True Grit

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/15/true_grit_118407.html

By John Stossel - May 15, 2013

Are you a real man (or woman)? Do you have "grit"?

Compare yourself to the man on the $20 bill: Andrew Jackson, our seventh president.

During the Revolutionary War, Jackson volunteered to fight. He was just 13 years old at the time. The British captured him and made him a servant for British officers. When one ordered Jackson to clean his boots, Jackson refused, and the officer slashed Jackson's hand with a sword. When Jackson became president, he showed off the scar.

Jackson had grit.

Do your kids have that much grit today? I doubt it. Parents now try to protect kids from all danger. In New York City, some won't let teenagers go to school by themselves.

Lenore Skenazy, author of "Free-Range Kids," thinks that's absurd.

"Free-range kids are kids we believe in," she told me. "They can do things on their own."

Once she allowed her own 9-year-old to ride the subway alone. After she wrote about that, she was labeled "World's Worst Mom." Really. Google "world's worst mom." Skenazy's name comes up.

"Free-Range Kids" promotes events like "Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day." Skenazy says leaving kids in the park without adult supervision teaches them grit. Kids get used to bugs, rocks and a lack of constant supervision. They become leaders by discovering how to organize their own lives without parents bossing them around.

And they are not likely to be kidnapped. The horror of what happened to the three women in Cleveland makes all of us more frightened of sexual assaults and other threats. Skenazy says that today's parents are so frightened that only 6 percent allow young kids to play outside unsupervised. But the risk of harm is small, and we put our kids at greater risk, says Skenazy, if we don't allow them the freedom to learn from their own mistakes -- to acquire grit.

It shouldn't surprise me that parents want to shelter their kids from all risk. The parents themselves live in a society where risk is less and less acceptable. We expect regulations to protect us from accidents. We expect police to protect us from every imaginable criminal threat. We demand welfare, unemployment insurance and bailouts to protect every level of society from economic risk. When something goes wrong, we sue.

It wasn't always like this.

Our country's founders left relatively safe places to tough it out in the wilderness, to turn what a character in a John Wayne movie called "empty land used for nothin'" into ranches and farms. Doing that required long days spent hunting, plowing, fighting off enemies, digging in through cold winters, sometimes starving, losing children, losing wives and husbands -- it took grit to create American civilization.

Grit requires delaying gratification, wanting something bigger than yourself.

As John Wayne's character himself put it in "The Big Trail": "We're building a nation. We've got to suffer. No great trail was ever blazed without hardship. That's life."

Grit is the stuff of life. Greatness is often achieved only after repeated failure.

Cartoonist Charles Schulz had every cartoon he submitted to his high school yearbook rejected. "Peanuts" later became one of the most successful cartoons of all time.

Thomas Edison's teachers told his mom he was "too stupid to learn." Edison went on to accumulate 1,000 U.S. patents. His success with the light bulb followed 1,000 unsuccessful attempts. That's grit.

It's great that we live in a wealthy country -- one with a welfare state so big that we now worry about poor people getting fat. But what makes most people happy is not comfort. It's earned success, success you struggle for.

The opposite of earned success, says psychologist Martin Seligman, is "learned helplessness." In lab experiments, when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people's happiness. It produced helplessness. People gave up, became passive.

That passivity (and America's welfare state) is a threat to our future. Everyone goes through pain and loss. We face obstacles. It's the struggle to overcome obstacles that matters.

That's the stuff of life -- and the route to happiness and prosperity.

 

Stossel rocks.

I wonder if the 6% who are allowed to ride the subway or play outside unsupervised grow up to be the top 1%.

 

When I was 9, I would go out and play unsupervised. Geez. We'd play "baseball" in the street (tennis ball and whiffle bat), tackle football in Lincoln Park, ride bikes 15 miles away from home, ride the bus system using transfers (to get really far from home), etc.

When I say "we," I mean all the kids I knew, from school, from neighboring schools, from meeting other kids the places I would go.

This is radically different from when I was growing up. That's the point. I think the only kids not allowed to play outside unsupervised then were those who had some sort of handicap and needed actual supervision. Maybe girls were put on a shorter leash with an earlier curfew.

We used to talk about street smarts and book smarts. Street smarts was the ability to navigate the real world and interact with people. Something you became skilled at by being on your own, without supervision.

How true. Stossel, no doubt, was also referring to this NYTimes article and its ilk:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/nyregion/in-obesity-fight-poverty-is-patient-zero.html?_r=0

Then as now, economic disparity was, in many cases, driving disparate demographic patterns of disease. (Just to be clear, typhoid, though communicable, was not a greater threat to public health than obesity is today. In the early 20th century, there were about 3,000 to 4,000 new cases a year in New York, approximately 10 percent of them resulting in fatalities. Last fall, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said 6,000 New Yorkers a year died from obesity.) Obesity and its related illnesses, as we know, disproportionately affect low-income communities. In Brooklyn, for instance, the rate of heart-attack hospitalizations among adults 35 and older in East New York is nearly twice the rate in wealthier Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope.

The larger issue, though — larger than the matter of how much more time we should spend trying to ensure that no child ever grows up with a memory of a 32-ounce Sprite — is the recognition of poverty itself as a public health problem. The poor are more likely to live with asthma, depression, gun violence and pests (and the chemical pesticides used to eliminate them). The articulated goal should not simply be to create a population of poor people who are thin, but to create a population of poor people who are less poor. In 2010, the poverty rate in the city remained what it was 10 years earlier, 21 percent.

 

I'm all for letting the kids be free, my mom let me roam around town unsupervised for most of my childhood as long as I let her know who I was hanging out with and had some agreed upon time to get home. And I'm 23 right now so this wasn't decades ago, we're talking late 90s-early 2000s. That said, if I had a daughter it would be a TOTALLY different story than with my son. I don't want to be discriminatory but I feel like you can't pretend like they're the same, and my mom did the just that with my sisters and I.

 

A good read, Nik.

Right now, though, I bet recent HS and college graduates would disagree they have it easier than their folks did.

I'm shocked by the claim Stossel made (and he always has a source for these things) about only 6% of today's parents allowing their kids to go out and play unsupervised. It's so far over the top being overprotective of the kids. He is making the point that we are keeping them from becoming street wise and that the fear of harm is unwarranted for the most part.

It's true that Lenore Skenazy shows up in most of the links on that google search. "World's worst mom"

http://crime.about.com/od/stats/f/faqkids.htm

In 1999, there were 100 children kidnapped by nonfamily members. These are the ones where there's real risk of death or serious harm. Lots of kids do go missing, but they're runaways or are abducted by family members (e.g. custody disputes, etc.).

 

http://www.lightspeedresearch.com/p...-or-no-unsupervised-outside-play-this-summer/

That's for England. US survey might be the 6% figure.