Never Tell Your Children They're Smart

The other day in class, someone brought up that there was a study that showed praising children made them lazy. Sadly, I don't actually remember the circumstances of the comment, I think it might have been concerning a discussion about success following our watching Grizzly Man. I do remember some people expressing incredulity about the study, but it does exist.

Now, it doesn't actually say praising children is bad - only a specific type of praising. The studies were conducted by Carol Dweck while working at colleges such as Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard on hundreds of kids over thirty years. So these are not to be taken lightly. This is not to say they are definitely true, but the diversity of samples, size of the samples, and time the studies were done over lends them significant weight.

This studies suggest that children who are often told that they are smart, or otherwise praised for their innate abilities, develop a "fixed" view of intelligence - believing that it is a quality that they were born with and that cannot be improved upon. They therefore avoid challenging academic situations, because they do not see striving to learn or working hard as valuable. Instead, this belief makes challenges, mistakes and the need to work hard threats to their ego, and thus the avoidance of them becomes almost inevitable. However, children congratulated for working hard develop a "growth" mindset, in which failures or challenges are opportunities to get better. That's not to say that they like them, because who does, but they don't stop trying completely. So don't not praise your children, just don't praise them for innate abilities.

Why are we (or at least some of us) praising these innate abilities more than hard work? Hard work is an American value, right?

Perhaps not anymore, at least in some communities. In areas like ours, where achievement in academics, sports, music, ect is the most important thing talent is valued above hard work. I'm not sure if anyone has had this experience, but multiple times in math class I've had one or two kids who seem to automatically understand all the concepts and can do all the classwork with their eyes closed, but never do the homework and often don't do well on tests because they haven't bothered to learn formulae or something - and people are jealous of them. Even if they aren't working or trying or even succeeding, their innate abilities are considered more valuable.

Has anyone else experienced this? Are we coming to value those who succeed because they are just born smart more than those who work their way to the top?