‘Great parenting’ often comes from this simple habit

If you want to raise successful, resilient children, help them find activities they actually love, says the psychologist Angela Duckworth.

Instead of forcing your kids to try a particular sport or gadget, spend time exposing them to a variety of extracurricular activities and see what they spend the most time thinking about, Duckworth said Oct. 13. episode From “Mel Robbins Podcast.”

Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches mental and emotional “grit,” said directing children to activities they are interested in can help them find their passions, hobbies and perhaps even a future career.

“I think great parenting is that a lot of it is noticing what your little ones are thinking,” Duckworth said. “When we start noticing where our mind lives, when we start noticing what spontaneously catches our attention, that’s the beginning of discovering interests that can make us geniuses at what we do.”

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Children who learn to stick to their interests, even on tough days, can develop confidence and resilience — two traits that can help them achieve success later in life, Duckworth says. She added: Your child may choose a sport or hobby and then decide that he does not like it, but it is important for him to finish this sports season, or to continue practicing this musical instrument during his next concert.

Duckworth pointed to her own experience as a mother. She said her child, Lucy, “hated doing her homework and practicing the violin,” but when Duckworth looked at Lucy’s iPad, she noticed that “all the tabs were open for baking videos.” She noted that Duckworth saw Lucy reading her family’s cookbooks.

Lucy ended up “volunteering in restaurants to wash dishes, [then] “She was allowed to assist the pastry chef,” Duckworth told CNBC Make It. “She literally made pastries every weekend and every summer all the way from eighth grade to 12th grade, I think… Her lifelong interest in food and cooking is still evident.”

Not every interest has to become a full-fledged career. If you only follow what you love to do, you may not necessarily make much Money, best-selling author and NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway He told CNBC Make It in 2019.

“Don’t follow your passion,” Galloway said. His advice instead: “Find out what you’re good at and then invest 10,000 hours in it — and become great at it.”

For Duckworth, attention is just one of those things Four building blocks On the path to building grit, which her research shows is the most common trait among successful people in any field. Others include hard work, purpose and hope.

“Anyone who becomes great at what they do, there’s a curiosity there, right? Their mind comes to that subject and wants to stay there,” Duckworth said. “When you start talking about something you really care about, you’re a genius [on it]”Because that’s where your mind lives.”

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