Why you shouldn’t tell your kids they are smart
Posted by: KrisVMonday, October 6th, 2008
Here’s some news that will go against conventional wisdom. There are substantial risks to telling your child that he or she is smart. This totally contracts the cultural wisdom—Mom 101 is, I think, that you are supposed to fill your child up with unconditional positive regard, and many of us do that with labels like “smart” (or “beautiful” or “talented” or whatever). Many of us have come to believe that we should try to boost our children’s self-esteem so they will go on to be well-adjusted and successful.
There are at least two problems with that approach, however. One is that American culture has collectively made a common error in reasoning, confusing correlation and causation. Four decades or so ago, people noticed that kids who felt good about themselves were the same kids that were doing well in school. Aha! Then, we concluded, if we could make all kids feel good about themselves, they would all do well in school, refrain from taking drugs and having sex, and go on to become productive citizens. And so we developed curricula to try to boost self-esteem. The state of California actually had a Task Force on Self-Esteem (annual budget $245,000) for several years in the 1980s. We did not, it seems, think to ask ourselves whether the kids felt good about themselves because they were doing well in school. We assumed they were doing well in school because they felt good about themselves.
Oops.
Recently, researchers have been looking at self-esteem in a different way. One thing they note is that it’s really hard to raise self-esteem for someone else in the absence of actual achievement. (If you have a friend who feels bad about herself no matter how wonderful you tell her she is, you may recognize the phenomenon here.) Telling students they are fantastic when they don’t do what they’ve been asked to do, or do it in a mediocre way, doesn’t build self-esteem. Another issue is that high self esteem does not actually lead to better school performance, or to many other positive outcomes. If you’re interested in a really thorough exploration of the data on self-esteem, I refer you to an article by Roy Baumeister and colleagues in Psychological Science in the Public Interest called “Does high self-esteem case better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles?” The short answer is that even if you could magically give people high self-esteem, it wouldn’t produce the effects our culture believes it would.
The second problem with this approach is more subtle, but really important to understand. To give a child a label such as “smart” implies that there are smart people and not-smart people in the world, and the child belongs to the first category. So far, that doesn’t sound too bad, right? But what happens after that label is applied, according to psychologist Carol Dweck, is that the kid immediately becomes invested in protecting the label. In one of her studies, 8-year-old kids who were told that they were smart immediately reacted by “rejecting a challenging new task they could learn from. They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.” In addition, when given the chance to report how they did, 40% of these students lied to inflate their scores. Not being perfect was shameful and needed to be hidden.
Dweck points out that American society tends to believe that intelligence, and lots of other traits, are fixed. You either have them, or you don’t. For example, as a teacher of statistics, I get to hear regular confessions from people who say they “can’t do math.” The solution to this problem is not, in these students’ views, to do more math until they get good at it. It is to avoid math, because they see themselves as the kind of people for whom math will always be problematic. They would rather avoid confronting the problem, even if it means that they don’t acquire a set of skills that is useful.
This isn’t to say we should emotionally abuse our kids, or ignore their accomplishments. Dweck’s research presents powerful evidence that a different kind of praise promotes mastery learning. When 8-year-old kids were praised for working really hard, they took on challenging problems, and did not see failure as a diagnosis that they were stupid. They ended up learning more. They didn’t lie about how they were doing. She says, “So telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we are aiming for when we put positive labels—‘gifted’, ‘talented’, ‘brilliant’—on them. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.” (This is just a small portion of Dweck’s research program, more thoroughly summarized in the admirably readable book Mindset, which I think should be required reading for everyone.)
I’ve been reading Dweck’s work for a couple of years now, and I still find it really hard to avoid telling my kids that they are smart. But I am working to develop a new repertoire of praise, to help them understand that the best thing they can do is to keep working at things that are hard for them. It goes against the cultural practice, and even against my own intuition. In that way it’s a great test of my skeptical commitment to follow the data even when I don’t like them.
October 6th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Followed a link here from the Friendly Atheist.
There are many problems with labeling children (regardless of whether the label is positive or negative). In our family I (the oldest) was the ’smart’ one. The middle child the ‘creative’ one and the youngest was basically left the role of ‘trouble maker’. I see how those labels effected each of us in different ways even now that we are adults.
Praise too can be counter productive. When that praise is an external valuation it can cause children to seek approval outside themselves. This has a large effect on self esteem in the sense that their value to themselves becomes dependent on external validation. Praise not only doesn’t increase self esteem, it actually gets in the way of good self-esteem. Of course that doesn’t mean we want to ignore their achievements, we just have to find more productive ways to acknowledge them. I’ve been working a lot on cutting down those value judgments myself (”good job”, I like how you…” and so on), and I agree with you, it really is counter-intuitive to what we as parents have so long accepted as the right way.
Great post. I look forward to reading more.
October 6th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
The only problem with this is that it goes both ways. “Gifted” is frequently misused, but it is a REAL category of children with high IQs. This is purely anecdotal, but as a student teacher I’ve followed the “praise the effort” model with gifted students, and they’ve said they feel it is rubbish to be praised for effort on schoolwork (which is often too easy for them) that they didn’t really put any effort into. They DO love to hear that they are smart, and it’s great to be smart. In a sea of mediocrity, where being smarter is just as stigmatizing as being less smart, these kids want validation that it’s okay to be able to achieve what few can.
October 6th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I smell a psychologist here! If I’m right, from one to another, nice work on the post! I actually study influences on achievement motivation, so I can appreciate exactly where you’re coming from.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:29 am
I came across this research awhile back and have noticed a marked change in my daughter since I’ve worked hard to praise her for thinking things through and trying new things instead of telling her how wonderful I think she is. Of course, I still tell her she’s the best daughter in the state, country, continent, hemisphere, world, universe etc, but it’s more after the style of Mr. Rogers- “I like you just the way you are.” And then I go back to thanking her for trying something new/different/scary. It has made a huge difference in our family life.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I found this site through the Letters From A Broad blog and I try to do the same thing with my younger kids. I think it’s actually a tenet of Love and Logic, IIRC. It is definitely counter-intuitive, however. I catch myself screwing up all the time.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Great post! As a college educator, I’ve been watching the effects of children raised to believe that they are ‘bright’ and ’smart’ and ‘wonderful’ regardless of their output. The kids in my classes resist any critique of their work and refuse to accept the possibility that their work merited a C. In fact, the idea of merit is almost entirely lost on them: if they worked hard on a paper, and put in the effort, why should it matter if half the sentences were grammatically incorrect? How dare I ruin their self-esteem by pointing out their grammatical errors!
I don’t mean to sound harsh, but that negative feeling we get when we don’t do well on a test or paper, that’s your head telling you to go back and work harder and push yourself. It’s a necessary part of learning. Without it, we’ll end up with a bunch of students who get 2 + 2 = 5 on a math test — and feel great about it.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Here’s an interesting article about praise and why it can be detrimental to children:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm
Giving mindless praise is a hard habit to break, but as my husband and I practise the techniques Kohn suggests, they become less awkward.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I read about this study on another blog I follow (here), and I’ll tell you essentially the same thing I said there:
If the goal is to get the kids to love learning, show them that you love learning. When your kid shows you a page of dinosaurs s/he has drawn, listen and ask questions as your kid explains it. Then help find some related info (in books or on the Internet) to share. Praise (for work or acheivement or whatever ) is secondary.
It’s the same with reading and many other things: if you want your kids to enjoy doing something, then show them you enjoy it.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Perhaps this is just not as big a problem for us in Europe but to this new research I say “well, duh!”.
The Mom101 approach- calling your children smart, beautiful, talented or even perfect every now and then- and recognising when to dial down the praise and find other ways to help keep your children confident and motivated are surely not mutually exclusive. The adage “everything in moderation” is probably not an oversimplification in this instance.
Quite possibly, problems arise when parents start to follow a system or method of praise or motivation as the result of reading one particular study or childcare book.
I would be sceptical of anything truly counter-intuitive to my feelings as a parent. Perhaps the wording in the opening paragraph should read “there are substantial risks to telling your child that he or she is smart 10 times a day, every day”
October 8th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Indeed, moderation is an excellent principle, and of course empty praise is never going to be a good thing. But I should point out that the quote from Dweck arises after children got *one* instance of praise from a researcher they didn’t know. While I imagine that a parent doing it 10 times a day would have much larger effects, the data here (and in Dweck’s many other studies) are convincing to me. I urge everyone to examine the evidence for herself. Absolutely, be skeptical, in the best sense of that word, and check it out.
October 11th, 2008 at 1:24 am
[...] V. has presented some good evidence for why you shouldn’t tell your kids they’re smart. There’s more to encouraging a love of learning than just praise, though (for the [...]
October 12th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I just ran across this article on praise while looking for online parenting group that follow Alfie Kohn. It’s more of what was posted here but I really liked the following quote:
“Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.”
The Power (and Peril) of Praising…
October 12th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Jennie M., I agree with your observation, and maybe that’s because we teach in the same college.
I also teach in high schools in California, and I’ve noticed a lot of kids don’t know grammar. They don’t seem to learn it the way I learned it. Instead, the curriculum in California schools seems to focus on trying to teach kids to feel good about themselves so they will be free to express their thoughts. Even teachers sometimes don’t know some basics of Standard English, and they have made comments to me like, “Well, I don’t want to get hung up on those details and make the kids feel bad about themselves.”
I have also taught ESL to adults, and the same philosophy seems to prevail in that line of work.
I drill grammar. I think kids and adults feel good about themselves when they learn to express themselves well. There’s a positive way to point out what needs to be improved, and I do believe writers feel better about their accomplishment when they’ve truly accomplished a clear piece of writing.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:49 am
My nephew is a very bright kid. He has a very IQ….and was tested because he was getting into a lot of trouble in his class. He jumped a class and now they don’t seem to have the same problem. Most of my children are pretty much average. My nephew used to come over and show off how smart he was and everyone told him that he was and that he was pretty much a genius. Only one of my children was his age and in the same class….he told me that all the other kids were mean to him and didn’t like him cause he would brag all the time about how he was soooo much smarter than the rest of them.
Now…first this caused hard feelings with kids that he could have made friends with by bragging and making them feel lesser of a person than him. Second….it took a negative impact on him. He really rebelled and tried to meanto the other kids cause they didn’t want to play with him.
I am sorry but I think it is important to praise your children and also discipline them when they have done wrong….but I don’t think it is a good idea to make them feel like they are better than everyone else…..because technically noone is better than anyone!!
October 13th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I think you should say someone is smart not when they answer a question correctly but when they ask the correct question. And there are lots of those. Lots and lots of those.
“What is the corona made of?” “Wow, I didn’t know you where that smart.”
“How do you know when the brownies are done?” “That question shows a clear sign of intelligence my friend!”
“How did you get that wrapping paper to fold so neatly?” “Ah, I see the little gears in your head turning. Lots of gears. Wonderful gears.”
“Where do babies come from?” “It is a perplexing thing isn’t it! I’m so glad you thought to ask. It shows your understanding of the puzzle.”
All these comments encourage the questions. Encourage the curiosity. It is the QUESTIONS not the ANSWERS that makes us brilliant.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
The idea in Dweck’s work is NOT to avoid praise. It’s to avoid praising that paints a picture of a stable trait that the child must then defend. To say “that’s a fantastic question” or “I’m really proud of what you did” or “I admire the way you kept at it even if it was hard” are all reasonable things to do in this model. On the other hand, the research here suggests that praise such as “you are brilliant” or “you’re a genius” will cause kids to veer away from situations where they might not look smart, even if there are lots of opportunities to learn in such situations.
October 15th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
One thing I’ve noticed that works very well with dwecks method is by playing video games. Mainly role playing video games. These types of games always have a specific goal that can be fairly hard to accomplish. Kids simply must accomplish this goal in order to advance, once they do they are rewarded with praise and whatever virtual reward they wanted in the first place. When they fail they always no there will be another chance to succeed, thus reinforcing the notion that it’s ok to fail and hard work will get you to your goal.