Do you want to teach your son to persevere through solving a problem?
Do you want your daughter to bounce back from setbacks?
Our brains love stories AND our brains loving having examples (i.e., models) to follow. This post explains the concept of struggle stories, a low cost & high impact tool for parents to build growth mindset in their children by using storybook characters to model resilience and perseverance.
- Low Cost & High Impact
- What is a struggle story?
- Can struggle stories help preschoolers increase persistence in difficult tasks?
- Try This
- Takeaway
Struggle stories: a low cost & high impact idea for building resilience and perseverance
Using storybooks is a highly economical way to introduce and reinforce values (like resilience or perseverance) or mindsets (like growth mindset) to our children.
Many of these books are available through local public libraries, making access completely cost free for families.
Research shows that students with growth mindset, who believe that they can achieve through incremental persistent progress rather than talent, perform better than their counterparts with fixed mindsets across academic subjects.
But academics are only part of the picture–using struggle stories to build resilience helps prepare a child for the inevitable challenges that she will face in everyday life.
2. What is a struggle story?
In the Little House on the Prairie series, Laura Ingalls and her family overcome frigid winters, rushing waters, famine, and illness as they create a home and a life in the American pioneer era. In the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, young Harry overcomes evil while facing manipulative adults, giant trolls, and significant peer bullying. In The Swiss Family Robinson, a family survives a shipwreck and learns to thrive on a remote island while facing wild animals, lack of resources, and even fighting off pirates.
Reading aloud stories like these to our children have profound benefits, even beyond neurochemical advantages. Stories with adventures like these don’t just capture the imagination–the characters exemplify a growth mindset. A growth mindset is a perspective that encourages persistence in incremental progress, no matter the starting point.
Modeling a growth mindset is important, especially from parents and caregivers who can display a living example of trying hard things and persistently moving forward. However, when personal models of growth mindset aren’t readily available in homes or in the classroom, storybooks that share tales of persistence to novel tasks can be readily used as narrative models at little to no cost (Hachigian, 2020).
In her recent dissertation at Columbia University, Amy Hachigian conducted a research study to determine if preschoolers could listen to storybooks (specifically struggle stories) and then demonstrate persistence on difficult tasks. Hachigian defined struggle stories as books that “demonstrate how sustained effort towards a difficult task and the use of multiple problem-solving strategies are essential to goal-achievement despite moments of set-back or failure.”
3. Can struggle stories help preschoolers increase persistence on difficult tasks?
Here’s how Hachigian conducted her research study:
- She developed original struggle story books and read them to young children. Two groups of children participated: one group heard struggle stories and one group heard non-struggle stories.
- For the group that heard struggle stories, some used roleplay to reinforce the learning and the others heard the reader provide specific praise for the character’s display of persistence.
- Then, the researchers gave all participants challenging tasks (puzzles, search and finds, or shape sorters) and measured their time spent attempting to complete them (to measure persistence).
Her findings?
The children that showed significantly higher persistence on challenging tasks were the “...children who heard researchers praise characters throughout each reading of the struggle narratives…”
She did NOT find differences in persistence between the students who heard struggle stories vs. non-struggle stories. Further, roleplaying after hearing struggle stories was not an effective approach in this particular study. But something special happened when vicarious praise was used to reinforce perseverance while reading a struggle story.
Our brains follow models & keep what is reinforced
In the post Modeling How to Shape Brains & Behavior for Better, I mentioned the roles of observational learning and social learning theory. Essentially, these two theories support the use of struggle stories to teach children character values like persistence or resilience. Children observe what adults and peers are doing around them and they encode the behavior. But, some of the behavior is more likely to be encoded if it is reinforced. Reinforcement can be positive (i.e. praise, reward) or negative (i.e., critique, punishment).
The power of modeling and reinforcement means that parents (or characters in a narrative) can model desired behavior and can also reinforce the desired behavior. Even children at very young ages can “…learn messages from their environment and can generalize the value of persistence to novel tasks” (Hachigian, 2020).
There is a difference between praising the process and praising the outcome, though. If our desire is to build growth mindset, we want to highlight and praise the model’s incremental steps toward success despite failure, adversity, or hardship. We want to focus on and praised effort-based success, not an outcome. This is called process praise. For example, instead of saying “Good job” when your child showed you their castle of blocks, you could say “You worked hard to rebuild this several times.”
What about persistence with an impossible task?
An interesting caveat from Hachigian’s study: children showed demonstrated persistence on challenging tasks but NOT on a clearly impossible task. Children were given a shape sorter task in which a new shape presented could not possibly fit in the holes provided. Most participants correctly recognized this task as impossible and didn’t waste their efforts. This is an important consideration as we help our children to develop persistence. Fruitless persistence for an unattainable outcome is unproductive.
We want our children to persevere in finding a solution…when finding a solution is possible.
4. Try This!
- Find struggle stories!
- Use your local library
- Ask the children’s librarian to help you identify struggle stories that are age appropriate. Choose stories that involve a task or problem that your child can relate to (persistence in school, the sport they play, or instrument they are learning, etc.)
- Save time by downloading my FREE CURATED LIST OF STRUGGLE STORIES!
- Use this list as a starting point for finding picture books AND chapter books you can read aloud to your children. It also includes a free quick guide about struggle stories and the best ways to use them!
- Use your local library
- Read the struggle story more than once!
- Repeated exposure (at least twice) to books increases vocabulary comprehension and aids content retention.
- Verbally reinforce the growth mindset of the storybook character (process praise).
- As you read aloud, vicariously praise the efforts of the character in the story who tried multiple ways to solve hard problems or endured difficult circumstances (Hachigian, 2020). This reinforces the behavior of sustained effort despite difficulty.
- “Wow, Harry didn’t give up even when he was scared.”
- “Rosie was so persistent! She kept building even though she didn’t know how it would turn out.”
- “I noticed that he tried four different ways to solve the problem.”
- “I liked how Laura’s family kept trying, with good attitudes, even when things got hard.”
- As you read aloud, vicariously praise the efforts of the character in the story who tried multiple ways to solve hard problems or endured difficult circumstances (Hachigian, 2020). This reinforces the behavior of sustained effort despite difficulty.
- Ask your child open ended questions about the struggle story.
- Who was persistent in the story? Tell me more about that character.
- Why do you think they chose that solution?
- What kind of problems do you think the character will encounter?
- What kinds of tools could they use?
- What would you do in that situation?
6 Takeaway
In her dissertation study, Hachiagian concluded that struggle storybooks alone may not increase persistence. However, “…vicarious praise may play a critical role in how effectively children learn from struggle stories and, in turn, how children apply these learnings to situations where persistence is required to succeed.” (pg. 57-58, Hachigian, 2020).
Parents and teachers can consider using vicarious process praise, specifically focused on the efforts and problem solving of characters, while reading storybooks aloud.
Don’t use struggle stories as an isolated tool.
Model growth mindset at home, read struggle stories while praising persistence, and encourage failure as a stepping stone to success. These strategies collectively enhance the building of a growth mindset.
Grab the printable PDF BOOK LIST of curated struggle stories you can read and use, today!
Do you need more resources for helping your child build resilience and perseverance? Check out these related posts:
- Reading Aloud and Your Child’s Brain: The Powerful Science Behind the Magic
- Growth Mindset: Helping Your Child Embrace Failure to Achieve Success
- 3 Ways Adventures Change Our Thinking
References
Bauer (2021). The Neuroscience of Storytelling. Neuroleadership.com https://neuroleadership.com/your-brain-at-work/the-neuroscience-of-storytelling/ Accessed 6_15_23
Hachigian (2020). Persisting Preschoolers: Using Storybooks to Increase Persistence on Difficult Tasks (a dissertation). Retrieved from: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-amkd-9p19
