A worried mother sits on the couch in my office. Her spouse was recently laid off, they're experiencing tension at home, and her 15-year-old son's grades have started to drop. 'The one thing he seems to care about is the wrestling team,' she tells me. He'll wake up at 5 a.m. to train, but he isn't doing his homework. 'We're thinking we should take him off the team until his grades turn around.' I certainly understand this instinct, having had many versions of this conversation over the past 30 years, as both an educator and the parent of three kids. When a child encounters difficulty, it's common for parents to feel like they don't have many levers to pull. Yet my experience working with children, along with plenty of research on resilience, has taught me a valuable lesson: When a kid is falling short, penalizing them by taking away the thing they care most about is not the way to motivate them. Raising humans is an imperfect, iterative process. The current parenting landscape'which...
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