What we get wrong about grit—and what our kids really need instead

There’s a particular silence that settles over a child’s room when they’ve failed at something they cared about. 

Not the silence of sleep or sulking, but something quieter. Heavier. 

It’s the moment right after the math test is shoved into a backpack, or the soccer tryout ends with a coach’s polite smile and no callback. 

That silence isn’t just disappointment—it’s self-questioning. 

The beginnings of a story they may start telling themselves: “I’m not good at this. Maybe I never will be.” 

And the truth is, the stories we begin telling ourselves as children are often the ones we carry into adulthood—sometimes for a lifetime.

We talk about grit like it’s a secret weapon.

It shows up in parenting books, TED Talks, and feel-good documentaries.

We celebrate it in Olympians and child prodigies.

We hand it to our kids like armor.

“Don’t give up.”

“Try harder next time.”

“Believe in yourself.”

Simple phrases.

But loaded with expectation.

The growth mindset has become a mantra—an education trend repackaged as a moral imperative. 

And yet, even as we hand it to our kids like a tool, we don’t always stop to ask whether we understand it ourselves. 

Or worse: whether we’ve confused it with something else entirely.

Because grit—real grit—is not loud. It’s not shiny. It doesn’t come in gold-star form. It doesn’t always look like winning. 

Sometimes, it looks like crying quietly and showing up anyway. Sometimes, it looks like failure repeating itself. Sometimes, it looks like letting go.

I remember a boy I once tutored. 

He was nine, small for his age, painfully shy. He struggled with reading, and no matter how many phonics drills or picture books we moved through, his progress was achingly slow. 

But he came back every week. He sat with the discomfort of not knowing, not getting it, not matching his peers—and he kept coming back. 

His mother once asked me if I thought he lacked grit. She said it in a whisper, as though she feared the answer would become a prophecy. I wanted to say: “He has more grit than most adults I know.” 

But that wasn’t what she meant. She meant: Will he win? Will he shine? Will he ever feel enough?

Somewhere along the way, the idea of grit—of growth mindset—got hijacked. Turned into a scoreboard. 

We started treating it like a magic ingredient for success, when it was really meant to be a lens. A way of seeing effort and failure not as endpoints, but as motion. 

The Buddha spoke of right effort—not in the sense of relentless pushing, but in terms of balance. Knowing when to persist and when to release. 

When to challenge the mind and when to sit still and observe it. Grit without this wisdom becomes ego. Or worse, punishment masquerading as discipline.

Western psychology has long explored the role of mindset in achievement. Carol Dweck’s research popularized the idea that believing intelligence is malleable leads to greater motivation and performance. 

But in translation—from lab to classroom to parenting podcast—something essential was lost.

We turned growth mindset into a checkbox. A slogan. A reward loop. We told kids they could do anything if they just believed hard enough. 

But belief alone is a brittle thing. It doesn’t survive its first real failure without context. Without compassion. Without the inner strength to say, “I am not what I did today. But I can try again.”

Social media doesn’t help. In the curated highlight reel of modern parenting, “gritty” kids are piano prodigies, junior athletes, and micro-entrepreneurs. 

We don’t just encourage effort. We expect results that sparkle.

Instead of teaching kids to be okay with slow progress, we rush them.

Instead of honoring the effort itself, we look for outcomes.

A trophy. A certificate. A viral video. That’s what starts to matter.

And when they fall short, we rush to call it a lesson.

We say it builds character.

But deep down, it still feels like failure.

And often, the lesson tastes more like shame than growth.

What matters more is feeling safe enough to keep learning.

There must be room to fail without identity cracking under pressure.

Children thrive when parents and teachers see the struggle not as a flaw to fix, but as something worthy of respect.

Because grit, in its purest form, isn’t about climbing higher.

It’s about standing still in the storm—and not running away.

Buddhist psychology teaches that attachment to outcome is a source of suffering. That clinging to a specific version of success blinds us to the present moment. And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong. 

We say we want our kids to have grit, but what we often mean is: we want them to succeed. To perform. To prove. 

But real grit has nothing to prove. It just stays. Quietly. Persistently. Without needing to be seen.

I’ve seen it in my own life.

The times I’ve sat with failure and let it sting instead of distracting myself out of it. The times I’ve written drafts that went nowhere, sat on cushions through restless meditations, shown up for people I’d rather avoid. 

These moments don’t look like growth from the outside. They don’t sparkle. But they shape us in a way that shiny things never can.

And maybe that’s the paradox. The more we chase grit as a goal, the more we miss its essence. 

Because grit isn’t something you earn or bestow—it’s something you uncover. In stillness. In repetition. 

In the small, unremarkable acts of staying with something, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially then.

So what if we stopped treating grit like a performance metric? 

What if we stopped measuring our children’s resilience by how quickly they bounce back, and instead started paying attention to how deeply they feel? 

What if we allowed space for discouragement, for pause, for anger, for letting go—not as failures of mindset, but as sacred parts of the learning curve?

There’s a Japanese concept I’ve always loved: kintsugi—the art of mending broken pottery with gold. 

It doesn’t try to hide the cracks. It illuminates them. Honors them. 

The object becomes more beautiful not despite its breakage, but because of it. I think children are like that, too. 

Not blank slates or success projects, but vessels—already whole, already enough—just learning how to live with the cracks.

And maybe, in the end, that’s all grit really is. 

Not toughness, not hustle, not perfection. Just the quiet bravery to keep showing up cracked, and whole, and in motion.