Dear parents, do you want to teach your kids the worth of hard work? Here’s how to

An MIT study found that babies as young as 15 months can learn the value of hard work, when they see parents struggling hard to achieve a goal.

Do you want to instil the value of hard work in your kids? If so, try and demonstrate the effort you put in to achieve a goal, say researchers.

The findings showed babies as young as 15 months can learn the value of hard work, when they see parents struggling hard to achieve a goal. Babies, who watched an adult struggle to reach two different goals before succeeding, tried harder at their own difficult tasks than babies who saw an adult succeed effortlessly.

The study may offer some guidance for parents who hope to instil the value of effort in their children, the researchers noted.

The study showed that people appear to be able to learn, from an early age, how to make decisions regarding effort allocation.

“There’s some pressure on parents to make everything look easy and not get frustrated in front of their children,” said Laura Schulz, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “This study suggests that it may not be a bad thing to show your children that you are working hard to achieve your goals,” Schulz added.

For the study, published in the journal Science, the team designed an experiment in which 15-month-old babies first watched an adult perform two tasks. Then the babies were given a musical toy, whose button to turn the toy did not work.

Babies who had seen researchers struggle before succeeding pressed the button nearly twice as many times overall as those who saw the adult easily succeed. They also pressed it nearly twice as many times before first asking for help or tossing the toy.

Importantly, the study showed that people appear to be able to learn, from an early age, how to make decisions regarding effort allocation, the researchers noted.