Teach Resiliency; Teach a Teen to KNIT!

This week psychologist, Dr. Madeleine Levine was in Princeton speaking to the various adult constituency groups that influence today's teens, and as a middle school teacher at an all-girls school, I'm one of her targets. She argued that teens are stressed out, depressed, and anxious because they have neither experienced or witnessed much failure. Basically, they possess the belief that the road to success is straight and smooth.

After quiet reflection, I have the solution: teach every child to knit! This winter quite a few articles popped up on my social media feeds touting the benefits of knitting. Here are a few of my favorite reasons because they directly ease feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress:

• the repetitive nature of knitting stimulates our relaxation response
• our social circle widens and our connections with others deepen 
• finishing what one starts feels good; even better if the item is given as a gift 

However, there is an important benefit missing from the published sources: knitting teaches resiliency. When I knit, I make lots of mistakes. I misread patterns. I drop stitches. I increase or decrease on one side of a stitch marker but not the other. I mismeasure. I dislike the color or texture of the yarn. I could go on and on. I tend to start every project three times before I really understand the pattern and find my rhythm. I have grown to accept and expect this arrangement. It is not failure but process, and I carry this attitude from beginning to end of every project. 

Over my Spring Break, I worked feverishly on Ankestrick's Antler. This beautiful sweater is knit in the round from the top down, and I had so much fun choosing colors in my new favorite yarn, Tosh Merino Light. Originally, I saw this sweater as a way to use a skein of esoteric that I had purchased on a whim, but when the main color, tern, arrived I liked but didn't love the match. I fell in love with the idea of switching to yellow, and the deal was sealed with a trip to my local yarn store and the discovery of candlewick. Without casting on a single stitch, I had already taken my first left turn.

Not only did I continue to make left and right turns after I cast on my stitches, all 134 of them, but I went back to the starting line as well. I lost track of my increases and short rows about half way through the collar, because I couldn't keep track of my front and back. Pulling 24 rounds off my needles was the only way to right myself. Frogging that much work when one is using 3.5mm circulars is painful, and I very much wanted to avoid driving down the same road on my second attempt. My mistake and my desire not to repeat it pushed me to think of different strategies I could employ, and eventually I came up with a system that involved writing each step on its own notecard and flipping through the set each time I was ready for the next round. 

I'm still working on the sweater, and I'm still making mistakes. I haven't given up because the mistakes I've made over 25 years of knitting have made me resilient to this kind of epic failure. I think it's time to give this generation of young women the same gift my grandmother's generation gave us. If we want our adolescent girls to have the freedom to succeed then we need to give them the freedom to fail. Teach a teen resiliency; teach a teen to knit!