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So if they were more motivated, they'd be more resourceful too?

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Yeah.

I think the obvious answer--you teach kids to be resourceful by letting/making them
solve problems for themselves--is essentially true. It can be hard to see the truth of this because kids don't learn (or, more correctly, change) character traits as quickly as they learn specific skills. And that is what we're talking about here: character traits, and you don't so much learn those as get trained into or out of them.

Connecting this to the statement I quoted above, I have seen my girls insist that they can't tie their shoes, for instance. If instead of tying them for them I say something like, "Okay. We won't go out until your shoes are tied," assuming we're going somewhere they want to go, their shoes get tied in a matter of seconds. If we're getting ready to go shopping, though, it takes them much longer to figure it out.

So then, am I really teaching them resourcefulness, if the lesson is unlearned so quickly? Well, setting aside the argument that resourcefulness is precisely what they're displaying, I still think the answer is yes. The hard lessons, the character lessons, I don't think you see the fruits of those right away. But somehow most kids go from being amoral little psychopaths to functional adults, so they must eventually get through.

Doesn't every parent teach resourcefulness this way? Well, I think most parents are guilty from time to time of sacrificing teaching in the name of efficiency. For instance, my girls are a bit behind physically as well as in other ways. They can't take a bath without help yet and they can't brush their teeth without help yet. What I do to try to help them grow is let them try to bathe themselves while I point out what they've missed. But, as Elizabeth noted in the case of her students, they won't do as good a job as if I just took over. When they brush their teeth, I hold their hand and guide them, to make sure they do a good job, and then I have them rinse out their own toothbrushes and rinse and clean themselves. It is faster if I just brush their teeth for them, though. And sometimes, when I'm running late or something, I do take over with each of these tasks.

It's increasingly common for both parents to work, and people just don't always think they have time for lessons whose efficacy isn't readily apparent anyway. *shrug* I think the parents who fight this temptation most successfully are the ones with the most resourceful children. But goodness knows I am not always the father I want to be.

From a teaching standpoint--and sometimes I feel like I'm much more successful as a teacher than I am as a father--I routinely emphasize that learning the critical skills to be able to figure things out is more important than learning a specific skill set. For this reason, I only teach formulas to be memorized when it is unavoidable, and usually teach how the formulas are derived instead. I think this ties in to the issue, because many kids just want something they can memorize instead of having to approach problems that don't fit a mold or that force them to puzzle things out for themselves.

It's natural at all stages in life to seek the easy way out. For young kids, that wish can outweigh the value of being self-reliant, because self-reliance is not how we begin life. It takes some time to adjust to this mature expectation.

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