Infants' social environments play a part in whether they decide to persist. Research has found that adult models causally affect infants’ persistence, and infants can generalise the value of persistence to new tasks. Infants who see adults work hard to succeed persist longer at their tasks than they do at baseline or after seeing adults succeed effortlessly.

At a very young age, children cannot sustain attention for very long. Caregivers can help the child sustain attention and encourage the child’s efforts. Researchers found that infants whose parents spent more time praising their efforts and hard work, also known as process praise, and used more persistence-focused language in general, were more persistent than infants whose parents used this language less often.

Read more at AL-PER-C02.