In her fabulous TED Talk and book (How To Raise an Adult), Julie Lythcott-Haims emphasizes the overlooked importance of building self-efficacy in children. Here’s how she describes it in her TED Talk:
With our overhelp, our overprotection and overdirection and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one’s own actions lead to outcomes, not one’s parents’ actions on one’s behalf, but when one’s own actions lead to outcomes.
Research shows that more and more, parents are literally doing their kids’ homework for them. Finishing math, writing essays, completing science fair projects.
It’s one more place where the performing arts show their value. Because try as they may, no parents can practice their kid’s viola for her. No parents can memorize their kid’s lines for the play or learn to balance, blend, and phrase the music their kid is practicing in choir.
Modern parenting norms have short-circuited self-efficacy in many classes, but not in the arts. Kids learn in deeply personal ways about their own self-efficacy, they succeed and fail on their own, or as part of a team of equals.
This isn’t a reason to join choir, of course. But it’s a gift music, theatre, drama, and visual art educators are able to give their students.