How to Grow in Perseverance

How to Grow in Perseverance

Sabrina B. Little

Media report

Psychology Today

2025

Prior to graduate school, I taught medieval history and literature to middle-schoolers at a small classical school. This school had all the advantages of a well-structured curriculum and committed teachers. It was also a school where parents were involved and invested in their children, which goes a long way in supporting learning outcomes.[1] Even so, I could easily identify students who had unrestricted access to iPhones and other screens. They were generally less curious, struggled with imaginative tasks like creative writing, and lacked perseverance. They were distractible and had difficulty completing sustained tasks. I am now a decade removed from the middle-school classroom where I first observed the negative impacts of screens on students, and our society has become even more technology-saturated and device-dependent in the intervening years. John Burn-Murdoch, a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, recently shared findings from the Understanding America Study (2024) indicating a significant decline in perseverance and an increase in distractibility among American youth as a result of unrestricted internet usage.[2]