How To Praise Kids Without Ruining Them
Do you tell your children how smart they are? Well, stop it, before you ruin them.
That kind of praise – “you’re very clever at this” – is likely to backfire. You see, if you tell a child they’re smart, they’re liable to stop learning at a quick pace. Why? Because the last thing a child who’s consistently labeled “smart” wants … is to be seen making mistakes. Making mistakes, they figure, is what dumb kids do. Children accustomed to the “smart” label become cautious in the face of challenges; they avoid tough tasks so they won’t be seen making “stupid” mistakes.
So, how should you praise children? Try saying: “You must have worked really hard.” The effect of saying these six words is nothing short of miraculous. It beats saying the other six words: “You must be smart at this,” every time.
Students need to be praised for their effort, not their intelligence.
How do we know this? Because Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, used these exact same words in a now-famous experiment with over 400 students at a dozen schools in New York City. Dweck focused on 10- and 11-year-olds and took them, one by one, for an easy test consisting of non-verbal puzzles.
When the students finished their no-sweat test and were given their satisfyingly high scores, Dweck’s researchers praised them in the most precise manner. Half were praised for their intelligence with the words: “You must be smart at this”; while half were praised for their effort with the words: “You must have worked really hard.”
That’s when things got interesting. Boosted by these bits of sharply contrasting praise, the students were given a choice between two further tests:
1) a tougher one, which the kids were told would stretch them, and
2) an easy one, like the one they’d just taken.
Dweck did not expect her carefully chosen words to have such a significant effect. But they did. The students praised for their efforts chose the harder test, an astonishing 90% of the time. Did the students who were told they were “smart” rise to the challenge? Sadly, no. The majority of the “smart” set preferred to take the easy test.
Perhaps the “smart” kids were thinking: Why risk being embarrassed by a challenge when the familiar is so rewarding? Just six words of the wrong kind of praise and they were launched on the perilous path of underperforming.
As Dweck noted: “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
(Dweck’s study is given prominent attention in two recent books: Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Childrenby Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman and How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Both books are well worth reading by every adult who wants to encourage children, or human beings generally).
The study didn’t end with the second round of tests; Dweck had further tricks up her sleeve: the students were required to take a third test. It was very tough, with puzzles designed for students who were two years ahead of their peers. The idea was that everyone would fail this doozy of a test and that’s exactly what happened.
But the students’ reaction to their failure split along party lines: kids praised for their effort assumed their failure was because they hadn’t focused enough. They knocked themselves out to try every solution to the puzzles. Dweck recalls that several of the “effort” kids said, without prompting of any kind: “This is my favourite test.”
By contrast, the students praised for being “smart” were undone by their failure. They assumed this test showed they weren’t smart after all. Dweck reports: “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”
But Dweck, whose legendary big black eyebrows are often raised, was not finished. A final round of tests – as easy as the first ones -- were given and, yet again, the power of the right kind of praise was on full display. The “effort” kids improved on their first score by about 30%; the “smart” kids actually did 20% worse than they had on the first round!
Dweck explains: “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Mark Twain once said: “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” For children, compliments are more complicated: they either thrive or shrivel, depending on the kind of praise you give them.
Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana. His email address is: .Maru-a-Pula’s website is: