Are Kids Really Always Doing Their Best?

True or false?

Kids do well if they can.

Dr.

Ross Green, the psychologist, has made this phrase famous and I hear a lot of educators repeating it, but I think it's hogwash.

It is not true that kids do well if they can.

How well kids do has a wide range from the least they're capable of to the most they're capable of.

Like kids can do nothing or they can do something that really pushes them to the limit and helps them grow.

And when I hear people say kids do well if they can, What they're really saying is you shouldn't have high expectations of this child.

You shouldn't push this child to try harder and do better.

And somehow we've pathologized this idea of having expectations for students that push them, that make them grow.

And I think that really undermines the fundamental purpose of education.

And this is where psychologists have a different professional responsibility than educators do, right?

Like psychologists are working with students to help them solve a problem.

And even if it means that that student doesn't grow for a time so that they can solve that problem, that's fine.

That's related to the goals of being a psychologist.

But our goals as educators are different.

So I think we have to be very careful about taking advice from psychologists about how we should do school because our goals are different.

We're trying to produce healthy, functioning adults, and that means we continually need to be pushing students to grow.

Now, if there is a major problem, might we back off for a given child for a while?

I think, yeah, absolutely.

Just as If you're lifting weights and you injure yourself, you should stop lifting weights for a while so that you can heal, not pull a muscle or rip a ligament or whatever.

And certainly if your orthopedic surgeon said, hey, stop lifting weights for a while so you can get better, we can get you fixed up, then that would make a lot of sense.

But it wouldn't be good advice to just never lift weights again if you're capable of it, if you are able to kind of get back on the road to your fitness goals, and if you have had the time to heal.

And I think that's where psychologists don't realize that if we just like back off permanently and don't try to help kids grow, don't try to help kids try harder and do better, we'll fail at our mission.

Our mission grinds to a halt and we just become a babysitting service.

if we're not pushing kids to try harder and do better.

And like, I don't understand where they think the role of effort is in student behavior, in student learning.

Kids can almost always try a little bit harder.

You can almost always lift a little bit more weight and you'll hit some limits on that, but it's in hitting those limits that you surpass those limits, right?

It is in trying your hardest that you become capable of even more, right?

If you can lift 200 pounds, well, put a few more pounds on there, you can lift 202, 204.

That is how we get stronger, and the same is true when it comes to student effort, student attention span, student, you know, any student characteristic that we want to enhance, we ask for a little bit more, and that is how students grow.

And if we don't do it, they won't grow.

So I think this advice to just treat whatever we get from students as the best they can do is just flat wrong.

It is not the case that whatever behavior we saw is the best that that kid can do.

There is always room for effort.

There is always room for motivation.

There's always room for trying harder.

And we have to draw on that if we want to help our kids grow.

So I think we've got to stop listening to this just terrible advice from psychologists who think they know how we should run schools because they don't.

Let me know what you think.