Posted on 05/15/2013 4:59:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
Are you a real man (or woman)? Do you have "grit"?
Compare yourself to the man on the $20 bill: Andrew Jackson, our seventh president.
During the Revolutionary War, Jackson volunteered to fight. He was just 13 years old at the time. The British captured him and made him a servant for British officers. When one ordered Jackson to clean his boots, Jackson refused, and the officer slashed Jackson's hand with a sword. When Jackson became president, he showed off the scar.
Jackson had grit.
Do your kids have that much grit today? I doubt it. Parents now try to protect kids from all danger. In New York City, some won't let teenagers go to school by themselves.
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, thinks that's absurd.
"Free-range kids are kids we believe in," she told me. "They can do things on their own."
Once she allowed her own 9-year-old to ride the subway alone. After she wrote about that, she was labeled "World's Worst Mom." Really. Google "world's worst mom." Skenazy's name comes up.
Free-Range Kids promotes events like "Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day." Skenazy says leaving kids in the park without adult supervision teaches them grit. Kids get used to bugs, rocks and a lack of constant supervision. They become leaders by discovering how to organize their own lives without parents bossing them around.
And they are not likely to be kidnapped. The horror of what happened to the three women in Cleveland makes all of us more frightened of sexual assaults and other threats. Skenazy says that today's parents are so frightened that only 6 percent allow young kids to play outside unsupervised. But the risk of harm is small, and we put our kids at greater risk, says Skenazy, if we don't allow them the freedom to learn from their own mistakes -- to acquire grit.
It shouldn't surprise me that parents want to shelter their kids from all risk. The parents themselves live in a society where risk is less and less acceptable. We expect regulations to protect us from accidents. We expect police to protect us from every imaginable criminal threat. We demand welfare, unemployment insurance and bailouts to protect every level of society from economic risk. When something goes wrong, we sue.
It wasn't always like this.
Our country's founders left relatively safe places to tough it out in the wilderness, to turn what a character in a John Wayne movie called "empty land used for nothin'" into ranches and farms. Doing that required long days spent hunting, plowing, fighting off enemies, digging in through cold winters, sometimes starving, losing children, losing wives and husbands -- it took grit to create American civilization.
Grit requires delaying gratification, wanting something bigger than yourself.
As John Wayne's character himself put it in The Big Trail: "We're building a nation. We've got to suffer. No great trail was ever blazed without hardship. That's life."
Grit is the stuff of life. Greatness is often achieved only after repeated failure.
Cartoonist Charles Schulz had every cartoon he submitted to his high school yearbook rejected. "Peanuts" later became one of the most successful cartoons of all time.
Thomas Edison's teachers told his mom he was "too stupid to learn." Edison went on to accumulate 1,000 U.S. patents. His success with the light bulb followed 1,000 unsuccessful attempts. That's grit.
It's great that we live in a wealthy country -- one with a welfare state so big that we now worry about poor people getting fat. But what makes most people happy is not comfort. It's earned success, success you struggle for.
The opposite of earned success, says psychologist Martin Seligman, is "learned helplessness." In lab experiments, when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people's happiness. It produced helplessness. People gave up, became passive.
That passivity (and America's welfare state) is a threat to our future. Everyone goes through pain and loss. We face obstacles. It's the struggle to overcome obstacles that matters.
That's the stuff of life -- and the route to happiness and prosperity.
If you don’t work you don’t eat.
Negligence is not teaching “grit”, it is parental negligence because the parent is too busy having a sex life or a drug high or going on a binge or getting divorced. What kids need is not riding the subway or being dumped in the park or the toy store, they need intact families with fathers who work.
In biblical times, and in frontier times, children worked with their parents..mainly, so the parents could protect the kids from marauding tribes kidnapping them.
“Negligence is not teaching “grit”, it is parental negligence because the parent is too busy having a sex life or a drug high or going on a binge or getting divorced. What kids need is not riding the subway or being dumped in the park or the toy store, they need intact families with fathers who work.”
Letting a kid play outside and go to friend’s houses unsupervised is not negligence. As a 9-10 YO kid I would sometimes leave in the morning to play with friends and only come home for supper. We rode bikes everywhere, miles from home, in the woods, fields, abandoned buildings, anyplace interesting. We didnt need or want our parents supervision and they didnt worry because such things were normal. My mom would tell me that women would go into department stores to shop and there would be lines of strollers with infants left outside (Ok that would freak me out a little today). Kids need to learn independence and they cant do it under patental supervision.
Oh lord give me a frickin break, my dad says the same thing, gone all day and have to be home by dark.............blah blah blah. Take your kids backpacking, hiking, skiing, fishing, canoeing in Canada, scuba diving, to the beach, sign them up for camp for 10 days or more, send them on mission trips to help others, these are the ways to develop them.
“Oh lord give me a frickin break, my dad says the same thing, gone all day and have to be home by dark.............blah blah blah.”
OK there are clearly some personal family issues that you are dealing with that I will not comment on. For everyone else that is the way things were done and the vast majority of us turned out fine, didnt feel abandoned, unloved, get kidnapped, murdered, abused, disappeared, fall down a well, get hit by cars etc.
You’re missing the point -— which is: to let the kids ALONE. Let them think for themselves, do for themselves, solve problems for themselves. All the activities you mentioned are wonderful, but should be in addition to, not instead of self-directed playtime & adventures.
It’s just like the walked to school 5 miles in the snow story
Not quite sure what the picture of guys looking at snow brushes has to do with this story.
Uphill both ways and barefoot. That’s the way I did it :)
What do you use to get grit off? A brush
If you add some grit to the walkway, it’ll make the snow melt faster.
lol
“It’s just like the walked to school 5 miles in the snow story”
I grew up in Brooklyn and there were no school buses. Kids WALKED to school, usually alone or with friends. From 1st grade to 5th I walked the 6 blocks to school in the city, rain, snow etc. In JHS school was 1.5 miles away, same thing. Now I see parents waitng in the car with their kids for the school bus at the end of their block so little Johnny wont have to wait in the 50 degree cold. Its just silly.
“What do you use to get grit off? A brush”
Real men leave the grit on.
it’s not the cold it’s the pervs
Jackson was a punk who showed contempt for the Constitution.
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