Why Some Kids Try
Harder and Some Kids Give Up
By Tracy Cutchlow
My toddler struggled
to buckle the straps on her high chair. “Almost,” she muttered as she tried
again and again. “Almost,” I agreed, trying not to hover. When she got it, I
exclaimed, “You did it! It was hard, but you kept trying, and you did it. I’m
so proud of you.”
The way I praised her
effort took a little effort on my part. If I hadn’t known better, I might have
just said, “Clever girl!” (Or even “Here, let me help you with that.”) What’s
so bad about that?
Stanford researcher
Carol Dweck has been studying motivation and perseverance since the 1960s. And
she found that children fall into one of two categories:
Those with a fixed
mindset, who believe their successes are a result of their innate talent or
smarts
Those with a growth
mindset, who believe their successes are a result of their hard work
Fixed mindset: ‘If you
have to work hard, you don’t have ability.’
Kids with a fixed
mindset believe that you are stuck with however much intelligence you’re born
with. They would agree with this statement: “If you have to work hard, you
don’t have ability. If you have ability, things come naturally to you.” When
they fail, these kids feel trapped. They start thinking they must not be as
talented or smart as everyone’s been telling them. They avoid challenges,
fearful that they won’t look smart.
Growth mindset: ‘The
more you challenge yourself, the smarter you become.’
Kids with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can be cultivated: the
more learning you do, the smarter you become. These kids understand that even
geniuses must work hard. When they suffer a setback, they believe they can
improve by putting in more time and effort. They value learning over looking
smart. They persevere through difficult tasks.
What creates these
beliefs in our kids? The type of praise we give them — even starting at
age 1.
The research
In one study,
Dweck gathered up fifth graders, randomly divided them in two groups, and had
them work on problems from an IQ test. She then praised the first group for
their intelligence:
“Wow, that’s a really
good score. You must be smart at this.”
She praised the second
group for their effort: (The way we do it in martial arts)
“Wow, that’s a really
good score. You must have tried really hard.”
She continued to test
the kids, including presenting them with a choice between a harder or easier
task.
Kids praised for their
effort tended to take the challenging task, knowing they could learn more. They
were more likely to continue feeling motivated to learn and to retain their
confidence as problems got harder.
Kids praised for their
intelligence requested the easier task, knowing there was a higher chance of
success. They lost their confidence as problems got harder, and they were much
more likely to inflate their test scores when recounting them.
Later, Dweck and her
colleagues took the study out of the lab and into the home. Every four months
for two years, Stanford and University of Chicago researchers visited
fifty-three families and recorded them for ninety minutes as they went about
their usual routines. The children were 14 months old at the start of the
study.
Researchers then
calculated how often parents used each type of praise: praising effort;
praising character traits; and “other praise” that has a neutral effect, like
“Good!” and “Wow!”
They waited five
years.
Then the researchers
surveyed the children, now 7 to 8 years old, on their attitudes toward
challenges and learning. Children with a growth mindset tended to be more interested
in challenges. Which kids had a growth mindset? Those who had heard more
process praise as toddlers.
I give more examples
of ways to praise effort in my book, Zero to Five: Parenting Tips Based on
Science.
Can you unfix a fixed
mindset?
I got an email from an
inner-city high school teacher. “Is it too late to learn algebra, or
third-person singular conjugation, or rocket science if you didn’t [develop a
growth mindset] when you were 4 years old?” she asked.
Dweck had the same
question. So she took middle-schoolers and college students who had fixed
mindsets. She found that the students were able to improve their
grades when they were taught that the brain is like a muscle:
intelligence is not fixed.
It’s not too late —
not for your kids, and not for you. Salman Khan of Khan Academy is on a mission
to let you know it. He created an inspiring video, based on Dweck’s work,
titled “You Can Learn Anything”:
The message: The brain
is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. The way you
exercise your brain is by embracing challenges, practicing skills, learning new
things. As Khan puts it, “the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not
right.”
Which is why, when my
toddler was trying to snap her own buckle, I needed to encourage her to take on
the challenge by saying, “Almost!” and “Try again” instead of “Here, let me do
that for you.”
Pass it on
Sharing is caring, as
they say. “If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning,
there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential,” Khan
writes.
So pass it on!
