Setting and achieving goals is an essential skill in life. Having specific goals for what we want to...

As parents, one of our key parenting tasks is to help teach our children the life skills that are important to them. The most successful people in any domain, whether they are Olympic athletes or leading scientists, tend to have very high levels of grit. They don’t quit things easily and have a long-term goal that remains unchanged for very long periods of time. Helping our children learn to set and achieve goals is one of the most essential roles we need to teach them.

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Confront Unrealistic Goals

Sometimes kids choose goals so big or so out of their element that it’s nearly impossible to meet them. When my daughter first set her goal of becoming a champion, we had a long talk about the difference between long-term and short-term goals.

If your cat-allergic child sets a goal of getting a cat, it’s time to have a reality check. If your little basketball player identifies the NBA as his goal, help him set a more attainable and age-appropriate version of the goal for this year.

Encourage your kids to choose goals that are realistic. Whatever the goal your child sets, be sure that your child came up with the goal. If you want your child to follow through, the goal has to have meaning to your child.

Break it down.

One of the reasons goals and resolutions are so hard to stick to is that they often feel so big that it’s hard to know where to start.

Teach your children to break down their goals into smaller, manageable steps. For example, having the boy who wants to be an NBA star turn his goal into being able to shoot a few baskets at a time will give him focus within the goal and he will know where to start and what he needs to do to reach it.

The Hard Thing Rule

Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and her family live by what she calls the “Hard Thing Rule.” It’s an easy concept. We briefly covered this in a previous article: How to Develop a Growth Mindset in Kids. We introduce this concept here because it covers most of the elements of how to set goals and accomplish them, and each step is suitable for application to real life.

There are three main aspects:

1. Everyone Has to Do a Hard thing.

The first part of the rule is that everyone has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice, such as playing the piano or playing a sport. As mentioned in my previous post, deliberate practice is a specific type of focused practice in which you deliberately stretch yourself and get out of your comfort zone. You focus on the areas you are weakest and develop strategies for improving them.

Deliberate practice is not particularly fun, but it is an incredibly efficient way to improve. This is why you need a high level of grit to do it consistently. And also this is why it’s called the “Hard Thing” rule.

2. You Can Quit, but Not Any Time.

The second part of the Hard Thing rule is that you are allowed to quit, but not until a ‘natural’ stopping point arrives. That means you can’t quit until the football season is over, or this term’s music lessons are done. The goal is to finish whatever your begin and so you cannot quit just because you had a bad day, or someone shouted at you, or you feel disheartened about your progress.

Once their commitment is complete, they don’t have to go back to that hard thing, but many times they do because they’ve tasted the pride that comes from finishing a hard thing and they want to pursue that little victory again.

3. You Get to Pick Your Hard Thing.

The third part of the Hard Thing rule is that each person gets to pick the thing that they want to work on. An intrinsic part of being gritty is being passionate and interested in what you’re doing, so it’s important that you pick an activity you are interested in from the beginning. Being forced to play the piano when you always hated it will not lead to developing grit, it will lead to resentment and wasted time.

These are the three main aspects of the Hard Thing Rule, but Duckworth mentions that since her kids are getting a bit older they are introducing a fourth part:

4. Two-Year Commitments.

You must commit to at least one activity (whether new or continuing an old one) for at least two years. This ties back to the second aspect of the rule. The goal is to become the sort of person that finishes whatever he or she starts and doesn’t quit easily. Long-term commitments like this will help develop grit more effectively.

SMART Goal Worksheet

SMART Goal worksheet is a tool attributed to German educator Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives concept. He published it in his 1954 book, The Practice of Management.

Setting SMART goals means you can clarify your ideas and focus your efforts, which allows you to allocate your time in a way that promises the greatest return and the greatest chance of achieving your goals. There are many kinds of worksheets on the websites, and we’ll end the article with the one that’s best for kids.

The goal should:

• Be no more than two-three sentences

• Include exactly what needs to be accomplished

• Include a completion date

• Answer: How will you know the goal is done?

• Answer: How will the goal be done?

• Answer: Who is in charge of completing the goal?

Best Goals Sheet for Kids

SMART Goals Checklist

This is the heart of the SMART process and is what separates the actionable SMART goal-setting worksheet from all other goal-setting worksheets.

As you go through these steps, review your goal for all the required steps of the SMART process. If the goal you wrote in step one meets the criteria on the checklist, click the appropriate box and move on to the next. If it fails to have criteria, revise the goal to include the criteria.

This SMART goal checklist makes sure that your goal is well defined and can be accomplished.

Reference

• 7 Keys to Helping Kids Set and Achieve Goals. (2020, June 22). Verywell Family. https://www.verywellfamily.com/helping-kids-set-and-achieve-goals-4121002
• Duckworth, A. (2018). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Reprint ed.). Scribner.
• The Hard Thing Rule. (2020, December 22). The Game of Few. https://www.thegameoffew.com/blog/2017-3-12-the-hard-thing-rule
• Kids, P. (2020, November 11). How to Help Your Child Set and Reach Goals | Parenting Tips & Advice. PBS KIDS for Parents. https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/how-to-help-your-child-set-and-reach-goals
• Merrihew, M. (2017, August 4). The Importance of Setting SMART Goals. HYDRATE. https://www.hydratemarketing.com/blog/the-importance-of-setting-smart-goals
• Scott, S. J. (2022, June 3). 4 Free SMART Goal Setting Worksheets & Templates [2022 Update]. Develop Good Habits. https://www.developgoodhabits.com/goal-setting-worksheet/
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