Give Your Brain a Hammer

When you praise children the right way, you give them a mental hammer they can use to solve problems and overcome challenges. A healthy cognitive lifestyle needs to include praising children for effort rather than smartness in order to raise kids who have the mental tools to feel in control of challenges, problems, and setbacks.

Parents have been taught that praising children for being smart or innately talented develops self-esteem that children can rely on when the going gets tough. Unfortunately, research has shown the opposite to be true. Children who are praised only for their intelligence versus effort may believe that a negative outcome really means that they are not smart. They can become frustrated and less confident.

Research Of Praise

Carol Dweck, Martin Seligman, and other researchers have studied the types of praise that develop resilient minds in animals and humans. Specifically, the following summarizes Dweck’s research of fifth graders as described in Gabrielle Principe’s wonderful book Your Brain On Childhood:

• Dweck first gave fifth-grade children puzzles that were easy for all of the kids to solve. 

• After the test, the children were told their score and then heard a single line of praise. Some were praised for their intelligence and told, “You must be smart at this.” Others were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

• Then, the children were given a similar test, but this time it was rigged so that none of them would succeed. 

• The children who had been praised for their effort earlier reasoned that they simply hadn’t tried hard enough on the second round, and generally enjoyed the challenge. The children who had been praised earlier for being intelligent reasoned that their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all, and had a miserable time with the test.

• Dweck then gave the children a final series of puzzles that were as easy as the first set. The children who were initially praised for their effort did better than the first time around and raised their score by about 30 percent. But those who had been told they were smart performed worse than they did on the first test by about 20 percent and were less confident taking the test. So after a failure, those children who were praised for their smarts developed trouble with tasks they had solved just moments earlier.

What This All Means For Children’s Mental Development

As a Developmental Psychologist, Gabrielle Principe explains the conclusions drawn from the research of Dweck and others, “Telling children they are smart sends the message that they are naturally endowed. The problem is, this “fixed mind-set” praise takes the control out of children’s hands and leaves them with no formula for responding to failure. When faced with failure, the “smart” children didn’t seem to realize or were unable to respond to the fact that their environment had become controllable. Emphasizing effort, however, gave children a variable they could control. These children felt as if their success was in their control and, therefore, they weren’t thwarted by failure. In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that children who believe that innate intelligence is the key to success discount the importance of the effort. These children reason, “I am smart, so I don’t need to put out the effort.” For these children, effort is stigmatized as public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural endowments.