Perseverance is one of the most valuable qualities your child can learn.
After all, we all encounter some form of failure or struggle throughout our lives and it’s important for kids to learn not to give up when faced with various setbacks or struggles of any kind.
According to Scientific American, one of the best ways we can teach our kids to deal with challenging tasks is to lead by example.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when infants see an adult struggle at something and then succeed, were more likely to display perseverance when completing a different task themselves.
We already know babies have a wonderful capacity to imitate our actions and behaviours.
This study proves that babies can also infer values – in this case, perseverance – from adults’ behaviours. They are so clever!
Laura Schulz, a cognitive scientist at MIT and senior researcher said: “The kinds of inferential mechanisms that babies use to learn concepts or things about the world, they can also use and learn to change how they act in the world.
“We don’t realize how much babies are watching us and drawing inferences from our behaviour.”
Graduate student and lead author of the work, Julia Leonard selected 262 infants between the ages of 13 and 18 months for the study.
The babies were all shown one of three scenarios.
In the first situation Julia pretended to be a “struggling” adult wrestling with two different toys: a tomato container that had a rubber frog inside and a carabiner attached to a cow keychain.
Infants who saw a researcher keep at a difficult task were more likely to show perseverance themselves https://t.co/0AbRmn6o7e
— Scientific American (@sciam) September 22, 2017
She involved the children in the struggled by using speech that engaged them, along with eye contact and puzzled phrases such as ‘Hmmm, how do I get my toy out of here?’
Julia pretended to struggle for about 30 seconds before opening the container and taking the keychain off the carabiner.
She then showed each child a different toy, handmade from the mechanism inside a musical Hallmark card—and secretly activated it, using a hidden button on its side to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
The toy was designed to be difficult for kids to activate, however, some did and therefore, were excluded from the study.
To confuse the children, there was a large button with no function on top which appeared to be the obvious way to activate the toy.
After five seconds of playing the music, she stopped the song, gave the toy to the baby and left the room.
In the second scenario, she used the same toys but showed minimal effort in opening the container or detaching the keychain. She then took out the musical toy and gave it to the child.
In the third scenario, she didn’t act out anything and just gave the child the musical toy.
Babies who had seen her struggle for approximately 30 seconds to open the container or detach the carabiner, pressed the button on the musical toy a significantly greater amount of times—showing persistence—compared with those in the other two groups.
To test the efficacy of her theory, she performed the same scenarios but without making eye contact with the infant or talking in a child-friendly way.
She found that the infants still showed effort in the button-pressing task but did not persist as much as when she used child-friendly cues.
Researchers hope to investigate this phenomenon further, to explore how long-standing the effects of being exposed to persistence are, especially as infants grow up and begin to attend school.
