“Kids These Days Are Soft”
What whitetail damselfish can teach us about resilience
In 2015, scientists did some research on the survival rates of juvenile coral reef fish. They wanted to look at the impact that the environment they were raised in had on their ultimate chance of surviving on the reef.
To do this, they collected “settlement-stage” (before they transitioned to the reef) juvenile whitetail damselfish and raised them in two different environments. One that was high-risk and the other low-risk. Within those two environments, they also added the presence of common reef predators to half of each group. This created 4 different groups: low-risk without predators, low-risk with predators, high-risk without predators, and high-risk with predators.
Once released to the reef, the analysis showed a significant difference in survival rates between the groups with high-risk fish surviving more than low-risk fish and those raised in the presence of predators (“trained”) surviving more than those not.
To cite the study: “Post-hoc comparisons revealed three outcomes: untrained fish in the high-risk group survived as well as trained fish in the low-risk group; trained fish in the high-risk group survived significantly more than fish in any other treatment, while untrained fish in the low-risk group survived significantly less than fish in any other treatments.”
What’s the takeaway? If you want to give whitetail damselfish the best chance of survival, don’t coddle them when they’re young. Raise them in a high-risk environment with the presence of predators. Want to give them the worst chance? Raise them in a low-risk environment with no predators present.
So it is with kids, I think. The toughest kids I know come from homes with high expectations where they were exposed to adversity and allowed to fail. Kids who have had low expectations placed on them in an environment where they were protected from failure tend to be much less tough. Dare I say, soft.
I think that’s the key. As parents of young athletes, we can do two things: have high expectations for our kids and expose them to adversity where they are allowed to fail and taught to take personal accountability when they do.
Too often as a parent, I find myself doing everything I can to make sure my child is in a “safe” environment and trying to remove any obstacles that might get in the way of their success. This is probably well-intentioned and feels right at the time, but if you look at the long-term impact, I’m actually giving them the worst chance at “survival” possible. If I keep that up, my kids will certainly grow up to be soft.
Quite simply, life’s hard, and anything that I’m doing to try to make my child’s life easier is probably not helping prepare them for that reality. We should not be surprised by this.
Maybe kids don’t choose to be soft. Maybe we raise them that way.
In his book Conscious Coaching, Brett Bartholomew put it this way, “Your job is not to prepare the path for the athlete but to prepare the athlete for the path.”
We’ve got to stop making excuses for our kids’ shortcomings. As well-meaning parents, we want to justify a bad outcome or help them feel better about themselves, but sometimes the right response is, “Yes, you came up short. It sucks, but how can you learn and be better next time?”
Unfortunately, the trend I currently see is the opposite. I hear more parents blame coaches or officials for poor outcomes than place ownership of the result on their child. Children learn from what they see and if every time something goes wrong there is someone else to blame, it should be no surprise if they refuse to take ownership later in life.
Want to raise tough, resilient children? Have high expectations, expose them to adversity, and let them fail!
Otherwise don’t be surprised if they grow up to be adults that have no goals, avoid being uncomfortable, and can’t handle things not going their way.
