expectations—with the ‘college for certain’ mind-set—they are unstoppable. With the grit and perseverance they have inside them, their mind-set becomes not ‘Do I belong in college?’ but ‘Get out of my way.’ They can be so much more equipped than kids who really haven’t deeply struggled in life. With a college degree and a great education, they’re going to change the world.
“The life experience that Rena and other Aspire students have is as cruel as it is invaluable. If we can support them through it, they will have tools that will give them the perseverance and grit to get through anything. And, that’s the tool that’s the hardest to replicate.”
But it can be done.