Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Flight Behavior, among many others) does a wide-ranging interview in Sun Magazine touching on writing, climate change, food, and more. The interviewer asks about perseverance:<\/p>\n
How do you nurture people to work hard enough to move all that dirt? How do you do that with your own children?<\/p>\n
And all of a sudden there\u2019s this: \u201cThere\u2019s something I have said so often to my children that now they chant it back to me: \u2018You can do hard things.\u2019 ”<\/p>\n
\u201cI sent my kids to a Montessori preschool, and thank heavens I did, because most of what I learned about parenting came from those wonderful Montessori teachers. They straightened me out about self-esteem. There\u2019s this myth that self-esteem comes from making everything easy for your children and making sure they never fail. If they never encounter hardship or conflict, the logic goes, they\u2019ll never feel bad about themselves. Well, that\u2019s ridiculous. That\u2019s not even a human life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cKids learn self-esteem from mastering difficult tasks. It\u2019s as simple as that. The Montessori teachers told me to put my two year-old on a stool and give her the bread, give her the peanut butter, give her the knife \u2014 a blunt knife \u2014 and let her make that sandwich and get peanut butter all over the place, because when she\u2019s done, she\u2019ll feel like a million bucks.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that was brilliant. Raising children became mostly a matter of enabling them and standing back and watching. When a task was difficult, that\u2019s when I would tell them, \u2018You can do hard things.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth of them have told me they still say to themselves, \u2018I can do hard things.\u2019 It helps them feel good about who they are, not just after they\u2019ve finished, but while they\u2019re engaged in the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Flight Behavior, among many others) does a wide-ranging interview in Sun Magazine touching on writing, climate change, food, and more. The interviewer asks about perseverance: How do you nurture people to work hard enough to move all that dirt? How do you do that with your own children? And all of a sudden there\u2019s this: \u201cThere\u2019s something I have said so often to my children that now they chant it back to me: \u2018You can do hard things.\u2019 ” \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[50,43,44,58],"class_list":["post-12973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montessori","tag-grit","tag-montessori","tag-parenting","tag-soft-skills"],"yoast_head":"\n