What makes people strong?
What makes them persevere?
How can you get your kids through years of self-esteem issues, identity crises, and bullying to be secure, independent, resilient individuals?
One of the biggest contributors we’ve found to date is called fostering a “growth mindset.”
Carol Dweck, the Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, coined the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” to describe the fundamental beliefs people hold about intelligence and learning.
A fixed mindset says that your basic abilities and intelligence are set in stone. You get what you get and that’s it.
So, then what does it mean to have a growth mindset?
A growth mindset says that your basic abilities and intelligence can be improved through effort. You can keep learning and improving, if only you try.
To expand on that, here’s Dweck from her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
“The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
When people have a fixed mindset and they struggle to do something, they often believe themselves incapable and quit.
Why keep trying if you don’t believe you can improve?
From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
“Students with the fixed mindset stayed interested only when they did well right away. Those who found it difficult showed a big drop in their interest and enjoyment. If it wasn’t a testimony to their intelligence, they couldn’t enjoy it.”
“In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted.”
However, when people have a growth mindset, they find value in what they’re doing even when the outcome is failure. Dweck states:
“The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.”
So, you can see, having a growth mindset is important, but how do you cultivate it?
Stop Praising Intelligence and Talent, Instead Praise Effort
First things first, you need to stop praising them for their intelligence and talent:
“Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong.”
Celebrating a child’s intelligence or innate talent promotes a fixed mindset. When a child gets an A on their math test and you praise them for being smart, they think, “you’re proud of my intelligence.”
“If success means they’re smart, then failure means they’re dumb. That’s the fixed mindset.”
Thinking this way makes them more likely to avoid new challenges and makes them more likely to quit when they aren’t immediately good at something
“Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart. I have studied thousands of people from preschoolers on, and it’s breathtaking how many reject an opportunity to learn.”
But praise is important, so what do you praise instead? Effort.
According to Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
“If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t praise your kids for the outcome, for the A on their math test. It means you should focus your praise around the hard work they put into that A. Even if your child is naturally highly intelligent, they still had to put in some work to learn what they did.
But what if the outcome from their effort isn’t positive? What do you do then?
Teach Your Kids That Mistakes and Failure are Just a Part of Learning
A mistake parents often make is glossing over failure, trying to ignore bad outcomes. You might think your child will lose confidence when their hard work doesn’t lead them to success. But this is actually a critical time for learning.
Your children need to learn that mistakes and failure are just a part of the process of learning and growing. Failure is an opportunity to apply more effort and/or try new strategies. It’s not a reason to quit or evidence that you can’t learn something or be good at it.
Despite all the negative connotations, failure is essentially neutral. Failing a test isn’t a moral failure. You’re not a bad person. You’re not dumb. You just haven’t learned something yet. YET.
As Dweck put it in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
“When people believe their basic qualities can be developed, failures may still hurt, but failures don’t define them. And if abilities can be expanded—if change and growth are possible—then there are still many paths to success.”
So, don’t ignore those failures, explain what they are. “Failing” something just means you don’t understand it yet or you’re not good at it yet, and that’s okay. You can still figure it out. Until you stop trying, you haven’t actually failed to learn or do something.
But what about when they’re trying to learn something and they’re just not getting it? Do you just tell them “Try harder?” Of course not.
Challenge and Nurture
It’s not just about teaching your children they can do whatever they set their mind to. You need to make sure your children are challenged.
From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:
“So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, ‘Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!’”
You also need to believe in them, nurture them along the way. Kids can learn almost anything in the right environment, with the right guidance.
“In their classrooms [teachers who preached and practiced the fixed mindset], the students who started the year in the high-ability group ended the year there, and those who started the year in the low-ability group ended the year there. But some teachers preached and practiced a growth mindset. They focused on the idea that all children could develop their skills, and in their classrooms a weird thing happened. It didn’t matter whether students started the year in the high- or the low-ability group. Both groups ended the year way up high.”
Believing in children, in their ability to learn and grow, helps them achieve.
“Bloom concludes, “After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
We’ve already quoted this next part, but I really want to drive the point home:
“The best thing [parents] can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.”
To Sum It All Up:
-
Direct your praise towards your children’s efforts.
-
Teach them that failure is just feedback.
-
Make sure they’re being challenged and encouraged, not judged.
“In fact, every word and action can send a message. It tells children—or students, or athletes—how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I’m judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am interested in your development.”
