Ep #14: Should You Let Your Child Quit?

Have you ever had a child start an activity, a sport, something like that and then want to quit right afterwards? How do we know when to let our kids quit? Is this going to ruin their grit? Today I’m going to be sharing three things you could ask yourself when you’re trying to make this decision and give you some tips on helping model this for your children so that they can learn how to make these decisions for themselves in the future. That’s all coming up on this episode of Raising Healthy Kid Brains.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

What do we do when our child wants to quit something? So maybe you signed your child up for soccer and they were so excited to play soccer and then they go to practice for a few weeks and they start doing games and they start getting tired and they don’t want to go to practice anymore and they want to quit. Or maybe it’s learning the piano, there are so many different things that we sign our kids up for and we want to give them experience and let them have all kinds of different learning and social experiences.

And then sometimes they want to quit and what do we do when kids want to quit? When is it appropriate to let a child quit? So we want to teach our kids resilience. We want to teach them grit. We want them to learn to work for things and we don’t want to just let them quit every time it gets hard. But is there ever a time that it’s appropriate to let them quit? So here is something to think about. Grit isn’t just about making a child do something they hate. That’s not the point of grit is to just keep going and persisting and going and going and going forever even if it’s something that you despise.

Grit is more of a broad idea around teaching kids to make and pursue goals around a specific activity. So that’s what we’re really trying to help kids do as opposed to just making them never quit. So I wanted to share with you three things that I have learned, questions that you can ask yourself when you’re trying to decide, should I let my child quit or should I have them keep persisting and keep going? So these are three things you can check in with yourself about when you’re asking this question.

So the first one is going to be what is your resistance to them quitting? I think there is this idea around failure that we are just so adverse to. We’re so adverse to failure, it sounds bad, you get an F on a test. Failure is so bad. And so we see quitting as failure but is that really what it is? And is failure always bad or maybe we could look at it in a different way. So instead of just considering it failure if you quit something. I want you to think of asking yourself the question, is it actually failure or is it letting go?

Sometimes continuing to do something and to push and push something that is no longer serving us or is not the right fit is actually maybe more of a problem than allowing ourselves to quit and maybe suffering from what someone would consider that a failure. So I want you to think of this idea of maybe is it time to let go? And sometimes I think we have a really hard time letting go because we’ve put so much into something. Maybe you’ve put years into this. Maybe there is so much you’ve invested into this, either money or time, or just desire.

And so we have all this stuff we’ve already put into it. And those could be considered sunk costs, the stuff we’ve already invested. The time we’ve already invested, all those things. But we need to consider not just that, what we’ve already put into it but opportunity cost. What is your child missing out on? What opportunities are they missing out on by being stuck in this one thing? And that when you have a kid maybe that’s in dance. And dance takes so many hours a week that they don’t have an opportunity to ever try soccer or the school play or whatever else. There is an opportunity cost there.

Or maybe it’s an opportunity cost in spending time with friends and having that kind of different social experience. So consider that. What is your resistance to quitting, is it about your child or is it about you? Is it something that has to do with your resistance to failure? And maybe do you need to reframe that as letting go instead of failure? So that’s number one.

The second question I’m going to encourage you to check with yourself on is when was the last time you reassessed if this was the right goal? This is such an incredible skill to teach kids, how to reassess and regularly reassess if this is still the right goal?

So I wanted to give you an example that I heard recently on a podcast that was so good. And it was this idea that we’re not trying to change momentum. So if you’re in a car and you’re driving and you’re going, going, going, going. We’re not trying to stop the car but maybe we need to shift the steering wheel a little bit to turn and change the direction of our momentum. And so I love this idea for goal setting for kids and for allowing them to kind of reassess if the goal that they have been pursuing is still the right one.

And we say, “Hey, we’re not trying to keep you from moving forward, from developing skills, from learning new things. But maybe it’s time to change direction just a little bit of where we’re pushing that momentum and that energy to.” And isn’t that a delightful idea and that we can teach our kids to do that and that quitting or sometimes maybe letting go isn’t necessarily just stopping momentum, it’s shifting it. And so I wanted to give you just an example from my experience.

I had a dancer that had been dancing for seven years and had done really, really well and was progressing and decided she wanted to give up dance. And it was kind of a big deal to give up dance after seven years of dancing. And so we wanted to ask, “Well, why? What is your reason, is it because it’s hard or what is your reason for quitting?” And she said, “Because there’s so many things I don’t get to try because dance takes so much time.”

And she wanted to try being in the school play and she’s really into engineering and STEM and wanted to be in clubs for that. And there were so many different things she wanted to participate in that she was limited by and couldn’t do because of dance. And so it wasn’t that she was trying to stop momentum. She just wanted to shift it in a different direction. And I think that’s a great thing to encourage our children to reassess and to look at as we’re making these decisions of is it time to quit or not?

To give an alternate example, I have a kiddo in piano and was getting tired of practicing because it’s a lot. You have to practice every day and it’s work. It’s work to practice the piano. It’s work to learn an instrument. And so he was asking, “Hey, can I quit piano? And this is a lot of work and I’d rather play computer games.” So that looks a little bit different. That’s a different question and we have to talk about that and say, “Okay, is that a momentum shift or a direction shift?” Are we quitting moving or are we just shifting our energy into something else?

And so it’s also I think too, when we have a kid that is no longer passionate about soccer or is no longer passionate about the piano and we say, “Okay, well, what are you going to do instead?” And let’s think of something else that you can work on and work towards and put energy and effort into so that we can do a shift versus a momentum shift or a direction shift versus a momentum shift. We don’t want to stop moving. We don’t want to stop growing. Okay, so that’s number two.

Are you ready for number three? Here we go. I love this one, it’s so good. Ask yourself are you pursuing your values or your passions? Now, I think we have this huge idea that we want to teach our children to pursue their passions and we encourage that. Pursue your passions. But is that the right thing to encourage our children to pursue? And I heard the most interesting thing about this and it’s just been in my brain. So passions are actually something that you can create. Passions are a consequence of putting time and effort and energy into something.

We get passionate about things that we’re good at, that we perform well at. So the more you do something, the more passionate you’ll become about it. So you can create passions with time and effort which is kind of cool because that means you can be passionate about things you already need to do. And so pursuing values instead, our values are hopefully much more permanent than our passions. Passions change regularly.

We have kids that are so excited about soccer, cannot wait and then four weeks into the season they’re like, “I am done, this is exhausting.” And passions can change but our values hopefully last a very, very long time. Now, as young children, their values might look different than they’re going to look when they’re older. But if we start having them consider it from this perspective, this is going to give them a really good way to start thinking and decision-making as they’re trying to decide what to pursue. So what could your values be?

Our values might be to move our bodies in ways that bring us joy. Our value might be to learn to work with a team, to make friendships. Maybe it’s to learn how to work hard and to win well and to lose well and to just experience failure and also working hard in overcoming. So pursuing values is really, really important. Now, does that mean that you can only do that in soccer? No, if we’re pursuing a passion for soccer and then our passion goes away in four weeks, we’re not pursuing it anymore.

So if we’re pursuing a value though, of learning teamwork, of learning to work hard, of learning to accomplish goals and make progress and learning from failure and all those things. That’s a value we can pursue and that doesn’t mean that we have to stay in soccer for the rest of our lives. That means we pursue that while we’re in soccer but then we want to continue to pursue that in maybe something that looks like dance or karate or whatever it looks like.

And so helping children focus on pursuing values over passions and then what happens is as they pursue those values they will start to develop passions around the things that they’re spending their energy and time on. So is there value in not letting your kids quit? Maybe, but before you make that decision have this conversation and I would do it with yourself first because maybe some of the resistance to letting go is actually something inside of you and not about your child at all.

So have this conversation with yourself first and then have it with your child at a level that’s developmentally appropriate for them. And have them start thinking through these things. And you’re going to be modeling for them how to make decisions about when to quit and when to keep going in the future. So knowing when to let go and shift directions can be just as important a skill as sticking it out. And grit is more about continued momentum than it is about the specific direction or the specific current direction of that momentum.

I hope that was helpful and gives you something to think about as you’re working through this with your kids. Have the most amazing rest of your day and I will see you here next week on the next episode of Raising Healthy Kid Brains.

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