Don’t try to rescue your kid from the ‘learning pit’

This, he explained, was the shape that learning takes. The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea. Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don’t really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.

This was how the school planned to prepare our 10-year-old children for an upcoming standardized test. They would introduce material far above the kids’ abilities, and their grades would be very low. Don’t worry about the grades and don’t rescue them, the teachers told us. Let them know the goal is not getting the right answer but grappling with the problem. As they wrestled with the work, they would get more comfortable with the discomfort. They would develop strategies to manage it. They would find ways to climb out of the pit. In a word, they would build resilience.

This made sense to me: I understood how crucial it is to be able to manage discomfort to develop independence. But the reality of watching my own child flounder turned out to be far harder than I anticipated. My daughter had some perfectionist tendencies and cried when she could not do her work well. I hated seeing her so unhappy. After one particularly brutal night of tears and frustration (first hers, then mine), I emailed her teacher. Her confidence was waning, I said; her motivation was on the line. She was sad, and I was angry. I wanted to fix it.

James Nottingham, a British teacher, developed the idea of the Learning Pit in the 2000s after noticing that his students almost always played things extremely safe. They only raised their hands when they were certain of the answer. Given choices about what topics to explore, they stuck closely to things they knew.

Nottingham wondered how he could help them take more risks in the pursuit of learning: asking more questions, admitting when they didn’t know something, being brave enough to test different approaches. He used a picture of a U-shaped curve to explain to kids how their comfort level would drop and then, in time, rise again. He was teaching in an ex-mining town at the time, and one kid noticed his diagram looked like a pit.

Letting kids struggle is not the norm in the U.S. In 1999, the Department of Education released a detailed study comparing how teachers teach eighth-grade math in different countries. In Japan, teachers spent 44% of their time giving students material they don’t know and challenging them to figure it out; in the U.S., teachers took this approach 1% of the time. In Japan, a student would sometimes stand at the board for over half an hour trying to figure out how to solve a problem—no one was concerned or embarrassed. American teachers offered help before students tried the problems, to prevent them from struggling.

Parents like me often make things worse. Nottingham says there are three mental states kids occupy when they are learning something new: relatively comfortable, relatively uncomfortable and panicked. Too often parents step in at relatively uncomfortable. “It’s counterproductive," he said in an interview. “Struggle is where we learn."

Of course, some kids need more help than others. Neurodivergent children, for example, will need more support. But stepping back is usually a better solution than jumping in. Panic warrants action; discomfort does not.

When my daughter’s teacher emailed me back, he told me she was doing great. She was learning to dig in and try harder, to ask a friend for help, to go to the teacher eventually but not right away. He reassured me all was going to plan. My thought at the time was “this plan stinks."

But soon after my unnecessarily panicked email, my daughter’s mood started to improve. Her scores started ticking up. At a regularly scheduled parent-teacher meeting, her teacher said she was clocking 60% on math problems that were a full academic year ahead. She was getting better at dealing with frustration and setbacks. She was gaining confidence—not just in math and English but in asking for help. She was climbing out of the pit.

And, from a place of love, I had almost prevented it all from happening.

Watching your own kid suffer is a special form of hell. But a kid who struggles—and sometimes fails—will end up better prepared for life’s challenges than one who breezes through their work without breaking a sweat. Independence in learning is critical to success in an era where generative AI will require us not just to know things but to know what we want to do with our knowledge.

This does not mean that we stop offering help, dialogue and love. High standards can coexist with deep support. Our job is to notice how our kid is doing and to give them just enough guidance to make sure they don’t get into full-on panic mode. The difference is not doing it for them but letting them know you are with them as they muddle through.

The Learning Pit is a useful metaphor because all kids can remember being a novice at something and then gaining competence. Maybe it was soccer, or learning the trombone, or drawing. Remind them of the self-portrait they did in fourth grade and how well they can draw five years later. That improvement didn’t happen in a day, or a week. Children have the muscles they need to learn, and letting them scramble out of the pit without hauling them out is not an act of negligence but an act of love.

Jenny Anderson is a journalist who writes the Substack “How to Be Brave." This article is adapted from her new book, co-authored with Rebecca Winthrop, “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better," published by Crown.