Most people don’t understand that a mind virus can be just as deadly as a physical virus.
Brigham Young, "Good condition and blessings of the Saints in Zion," May 31, 1857, Salt Lake City.
As I advance in years, I hope to advance in the true knowledge of God and godliness. I hope to increase in the power of the Almighty, and in influence to establish peace and righteousness upon the earth, and to bring all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, even all who will hearken to the principles of righteousness, to a true sense of the knowledge of God and godliness, of themselves, and the relation they sustain to heaven and heavenly beings. I hope to increase and advance, as I do in days and years, in the wisdom and the knowledge of God, and in the power of God; and I pray that this may be the case, not only with myself, but with all the Saints, that we may grow in grace and in the knowledge of the truth, and be made perfect before Him.
There never has been a day for ages and ages, not since the true church was destroyed after the days of the Apostles, that required the faith and the energy of godly men and godly women, and the skill, wisdom, and power of the Almighty to be with them, so much as this people require it at the present time.
There never was that necessity; there never has been a time on the face of the earth, from the time that the church went to destruction, and the Priesthood was taken from the earth, that the powers of darkness and the powers of earth and hell were so embittered, and enraged, and incensed against God and godliness on the earth, as they are at the present.
And when the spirit of persecution, the spirit of hatred, of wrath, and malice ceases in the world against this people, it will be the time that this people have apostatized and joined hands with the wicked, and never until then; which I pray may never come.
I feel thankful for the privilege of lifting up my voice before you this day, my brethren; I feel that it is a great privilege. There is no other people on the earth that are blessed like this people, though some of them say they are not blessed, because they have trials—that they are not blessed as they wish to be, because they have cares upon them, because they are persecuted and hated. But I say that in all this you are blessed, if the words of the Savior are correct, which you and I believe.
He said to his disciples formerly, which will also correctly apply to the Saints in our day, “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
If this is not now done to perfection by the world, wait a little while, and it will be. The world will hate us to perfection; and if they have not spoken all manner of evil against us, falsely, it is because they have not knowledge enough to do it. At this time there is no falsehood which they can invent, but what they are active in their service to their father the devil against the Saints; consequently, according to the words of the Savior, “Blessed are ye.”
We know that we are blessed, and God knows it, if we love the Lord our God; and our works prove that we do. Blessed are the Latter-day Saints, if they love God and keep His commandments. And, let the world revile them, and do what they will, we are blessed, because we have the words of eternal life, and know how to perform, and are actually performing the works, to secure to ourselves an eternal salvation and an existence in the presence of our Father and God, while they will be wasted away, and be destroyed from the earth, and from every kingdom where there is peace and righteousness.
We are blessed, and we may never expect our happiness and heaven until we gain a perfect victory over the devil, hell, and the grave; and that we cannot do in this mortality; but we can conquer to a certain degree, and gain admission into the favor of our Father and God, and receive His promise to be received into His celestial kingdom, when we shall have a perfect victory and power over everything that is evil. I will give way for others. May God bless you. Amen.
(1850s1857, BY Journey ¶18–21 • JD 4:326–JD 4:327)
ET
On a winter evening a few years ago, I joined more than a hundred other parents for a meeting at my daughter’s school. We watched as an English teacher put up a picture of something called the Learning Pit, which looked like a cartoon ditch with a kid at the bottom.
This, he explained, was the shape that learning takes. The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea. Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don’t really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.
This was how the school planned to prepare our 10-year-old children for an upcoming standardized test. They would introduce material far above the kids’ abilities, and their grades would be very low. Don’t worry about the grades and don’t rescue them, the teachers told us. Let them know the goal is not getting the right answer but grappling with the problem. As they wrestled with the work, they would get more comfortable with the discomfort. They would develop strategies to manage it. They would find ways to climb out of the pit. In a word, they would build resilience.
This made sense to me: I understood how crucial it is to be able to manage discomfort to develop independence. But the reality of watching my own child flounder turned out to be far harder than I anticipated. My daughter had some perfectionist tendencies and cried when she could not do her work well. I hated seeing her so unhappy. After one particularly brutal night of tears and frustration (first hers, then mine), I emailed her teacher. Her confidence was waning, I said; her motivation was on the line. She was sad, and I was angry. I wanted to fix it.
James Nottingham, a British teacher, developed the idea of the Learning Pit in the 2000s after noticing that his students almost always played things extremely safe. They only raised their hands when they were certain of the answer. Given choices about what topics to explore, they stuck closely to things they knew.
Nottingham wondered how he could help them take more risks in the pursuit of learning: asking more questions, admitting when they didn’t know something, being brave enough to test different approaches. He used a picture of a U-shaped curve to explain to kids how their comfort level would drop and then, in time, rise again. He was teaching in an ex-mining town at the time, and one kid noticed his diagram looked like a pit.
Letting kids struggle is not the norm in the U.S. In 1999, the Department of Education released a detailed study comparing how teachers teach eighth-grade math in different countries. In Japan, teachers spent 44% of their time giving students material they don’t know and challenging them to figure it out; in the U.S., teachers took this approach 1% of the time. In Japan, a student would sometimes stand at the board for over half an hour trying to figure out how to solve a problem—no one was concerned or embarrassed. American teachers offered help before students tried the problems, to prevent them from struggling.
Parents like me often make things worse. Nottingham says there are three mental states kids occupy when they are learning something new: relatively comfortable, relatively uncomfortable and panicked. Too often parents step in at relatively uncomfortable. “It’s counterproductive,” he said in an interview. “Struggle is where we learn.”
Of course, some kids need more help than others. Neurodivergent children, for example, will need more support. But stepping back is usually a better solution than jumping in. Panic warrants action; discomfort does not.
When my daughter’s teacher emailed me back, he told me she was doing great. She was learning to dig in and try harder, to ask a friend for help, to go to the teacher eventually but not right away. He reassured me all was going to plan. My thought at the time was “this plan stinks.”
But soon after my unnecessarily panicked email, my daughter’s mood started to improve. Her scores started ticking up. At a regularly scheduled parent-teacher meeting, her teacher said she was clocking 60% on math problems that were a full academic year ahead. She was getting better at dealing with frustration and setbacks. She was gaining confidence—not just in math and English but in asking for help. She was climbing out of the pit.
And, from a place of love, I had almost prevented it all from happening.
Watching your own kid suffer is a special form of hell. But a kid who struggles—and sometimes fails—will end up better prepared for life’s challenges than one who breezes through their work without breaking a sweat. Independence in learning is critical to success in an era where generative AI will require us not just to know things but to know what we want to do with our knowledge.
This does not mean that we stop offering help, dialogue and love. High standards can coexist with deep support. Our job is to notice how our kid is doing and to give them just enough guidance to make sure they don’t get into full-on panic mode. The difference is not doing it for them but letting them know you are with them as they muddle through.
The Learning Pit is a useful metaphor because all kids can remember being a novice at something and then gaining competence. Maybe it was soccer, or learning the trombone, or drawing. Remind them of the self-portrait they did in fourth grade and how well they can draw five years later. That improvement didn’t happen in a day, or a week. Children have the muscles they need to learn, and letting them scramble out of the pit without hauling them out is not an act of negligence but an act of love.
Jenny Anderson is a journalist who writes the Substack “How to Be Brave.” This article is adapted from her new book, co-authored with Rebecca Winthrop, “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better,” published by Crown.
