August 17, 2025 • 16 mins
Your child says, “I want to quit.” Soccer. Piano. Swimming. Art. Should you let them? There’s a magic confidence threshold in every skill - and most kids give up just before they reach it. In this episode, Dr Justin and Kylie Coulson unpack why kids quit, the role of motivation and relationships, and how to help them push through frustration without forcing them into misery. You’ll learn how to balance empathy with encouragement so your child develops grit, resilience, and the joy of mastery.
KEY POINTS
- Every skill has a “confidence threshold” — the point where hard work starts to feel rewarding.
- Kids often want to quit in the “valley” before reaching this threshold.
- Motivation matters: autonomy and relationships increase persistence.
- Plateaus in progress are normal and often occur right before breakthroughs.
- Distress tolerance is a life skill - avoiding discomfort robs kids of resilience-building experiences.
- Angela Duckworth’s “Don’t quit on a hard day” rule helps kids make decisions in a calm emotional state.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE
“When we rescue kids from every struggle, we rob them of the chance to discover they’re more resilient than they think.” – Dr Justin Coulson
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Angela Duckworth’s research on grit
- The Dunedin Study
- Dr Justin Coulson’s “Anti-Fragile” resilience keynotes
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS
- Check the motivation – Was this activity your child’s choice or yours?
- Aim for the threshold – Encourage them to reach basic competence before deciding to quit.
- Build social connections – Support involvement where friendships are part of the activity.
- Talk about plateaus – Normalise slow progress and help them see it’s temporary.
- Adopt the “hard day” rule – No quitting right after a loss or tough session.
- Sit with discomfort – Model staying calm and present when challenges arise.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is the Happy Families podcast. Hello and welcome. My
name's doctor Justin Coulson. Your child comes home and announces
they want to quit soccer or piano, or swimming, or
art or just about anything. Do you let them? When
is quitting teaching resilience and when is it teaching them
to give up too easily. There is actually a magic
(00:28):
threshold and every skill that changes everything, and most kids
quit right before they reach it. That's what we're exploring
on today's podcast. Stay with us. Hello and welcome to
the Happy Families podcast. Real Parenting Solutions every day on
Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. We are doctor Justin and
(00:48):
Kylie Coulson. Every skill that your child attempts has what
researchers call a confidence threshold. Essentially, it's a magic line.
Before they cross this line, everything feels hard and frustrating
and unrewarding. And after they cross it, the same activity
starts to not always but it starts to feel good
and enjoyable and worth doing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
The image that comes to mind as you're saying that
is a child learning to ride a bike. When you
watch them in those early stages, it's really wobbly they're
like they're about to topple over and they're constantly putting
their feet on the ground to stop their fall. And
yet when they break through that, the feeling of freedom
that they get is they glide through the air. That's
(01:30):
what we're talking about, right, It's up until that point,
it was so hard.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, And the key word up until that point, generally
out of your child's mouth will be.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I hate this.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Well, well that's another one. I was going to say, can't.
I can't do this. It's too hard. I can't do it.
So I would say that same pattern applies to pretty
much anything, whether it's playing instruments or reading, or playing
a shoelace or writing your name or sports. Literally every
skill follows this pattern.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
And the crazy thing is, in my personal experience, it
goes from being hard, hard, hard hard hard. Oh, hang
on a sec, I just got it. Like it feels
like it's kind of like this, like a light switch.
You go from I can't do it, I can't do it,
I can't do it. I hang on, Actually I can
do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. This is my impression of a child learning to
write a bike or learning to swim or do some thing.
I can't.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I can't, I can't, I can't. This is fun.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I want to do more of this.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's right. And this goes back to
the whole competence thing.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
We're always talking on the podcast about competence being a
basic psychological need, and if you want to become competent,
you need to understand the structure or the process or
the formula or the framework or the system or whatever
it is that underpins competence and mastery and that thing.
So to write an essay, kids literally they stare at
that piece of paper or they stare at the curse
of blinking on the word document and just go, I can't.
(02:48):
But once they understand the structure an essay, tell me
what you're going to tell me, Then tell me, Then
tell me what you told me. That's the structure of
an essay. Once they understand that they have someone guide
them through it. They're someone like, oh is that all?
Oh yeah, I get that. Now. Riding the essay maybe
that's not going to be as fun as riding a bike,
but but they've developed that sense of confidence.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I can't think of anything that I've quit before I
actually got okay, at it.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
You haven't said that though your parents didn't exactly put
you into a whole lot of enrichment activities when you're
a child. No, they did it like they weren't sending
you off to swimming lessons. And I was going to
say horse riding, like I can afford a horse riding,
But they weren't sending you off to all of those things,
piano lessons and so on.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No, But I was just a kid with grit. My
dad had a ten speed bike. It was a mail bike,
so it had the bar across the top. I could
hardly touch the ground once I straddled his bike. But
I was so determined that I was going to learn
to ride a bike that I rode around on the
grass around our house over and over again. I smashed
every light reflect a thing on my dad's bike. But
(03:47):
I was determined, and and I finally mastered riding a bike,
not because somebody taught me, because I was so motivated
to do so.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
And see, I quit heaps of the.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Say with rollerskating. My cousin had rollerskates, and I was
going down the hill. I wasn't even on the flat.
I've fell over, busted my bum so many times. But again,
I was just really determined, and as I've matured as
an adult, I just have this kind of I don't know,
this sense I can do hard things. Even when it's
really hard, I'm going to give it a go.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, personality characteristics. So what's odd there is that there's
a bunch of things that I'm not very good at
that I've persisted at because I want to get competent
in them. Surfing would be an example of that, or
even cycling. I've achieved reasonable levels of competence in both,
but these are things that you can't master. There's always
another level, there's always more that you can do. But
I love the sense of progress. I love the feeling
of progress there. But I've quit roller skating, and i
(04:38):
quit piano lessons, and i quit swimming, and I quit Did.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You ever start roller skating? Let's just di real.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
We used to go on the Central Coast. That was
a place in man Street called Froggies. Anyone who is
on the Central Coast and lived back in the nineteen
eighties on the coast would remember Froggies. That was the
roll skating rink and I went there quite often for
somebody who didn't roll about to.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Say, considering what I've seen, I'm really surprised.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Probably about a dozen times I was skating, I've done
that a dozen times as well. Never going to do
that horse riding. Dumb stupid, can't stand it, Like I've
quit so many things because I never reached that level
of that competence threshold. That's what this is really about.
It's the competence threshold.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
But I think it also brings up another point. It's
actually about the motivation behind like what's your why? Why
is your child doing X, Y and z Okay?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Well, that ties in with basic psychological needs? Right, So
are my friends doing it? Or am I choosing to
do it myself? If the answer is not to both
of them, then there's not going to be any persistence.
And frankly, and none of my friends were really serious
about us roller skating, but we skateboard it a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and you were serious about surfing. All your friends
were doing that.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
That's exactly right. Yeah, And I love the progress and
I got to choose to do it. Basic psychological needs
drive motivation. Here's what the research tells us. Adults who
played sports as children scored thirty four percent higher on
measures of Britten perseverance compared to only twenty three percent
of those who never played sports. But the key isn't
just anticipating, it's sticking through the challenges long enough to
(06:04):
reach competence. So the stake that we make as parents
is letting our kids quit when they're in the valley
rather than on the mountain peak. It's really hard to
say this that kids shouldn't quit before they reach basic confidence.
It's something that they've committed to because they haven't yet
experienced what it feels like when the skill becomes rewarding.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And so again I guess I go back to that motivation.
Whose motivation was it to start the activity in the
first place. If it's the child, then I totally agree
with you. But if it's you as the parent, and
every week is just hard work and there's constant battles
getting them out the door, I actually think that that
is not a positive.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So the story that we've often shared on the podcast
is our eldest daughter wanted to ride velodrome track cycling
with me on a Friday night when we lived in
the Illawarra region. So we went and spend all the
money and bought all the gear. Even though I was
a student, we didn't have any money for it. It
was a huge sacrifice, and after about four or five
weeks she decided she didn't want to do it anymore.
But what she was discovering is number One, she wasn't competent.
She was in that I can't zone. She hadn't reached
(07:02):
the confidence threshold. But secondly, she really didn't have the
relationships and the defeat the way she was being defeated,
she was just like beliterated, yeah, and it just wasn't
that important to her. If she had better relationships, I
reckon she probably would have been in. It's not that
anyone was unkind, but she just didn't have the deep
relationships that all the other girls who competed and had
(07:22):
been doing so full years and years and years had developed.
So she kind of felt like she was slightly on
the outer. If I was raising young kids now I
guess we are with one of our kids, I'd be
using this confidence threshold concept in terms of guiding our
kids around sticking at stuff. So you want to quit
the piano, that's fine, but let's get you to a
point where you can actually play it. Maybe Grade two
level before you quit, because that way, you're not quitting
(07:44):
in the valley, you're quitting up on top of the mountain.
I might just add as an extension of this, Angela Duckworth,
who's world's leading expert on grit, has a rule in
her house. It's kind of similar. Her kids can quit activities,
but they can't quit on a hard day. So they
can't quit right after a last they can't quit for
a bad performance or when they're feeling frustrated.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I really love that. I love that because what it's
teaching our kids, number one, is that it's okay to
have a bad day, but if we're going to make
important decisions that are going to change the outcome, it's
really important to not do it in that space of
high emotion.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, and the research back set up. Studies show that
kids learn resilience not by being told about what resilience is,
but by actually experiencing working through the difficult emotions and
the difficult situations and the losses and that sort of stuff.
And when we rescue our kids from every struggle, we
pretty much rob them of the opportunity, the capacity, or yeah,
the opportunity, the chance to discover their own capacity.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And I think we've experienced it multiple times with our
kids where they've been in that high emotion state and
they've wanted to quit, and we've kind of helped them,
you know, work through that, and they've come out the
other side and they've gone, you know what, I actually
think I'm going to go back and give it another go.
You know. It's just it's giving them the space to
work through that and sit on the other side of discomfort.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Okay, after the break, we're going to talk more about
that discomfort where we call it distressed tolerance or frustration tolerance,
and that's where we're going to dive deep. Okay, So
we've talked about this competence threshold. This is an idea
that I developed a handful of years ago and I
(09:26):
teach you to my resilience workshops. Now, my resilience workshop
is called ADI Fragile. So let's say competence exists on
a curve. When you start something, there's this really steep
learning curve, but because you're so bad at something, you
get reasonably okay ish at it really fast. Like you
go from not even knowing what middle C is on
the piano to being able to play Twinkle Twink a
Little Star in about four weeks, and within another few
(09:49):
weeks you can play another couple of songs and you're like, yeah,
I'm getting really good at this. And then the music
teacher starts teaching you how to cite read, and all
of a sudden, you've hit a level of competence is
a very low one. And then this competence curve starts
to plateau. And this is one of the biggest reasons
that kids want to quit, because they hit this wall
(10:09):
in what felt like really exciting progress, really really exciting improvement.
At the start, you can see yourself getting better every week.
Then progress slows down, stops entirely. It's called a learning plateau.
And the research around this is really clear. Plato's are
not signs of failure. They're not signs of a lack
(10:30):
of ability. They're natural. They're predictable, like they're supposed to
happen when you're developing a new skill. They happen to everybody,
and studies of skill acquisition show that these platos often
occur right before the next breakthrough and performance. You've just
got to be willing to say I'm leveling out. This
doesn't feel good. That must mean that there's some learning coming.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
It's interesting. I was having a conversation with your mum
the other day and I was having a bit of
a dummy spit about some challenges that I'm experiencing right now.
And she said to me, she said, what you're actually
saying if you quit now, She said, what you're actually
saying is I'm really happy at being a grade five level,
like I've learned everything I need to learn. She said,
each time we hit a stumble or a challenge, it's
(11:16):
actually giving us the opportunity to level up. It's actually
giving us an opportunity to progress and get better at it.
We don't get better while we're sitting at our comfort zones.
We actually have to feel the friction of discomfort for
us to grow.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Well, let's pick up on that discomfort idea. I want
to talk about distressed tolerance. Distress tolerance equals life skills,
which is really what the conversation is that you had
with my mum. So when we let our kids quit
every time something gets hard, we're inadvertently teaching them that
discomfort should be avoided. But you know this, and I
(11:52):
know this. Research on child development shows is something that's
really crucial. The ability to tolerate distress and work through
difficult emotions pretty much one of the most important love
skills that we can help our children to develop. And
studies have shown that when you follow kids into adulthood,
those who learned to persist through challenges when they were
kids doing childhood activities, that is, they've developed frustration tolerance
(12:16):
or distress tolerance. It's the capacity to handle difficult feelings
without being overwhelmed by them. That skill transfers directly to
academic challenges and relationships and work situations and every other
area of life. Can you tolerate the distress? Can you
survive it? It's really about self control. Dunedin study thirty
(12:36):
years of research looking at people who had good or
bad life outcomes. They followed them across that thirty years
and basically the people who had more self control the
ability to tolerate distress. Now, this doesn't mean that you're
supposed to endure long periods of trauma and awfulness because
it'll make you a better person, will refine you. That's
not what this is about. This is basically, I'm able
to sit in this discomfort of not knowing how to
(12:57):
play the piece on the piano. I'm able to sit
in the discomfort of not being able to paddle my
surfboard out through the waves to get out the back.
I'm able to sit in the discomfort of falling off
my bicycle on that jump three times in a row.
And even though I've gone to hospital twice because of it,
I'm going to keep on going because I want to
master this jump. Distress tolerance, frustration tolerance, Push through it.
(13:19):
Don't go for the quick answer. Get good at de
layed gratification. You become resilient.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I was watching a TV show the other day and
there was this beautiful scene depicted between a son and
a mum. There had been a decision made by an
authority figure that was unfair, but that there was no
way that they could change their mind. This was just
their reality, and the sun was really really angry, and
he said, it's not fair, Mum, it's really not fair.
(13:45):
Tell me it's not fair. And she was trying really
hard to be diplomatic and be, you know, the adult
in the room, and she said, you know what, it's
actually not fair. I get that. And he said, I'm
just so mad, and she said I'm mad too, Let's
be mad together. And they just sat in that space,
in that really, really uncomfortable space together and it was
(14:05):
just beautiful because so often we want to try and
coddle our kids and kind of just you know, move
them through it. But I loved that they were just
able to show in such a really simplistic way that
it's okay to be angry and I'm going to sit
here with you in that discomfort.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. I think if we rescue kids from every struggle,
we rob them of the chance to discover that they're
more resilient than they think. Often resilience doesn't look like resilience,
and it doesn't feel like resilience, but the feeling of
accomplishment and genuine confidence that you get from pushing through
something that's really hard. It's something that you can't buy,
you can't inherit it, you have to earn it, and
it feels really good when you do hard things and
(14:42):
earn things. Mastery is something that is its genuine status.
It just feels good, whether you're a child or an adult.
Let's wrap this up. Our time is done. When your
child wants to quit, you're not just making a decision
about soccer or the piano. You're helping them to develop
the internal resources that they're going to need to navigate
every challenge they'll face as adults. Get them involved in
(15:04):
activities that they're choosing. Autonomy will help ideally get them
in activities that they have friends engaged in relationship matters,
and then help them to see progress. Oh, we're out
of time, but I've got to tell you our daughter, Emily,
eleven years old. You know how she started surfing with
me at the start of the year. She's basically given up.
I haven't been able to get her into the water
for a couple of months.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Well, it is the middle of winter and it's freezing.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Well, even though it's the middle of winter and it's freezing,
she has a couple of friends who go surfing every
Wednesday morning down at the local beach and have surf lessons.
And I took down there last week and she loved
it because she was with her friends and she felt
like she made some progress, and she signed up for
the rest of the term. She doesn't want to surf
with me. She wants to surf with her friends because
basic psychological needs. I feel confident I'm choosing it myself
(15:48):
and I'm with my friends winning. The Happy Family's podcast
is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media. Mimhammonds provides
additional research and admin support. If you would like more
details about making your family happy. Resources in info can
be found at happy families dot com, dot a you
(16:10):
hm
This is the Happy Families podcast. Hello and welcome. My
name's doctor Justin Coulson. Your child comes home and announces
they want to quit soccer or piano, or swimming, or
art or just about anything. Do you let them? When
is quitting teaching resilience and when is it teaching them
to give up too easily. There is actually a magic
(00:28):
threshold and every skill that changes everything, and most kids
quit right before they reach it. That's what we're exploring
on today's podcast. Stay with us. Hello and welcome to
the Happy Families podcast. Real Parenting Solutions every day on
Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. We are doctor Justin and
(00:48):
Kylie Coulson. Every skill that your child attempts has what
researchers call a confidence threshold. Essentially, it's a magic line.
Before they cross this line, everything feels hard and frustrating
and unrewarding. And after they cross it, the same activity
starts to not always but it starts to feel good
and enjoyable and worth doing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
The image that comes to mind as you're saying that
is a child learning to ride a bike. When you
watch them in those early stages, it's really wobbly they're
like they're about to topple over and they're constantly putting
their feet on the ground to stop their fall. And
yet when they break through that, the feeling of freedom
that they get is they glide through the air. That's
(01:30):
what we're talking about, right, It's up until that point,
it was so hard.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, And the key word up until that point, generally
out of your child's mouth will be.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I hate this.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Well, well that's another one. I was going to say, can't.
I can't do this. It's too hard. I can't do it.
So I would say that same pattern applies to pretty
much anything, whether it's playing instruments or reading, or playing
a shoelace or writing your name or sports. Literally every
skill follows this pattern.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
And the crazy thing is, in my personal experience, it
goes from being hard, hard, hard hard hard. Oh, hang
on a sec, I just got it. Like it feels
like it's kind of like this, like a light switch.
You go from I can't do it, I can't do it,
I can't do it. I hang on, Actually I can
do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. This is my impression of a child learning to
write a bike or learning to swim or do some thing.
I can't.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I can't, I can't, I can't. This is fun.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I want to do more of this.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's right. And this goes back to
the whole competence thing.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
We're always talking on the podcast about competence being a
basic psychological need, and if you want to become competent,
you need to understand the structure or the process or
the formula or the framework or the system or whatever
it is that underpins competence and mastery and that thing.
So to write an essay, kids literally they stare at
that piece of paper or they stare at the curse
of blinking on the word document and just go, I can't.
(02:48):
But once they understand the structure an essay, tell me
what you're going to tell me, Then tell me, Then
tell me what you told me. That's the structure of
an essay. Once they understand that they have someone guide
them through it. They're someone like, oh is that all?
Oh yeah, I get that. Now. Riding the essay maybe
that's not going to be as fun as riding a bike,
but but they've developed that sense of confidence.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I can't think of anything that I've quit before I
actually got okay, at it.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
You haven't said that though your parents didn't exactly put
you into a whole lot of enrichment activities when you're
a child. No, they did it like they weren't sending
you off to swimming lessons. And I was going to
say horse riding, like I can afford a horse riding,
But they weren't sending you off to all of those things,
piano lessons and so on.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No, But I was just a kid with grit. My
dad had a ten speed bike. It was a mail bike,
so it had the bar across the top. I could
hardly touch the ground once I straddled his bike. But
I was so determined that I was going to learn
to ride a bike that I rode around on the
grass around our house over and over again. I smashed
every light reflect a thing on my dad's bike. But
(03:47):
I was determined, and and I finally mastered riding a bike,
not because somebody taught me, because I was so motivated
to do so.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
And see, I quit heaps of the.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Say with rollerskating. My cousin had rollerskates, and I was
going down the hill. I wasn't even on the flat.
I've fell over, busted my bum so many times. But again,
I was just really determined, and as I've matured as
an adult, I just have this kind of I don't know,
this sense I can do hard things. Even when it's
really hard, I'm going to give it a go.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, personality characteristics. So what's odd there is that there's
a bunch of things that I'm not very good at
that I've persisted at because I want to get competent
in them. Surfing would be an example of that, or
even cycling. I've achieved reasonable levels of competence in both,
but these are things that you can't master. There's always
another level, there's always more that you can do. But
I love the sense of progress. I love the feeling
of progress there. But I've quit roller skating, and i
(04:38):
quit piano lessons, and i quit swimming, and I quit Did.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You ever start roller skating? Let's just di real.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
We used to go on the Central Coast. That was
a place in man Street called Froggies. Anyone who is
on the Central Coast and lived back in the nineteen
eighties on the coast would remember Froggies. That was the
roll skating rink and I went there quite often for
somebody who didn't roll about to.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Say, considering what I've seen, I'm really surprised.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Probably about a dozen times I was skating, I've done
that a dozen times as well. Never going to do
that horse riding. Dumb stupid, can't stand it, Like I've
quit so many things because I never reached that level
of that competence threshold. That's what this is really about.
It's the competence threshold.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
But I think it also brings up another point. It's
actually about the motivation behind like what's your why? Why
is your child doing X, Y and z Okay?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Well, that ties in with basic psychological needs? Right, So
are my friends doing it? Or am I choosing to
do it myself? If the answer is not to both
of them, then there's not going to be any persistence.
And frankly, and none of my friends were really serious
about us roller skating, but we skateboard it a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, and you were serious about surfing. All your friends
were doing that.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
That's exactly right. Yeah, And I love the progress and
I got to choose to do it. Basic psychological needs
drive motivation. Here's what the research tells us. Adults who
played sports as children scored thirty four percent higher on
measures of Britten perseverance compared to only twenty three percent
of those who never played sports. But the key isn't
just anticipating, it's sticking through the challenges long enough to
(06:04):
reach competence. So the stake that we make as parents
is letting our kids quit when they're in the valley
rather than on the mountain peak. It's really hard to
say this that kids shouldn't quit before they reach basic confidence.
It's something that they've committed to because they haven't yet
experienced what it feels like when the skill becomes rewarding.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And so again I guess I go back to that motivation.
Whose motivation was it to start the activity in the
first place. If it's the child, then I totally agree
with you. But if it's you as the parent, and
every week is just hard work and there's constant battles
getting them out the door, I actually think that that
is not a positive.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So the story that we've often shared on the podcast
is our eldest daughter wanted to ride velodrome track cycling
with me on a Friday night when we lived in
the Illawarra region. So we went and spend all the
money and bought all the gear. Even though I was
a student, we didn't have any money for it. It
was a huge sacrifice, and after about four or five
weeks she decided she didn't want to do it anymore.
But what she was discovering is number One, she wasn't competent.
She was in that I can't zone. She hadn't reached
(07:02):
the confidence threshold. But secondly, she really didn't have the
relationships and the defeat the way she was being defeated,
she was just like beliterated, yeah, and it just wasn't
that important to her. If she had better relationships, I
reckon she probably would have been in. It's not that
anyone was unkind, but she just didn't have the deep
relationships that all the other girls who competed and had
(07:22):
been doing so full years and years and years had developed.
So she kind of felt like she was slightly on
the outer. If I was raising young kids now I
guess we are with one of our kids, I'd be
using this confidence threshold concept in terms of guiding our
kids around sticking at stuff. So you want to quit
the piano, that's fine, but let's get you to a
point where you can actually play it. Maybe Grade two
level before you quit, because that way, you're not quitting
(07:44):
in the valley, you're quitting up on top of the mountain.
I might just add as an extension of this, Angela Duckworth,
who's world's leading expert on grit, has a rule in
her house. It's kind of similar. Her kids can quit activities,
but they can't quit on a hard day. So they
can't quit right after a last they can't quit for
a bad performance or when they're feeling frustrated.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I really love that. I love that because what it's
teaching our kids, number one, is that it's okay to
have a bad day, but if we're going to make
important decisions that are going to change the outcome, it's
really important to not do it in that space of
high emotion.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, and the research back set up. Studies show that
kids learn resilience not by being told about what resilience is,
but by actually experiencing working through the difficult emotions and
the difficult situations and the losses and that sort of stuff.
And when we rescue our kids from every struggle, we
pretty much rob them of the opportunity, the capacity, or yeah,
the opportunity, the chance to discover their own capacity.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And I think we've experienced it multiple times with our
kids where they've been in that high emotion state and
they've wanted to quit, and we've kind of helped them,
you know, work through that, and they've come out the
other side and they've gone, you know what, I actually
think I'm going to go back and give it another go.
You know. It's just it's giving them the space to
work through that and sit on the other side of discomfort.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Okay, after the break, we're going to talk more about
that discomfort where we call it distressed tolerance or frustration tolerance,
and that's where we're going to dive deep. Okay, So
we've talked about this competence threshold. This is an idea
that I developed a handful of years ago and I
(09:26):
teach you to my resilience workshops. Now, my resilience workshop
is called ADI Fragile. So let's say competence exists on
a curve. When you start something, there's this really steep
learning curve, but because you're so bad at something, you
get reasonably okay ish at it really fast. Like you
go from not even knowing what middle C is on
the piano to being able to play Twinkle Twink a
Little Star in about four weeks, and within another few
(09:49):
weeks you can play another couple of songs and you're like, yeah,
I'm getting really good at this. And then the music
teacher starts teaching you how to cite read, and all
of a sudden, you've hit a level of competence is
a very low one. And then this competence curve starts
to plateau. And this is one of the biggest reasons
that kids want to quit, because they hit this wall
(10:09):
in what felt like really exciting progress, really really exciting improvement.
At the start, you can see yourself getting better every week.
Then progress slows down, stops entirely. It's called a learning plateau.
And the research around this is really clear. Plato's are
not signs of failure. They're not signs of a lack
(10:30):
of ability. They're natural. They're predictable, like they're supposed to
happen when you're developing a new skill. They happen to everybody,
and studies of skill acquisition show that these platos often
occur right before the next breakthrough and performance. You've just
got to be willing to say I'm leveling out. This
doesn't feel good. That must mean that there's some learning coming.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
It's interesting. I was having a conversation with your mum
the other day and I was having a bit of
a dummy spit about some challenges that I'm experiencing right now.
And she said to me, she said, what you're actually
saying if you quit now, She said, what you're actually
saying is I'm really happy at being a grade five level,
like I've learned everything I need to learn. She said,
each time we hit a stumble or a challenge, it's
(11:16):
actually giving us the opportunity to level up. It's actually
giving us an opportunity to progress and get better at it.
We don't get better while we're sitting at our comfort zones.
We actually have to feel the friction of discomfort for
us to grow.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Well, let's pick up on that discomfort idea. I want
to talk about distressed tolerance. Distress tolerance equals life skills,
which is really what the conversation is that you had
with my mum. So when we let our kids quit
every time something gets hard, we're inadvertently teaching them that
discomfort should be avoided. But you know this, and I
(11:52):
know this. Research on child development shows is something that's
really crucial. The ability to tolerate distress and work through
difficult emotions pretty much one of the most important love
skills that we can help our children to develop. And
studies have shown that when you follow kids into adulthood,
those who learned to persist through challenges when they were
kids doing childhood activities, that is, they've developed frustration tolerance
(12:16):
or distress tolerance. It's the capacity to handle difficult feelings
without being overwhelmed by them. That skill transfers directly to
academic challenges and relationships and work situations and every other
area of life. Can you tolerate the distress? Can you
survive it? It's really about self control. Dunedin study thirty
(12:36):
years of research looking at people who had good or
bad life outcomes. They followed them across that thirty years
and basically the people who had more self control the
ability to tolerate distress. Now, this doesn't mean that you're
supposed to endure long periods of trauma and awfulness because
it'll make you a better person, will refine you. That's
not what this is about. This is basically, I'm able
to sit in this discomfort of not knowing how to
(12:57):
play the piece on the piano. I'm able to sit
in the discomfort of not being able to paddle my
surfboard out through the waves to get out the back.
I'm able to sit in the discomfort of falling off
my bicycle on that jump three times in a row.
And even though I've gone to hospital twice because of it,
I'm going to keep on going because I want to
master this jump. Distress tolerance, frustration tolerance, Push through it.
(13:19):
Don't go for the quick answer. Get good at de
layed gratification. You become resilient.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I was watching a TV show the other day and
there was this beautiful scene depicted between a son and
a mum. There had been a decision made by an
authority figure that was unfair, but that there was no
way that they could change their mind. This was just
their reality, and the sun was really really angry, and
he said, it's not fair, Mum, it's really not fair.
(13:45):
Tell me it's not fair. And she was trying really
hard to be diplomatic and be, you know, the adult
in the room, and she said, you know what, it's
actually not fair. I get that. And he said, I'm
just so mad, and she said I'm mad too, Let's
be mad together. And they just sat in that space,
in that really, really uncomfortable space together and it was
(14:05):
just beautiful because so often we want to try and
coddle our kids and kind of just you know, move
them through it. But I loved that they were just
able to show in such a really simplistic way that
it's okay to be angry and I'm going to sit
here with you in that discomfort.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. I think if we rescue kids from every struggle,
we rob them of the chance to discover that they're
more resilient than they think. Often resilience doesn't look like resilience,
and it doesn't feel like resilience, but the feeling of
accomplishment and genuine confidence that you get from pushing through
something that's really hard. It's something that you can't buy,
you can't inherit it, you have to earn it, and
it feels really good when you do hard things and
(14:42):
earn things. Mastery is something that is its genuine status.
It just feels good, whether you're a child or an adult.
Let's wrap this up. Our time is done. When your
child wants to quit, you're not just making a decision
about soccer or the piano. You're helping them to develop
the internal resources that they're going to need to navigate
every challenge they'll face as adults. Get them involved in
(15:04):
activities that they're choosing. Autonomy will help ideally get them
in activities that they have friends engaged in relationship matters,
and then help them to see progress. Oh, we're out
of time, but I've got to tell you our daughter, Emily,
eleven years old. You know how she started surfing with
me at the start of the year. She's basically given up.
I haven't been able to get her into the water
for a couple of months.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Well, it is the middle of winter and it's freezing.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Well, even though it's the middle of winter and it's freezing,
she has a couple of friends who go surfing every
Wednesday morning down at the local beach and have surf lessons.
And I took down there last week and she loved
it because she was with her friends and she felt
like she made some progress, and she signed up for
the rest of the term. She doesn't want to surf
with me. She wants to surf with her friends because
basic psychological needs. I feel confident I'm choosing it myself
(15:48):
and I'm with my friends winning. The Happy Family's podcast
is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media. Mimhammonds provides
additional research and admin support. If you would like more
details about making your family happy. Resources in info can
be found at happy families dot com, dot a you
(16:10):
hm
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