One of my all-time favorite generational writers, Po Bronson, penned a New York Magazine article this Spring about the power (and peril) of praising your kids, titled “How Not to Talk To Your Kids.”
To quickly paraphrase, studies show that praising and/or labeling your kids using intelligent-defining terms such as ’smart’ can cause underperformance, meaning the child begins to feel pressured to drop tasks they cannot immediately excel at for fear it will challenge their intelligent status. The optimal praise phrase or word for expressing a child’s success should be ‘good effort.’
The article is worth a read because of an interesting study conducted by a Carol Dweck, a Columbia psychologist, that showed kids who receive the praise word ‘effort’ try to take on harder tasks:
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
I find myself complimenting kids on their swimming ‘effort’ a lot, but I’m not telling myself I have some super-natural way to instinctual detect the newest teaching methods. It’s simply easier to enforce the effort word in swimming because athletic tasks take more displays of physical action and the praise term is a typical word that comes to mind. The take-away here would be perhaps to think about the different words you use to praise when it comes to physical and mental accomplishments.
