Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Observer
as one of the funniest comics in Britain, Francesca performs to sold-out
audiences around the world. In a typical routine, she breaks the no-cussing rule of the Young family,
and after the show, she’s sure to violate the drinking prohibition. Like her parents, Francesca is a
lifelong vegetarian, not religious, and politically, somewhere to the left of progressive.
Francesca was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age two. She prefers the term “wobbly.” Told that
their brain-damaged daughter would “never lead a normal life,” Tina and Alex quickly decided that
no doctor could foretell who their daughter might become. Achieving comedic stardom takes grit no
matter who you are, but perhaps more so when it’s a challenge merely to enunciate your consonants or
walk to the stage. So, like other aspiring comics, Francesca has endured four-hour drives (each way)
to perform for ten minutes for no pay and made countless cold calls to impassive and busy television
producers. But unlike most of her peers, she needs to do breathing and voice exercises before each
show.
“I don’t take credit for my hard work and passion,” she told me. “I think these qualities came from
my family, which was very loving and very stable. Their overwhelming support and positivity are
why there is no limit to my ambition.”
Not surprisingly, counselors at Francesca’s school were doubtful of entertainment as a career path
for a girl who struggled to walk and talk at a normal cadence. They were even more wary of her
dropping out of high school to do so. “Oh, Francesca,” they’d say with a sigh, “think about something

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more sensible. Like computers.” The thought of an office job was about as horrible a fate as
Francesca could imagine. She asked her parents what she should do.
“Go and follow your dreams,” Alex told his daughter, “and if they don’t work out, then you can
reassess.”
“My mum was just as encouraging,” Francesca said. Then, with a smile: “Basically, they were
happy for me to leave formal education at sixteen to act on television. They let me spend my
weekends clubbing with friends, surrounded by leery men and cocktails with sexually explicit
names.”
I asked Alex about his “follow your dream” advice. Before explaining, he reminded me that
Francesca’s brother Raoul was also allowed to drop out of high school—to apprentice himself to a
renowned portrait painter. “We never put pressure on either of them to become doctors or lawyers or
anything like that. I truly believe that when you do something you really want to do, it becomes a
vocation. Francesca and her brother are incredibly hard workers, but they feel passionately about
their subjects, so to them it’s not at all oppressive.”
Tina agreed entirely: “I’ve always had an instinctive sense that life and nature and evolution have
planted in children their own capabilities—their own destiny. Like a plant, if they’re fed and watered
in the right way, they will grow up beautiful and strong. It’s just a question of creating the right
environment—a soil that is nurturing, that is listening and responsive to their needs. Children carry
within them the seeds of their own future. Their own interests will emerge if we trust them.”
Francesca connects the unconditional support that her “absurdly cool” parents lavished on her to
the hope she maintained even when hope seemed lost: “So much of sticking with things is believing
you can do it. That belief comes from self-worth. And that comes from how others have made us feel
in our lives.”
So far, Alex and Tina seem the epitome of permissive parenting. I asked them whether they see
themselves as such.
“Actually,” Alex said, “I think I’m allergic to spoiled children. Children must be loved and
accepted, but then, without complications, they need to be taught: ‘No, you cannot hit your sister on
the head with that stick. Yes, you must share. No, you don’t get to have everything you want when you
want it.’ It’s no-nonsense parenting.”
As an example, Alex pushed Francesca to do the physical therapy exercises prescribed by her
doctors. She hated them. For years, she and her father battled. Francesca couldn’t understand why she
couldn’t simply work around her limitations, and Alex believed his responsibility was to stand firm.
As she says in her book: “Though happy in many ways, the next few years were punctuated with
intense rows replete with door-banging and tears and the throwing of objects.”
Whether these skirmishes could have been handled more skillfully is an open question—Alex
believes he could have done a better job explaining to his young daughter 
why
he was so insistent.
That may be so, but what really strikes me about this aspect of Francesca’s childhood is the notion
that an affectionate, follow-your-dreams parent can nevertheless feel compelled to lay down the law
on matters of discipline. Suddenly, the one-dimensional view of Alex and Tina as hippy-dippy
parents seems incomplete.
It was telling, for example, to hear Alex, who is a writer, talk about the work ethic he modeled for
his children: “To finish things, you have to put the work in. When I was younger, I’d meet many
people who were writing stuff. They’d say to me, ‘Oh yeah, I am a writer as well but I’ve never
finished anything.’ Well, in that case, you are not a writer. You are just somebody who sits down and
writes things on a bit of paper. If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it and finish it.”

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Tina agrees that as much as children need freedom, they also need limits. She’s a tutor as well as
an environmental activist, and she’s watched a lot of parents engage in what she calls begging-and-
pleading negotiations with their children. “We taught our children to live by clear principles and
moral guidelines,” she said. “We explained our reasoning, but they always knew where the
boundaries were.
“And there was no television,” she added. “I felt it was a hypnotic medium, and I didn’t want it to
replace interactions with people. So we simply didn’t have a television. If the children wanted to
watch something special, they would walk over to their grandparents’.”
What can we learn from the stories of Steve Young and Francesca Martinez? And what can we glean
from how other grit paragons describe their parents?
In fact, I’ve noticed a pattern. For those of us who want to parent for grit, the pattern is a helpful
blueprint, a guide for making the many decisions we must grapple with while raising our children.
Before I say more, let me repeat the caveat that, as a scientist, I’d like to collect many more data
points before coming to firm conclusions. In a decade, I should know a lot more about parenting for
grit than I do now. But because there’s no pause button for parenting the people we care about, I’ll go
ahead and tell you my hunches. In large part, I’m encouraged to do so because the pattern I’ve
observed matches up with dozens of carefully executed research studies on parenting (but not grit).
The pattern also makes sense, given what’s been learned about human motivation since John Watson
dispensed his