Ballet for children – how it helps build “grit”

Ballet carries with it a lot of undeniable developmental advantages for your child. Enhancing physical and mental development, ballet helps improve discipline, coordination, learning skills, and many more. One of those incredibly useful aspects that can really help your child in the long run is grit.

What is grit?

The term “grit” was recently coined by Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She used it specifically to denote a type of perseverance and success-oriented attitude that should go hand in hand with talent in order to achieve success. Unlike regular determination, though, grit focuses on long-term goals and working against setbacks, realising that one’s learning capacity is also malleable. In essence, grit is the drive to overcome any obstacle when reaching for a set long-term goal, that is a far more valuable ingredient of success than pure talent is.

How can ballet help build grit?

Ballet requires a specific mindset in order for your child to be successful. It’s often a process that doesn’t seem intuitive and failing can hurt. But it’s through the determination to not be discouraged by setbacks that children start to feel the progress from their practice – ballet shows them that their efforts have real, tangible results. This in turn inspired dilligence, and a mindset that they can achieve anything they set out to achieve as long as they put their mind to it. This is the epitome of grit.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of parental input into this process. Mothers and fathers can inspire their children to finish what they started and get up after every time they fail. Grit is all about learning to be excellent in a thing that you choose to do, and so parents play an important role of encouraging their children to pursue those interests and show them that the results are worth fighting for.

Ballet is all about striving for that excellence, serving as a challenge to both the mind and body. It teaches its practitioners that sometimes, you have to fail to get better in the long run. And that’s what grit is all about. Ballet can definitely help build a success mindset in your child.