I tell my child she is smart AND that that isn't enough for us. We know she is smart, but so are we and we can tell when she is slacking and lying.
It's actually working very well, but it took quite a while for her to believe us. In the long run she is showing a deep appreciation for how honest we are with her.
This would likely work with most smarter children. If you don't play mind games with them they will stop trying to play mind games on you.
-- Edit on my side note here --
She still plays games with most other adults but I would be a hypocrite to try to eliminate it completely. Mostly I just caution her on how it erodes trust and trust is very valuable. Besides, most adults are not completely honest with her so it's only fair.
I can confirm that. When i was child, every teacher said to me and my parents that i am so gifted, so smart. And i thought i am so smart that i don't need to spend so much time on school like others. So i missed on school a lot. In high school there were classes on which i was less than 50% throughout the semester. And it was ok, i needed only 2 last weeks to pass all the tests. In last year i did the same, again i needed to do tests because i had low grades and needed to pass whole semester on that tests. But this time there was a teacher of my native language (literature etc) and she told me "I know you will pass the test but you was more than 50% of time absent on my lessons i will not let you take test" and i was shocked. Why? Why she didn't let me take the test, i would pass it. And then headmaster of my school told my parents that "lot of kids are coming every day to school, they learn, they do homework for every class, they are hard workers and then there is your son, gifted, smarter than the rest, he only needs 2 last weeks to learn and pass the tests, he is not coming to class, he is not doing homework, how he looks in contrast to other students? What example he is giving to them? That you do not need to work hard, you only need to be gifted and smart and you can go by. There is no justice in this, we can't make that kind of example, showing that you do not need to come to school, make homework and still get promoted to next year like all those kids that come every day to school, are hard workers, learn, do homework". They didn't promoted me to next class, i needed to repeat it. That was the most valuable lesson i had in that school.
EDIT: What i wrote about lesson was not meant in a good way. As someone said in comments i was punished for being different - that was the lesson.
The lesson is that if you are too different people will go out of their way to punish you for it?
Yeah, I think it's a horrible lesson and a shame that too many people in powerful positions get away with it.
Yes, you should actually learn the material. No, you should not be punished for being gifted. The school should have recognized what they were dealing with, given you the test the second week and promoted you. Then perhaps you could have been challenged.
This whole "everyone has to go at the same speed" thing is what destroys gifted people.
You could have gone to college early, who knows maybe learned a lot and discovered a treatment or even a cure for many types of cancer or be the next great inventor.
Instead this school taught you to be mediocre and fit it.
What this school did to you and what it does to others is a travesty.
As a society we are destroying our most gifted people, simply so people "feel better"
That's a bullshit lesson though. You were held back because you made the system and the other kids look bad.
Turning up every day would have wasted your time, because you would have been bored and frustrated.
A good school would have forced you to turn up but would have let you run ahead at your own pace - or maybe moved you to an environment for the gifted.
Talent is rare and useful. Gifted kids should have the same boundaries and support as everyone else, but work challenges should be stretched in line with their abilities.
The lesson being: be normal and normal only, otherwise you will be made so, through intoleration, discrimination and assimilation. Public school system is for average people, and I don't mean anything hostile saying that. You are, on the base of your story here, above average in your intellectual capacity, and don't need to go through the chores others need to go through to succeed your class. There's nothing unjust about that, and your gift. Just like some people are more attractive, you're smarter.
I've been through similar situations (tho my breaking points have been more often and exaggerated) and quite quickly I've learnt to quack like an average guy, and to walk like an average guy, but to not be one, in school. I've always been a step ahead from my peers in learning quickly and in investing minimum time to get maximum output from my studies. So I just went to school and acted like the next guy, and did whatever I wanted (whatever being programming, literature, philosophy, etc.) in my spare time.
There is no justice in this, as the headmaster of your school said to your parents, some are just naturally more inclined to apprehension. Furthermore, some like doing it more than others. But sometimes educational staff feel the need to normalise the outliers, because they believe that the rest will believe that them themselves are idiots and won't engage. So they confine those outliers, the smarter ones, to normality, to the average, sacrificing them for the rest. Not only are their assumptions wrong, but the effects may be really bad on the students, dissuading them from exploiting their gifts in the future.
Some people are better at learning. Others are better at other things. Do we break the noses of very good-looking students in the school because they have unjust advantage in getting into relationships? Do we somehow shorten taller students because they score more baskets that the others? Do we deflate the breasts of more bustier students because other girls may get jealous of them? I'm sorry if I sounded a bit harsh and immodest. I don't claim that some are better overall than others, but they are better in some treats. But in situations like in your anectodes and in many experiences I myself had as an outlier, I've seen that this sort of practice leads to a missionary of reducing everybody to the lowest common denominator with regards to educational abilities, rendering public schools futile.
The lesson they taught you is politically palatable to a lot of people, but it strikes me as gross. That it was the most valuable thing you learned in that school underlies just how pointless the entire exercise really was.
I've never understood the reasoning that administration and teachers put forth that the smart and "gifted" need to set an example for the other kids. A student is at school to be taught, not to set an example and teach the other kids. Every child has a right to learn. Teaching is what the teachers are for. If you were slacking off and still passing with minimal effort, they should have accelerated you to the point you could no longer do that without working at it. That would have better taught you the value of work in addition to not wasting years of your life. In my opinion, it's a crime that schools waste so much of the lives of intelligent children for no better reason than "but that's where a child of such age SHOULD be."
The point of schools is not to teach you how to pass tests. It's to give you knowledge that sticks for life. Studying intensively for two weeks will let you (or mostly anybody, really) pass a test, but usually you will have forgotten most of it after a year. Attending class will give you delayed repetition of the material over a long period of time, which will help you remember.
Im curious to know how you could simply not go to school? Where I live it's compulsory. Smart or dumb, it doesn't matter, you go to school. I'm having a hard time understanding why they would just allow you to stay home in high school.
Did your parents agree with this way of schooling? That you were too smart to go to school? That's the only way I could see this happening. Did you study when you weren't at school, or did you simply chill out till test time?
at school I was always lazy and selected where to put in effort. If everyone in a math class was stuck on some problem that was when I was paid attention and listened and solved it. now I work as a programmer and feel like one my biggest advantages over everybody else is knowing what to be interested in and what to code.
Putting a little TL;DR up here on top, because I'd really like to see folks' answers to this:
What's the simple-language equivalent of, "You're so smart," or "That was so smart," but for intellectual effort?
Now, regularly scheduled thoughts :) :
What is a good, short method/word for praising effort?
with my 8.5-month old, "Good Job," specific variants on it ("Good Job climbing that staircase, tiny!") and such have worked wonderfully, but I seek something more-
It's so easy to praise a child's intelligence - "You're so smart!" "That's so clever!" - but much harder to praise effort, in my experience so far, because "I can tell you worked so hard to do that, that's so great!" just doesn't roll off the tongue very well! And this is important- "Good job!" is at the nexus of how I praise my little boy partially because he totally understand it. He's got that, even if he may not know the individual words exactly, he absolutely knows what Daddy means when, "Good job, baby!" comes out of daddy's mouth. I have VERY LOW FAITH that I could get, "I can tell you worked so hard to do that, that's so great!" to work the same!
(Incidentally, I also now feel I know more about why, in America at least, we often say, "I'm doing good," and variants thereof, instead of "I'm doing well." "Well" just isn't in the primal vocabulary quite as deeply, maybe because of its association with "Well, I was going to, but then I didn't," type of statements. "Good" is simple and meaningful, and I often find myself telling my son he's done something so "good," and then correcting myself a little, because, well, I want to teach him correct grammar, but more than that, I want to communicate with him meaningfully - and "good" gets a meaning across with which he's already familiar, while "well" does not, and has other common uses.)
So what's the simple-language equivalent of, "You're so smart," or "That was so smart," but for intellectual effort?
Maybe I need to invent a word for this and see if it catches on! :D
I've always said, "You're a hard worker" to my three kids. I've never told them they were smart and have emphasized how much more important hard work is over intelligence.
"Caplan argues that parents spend too much time trying to influence how their kids will turn out as adults. Using research on twins and adopted children, Caplan argues that nature dominates nurture and that parents have little lasting influence on many aspects of their children's lives. He concludes that parents should spend less time and energy trying to influence their children" [1]
I get what you're saying - kids aren't code to be optimized with objective best practices. But on the other hand, it's very head-in-the-sand to think that parenting with the best intentions and love will always have a positive outcome. It's a good course of action for guaranteeing a happy childhood, but unless you're so affluent that your kids are assured a life on easy street, happiness isn't your only responsibility as a parent.
May be that love and fun is all the kids need to be both happy and successful, but maybe not: I had very hippyish parents who didn't go much beyond love and fun and blind support. Myself and my two siblings all had very happy childhoods, but only my very self-motivated sister wound up finding success and happiness as an adult right off the bat, took me a decade to get my footing, and my brother - who was unquestionably the happiest and most loved kid in the family - is a broken and miserable adult.
Ultimately it comes down to regarding your kids as individuals and tailoring your parenting to each kid, which is what this study is trying to help parents do w.r.t. smart kids.
i figure that the ways that i am which are outside of my control, or even my awareness, dwarf the ways i am that are within my control. my efforts to be a good parent are almost insignificant compared to, i don't know, my posture and facial expression while speaking with the cashier at the grocery store, and all the other things like that.
maybe your last sentence should be, "Just raise kids with love and fun, and work on your own damn self."
First time parent of a 1 year old, and while we're just getting started this is pretty much my perspective already. I can already see how time flies so quickly, too quickly to hyper-analyze and optimally re-assess our every interaction. Just play and talk with them, I don't believe that there is any other secret formula.
I'll skip the humility. I'm smart. Always have been. My parents realized it early on and praised me for it. I pretty much slept through high school because after a couple of minutes of explanation of any math, science or computer science concept I grasped it. I never did any work, although I read a lot about the subjects I enjoyed, because I enjoyed them.
The non-STEM stuff was confusingly ill-defined and in those subjects I was average, at best. And because I wasn't good at them, I avoided them: I didn't do anything to be smart, I always had been, so what could I do to become smart at reading Shakespeare? I had no idea how I could learn to understand something I didn't understand because understanding seemed to have been something I was just born with.
I did well enough on the SATs to get into a top college and decided to major in electrical engineering. I skated through freshman year, earning a low B average.
Towards the end of the year I met with my advisor, the head of the department for the first time. Without preamble he said "We made a mistake. You're not really the person you looked like you'd be in your application." I didn't really grasp what he was saying. "You're not getting the grades your record indicates you could get. You're not working hard enough. You should think about transferring to a less demanding school. In any case, EE requires a commitment and I think you should pick a different major."
I was stunned. This was the first time in my life that anyone had ever done anything but praise my academics. I was angry. How could this adult, who claimed to be some sort of mentor, talk to me like that? In fact, writing this years and years later, I'm still a little pissed off.
But looking around, all my friends and classmates were working their asses off, getting ready for finals. The guy may have been a jerk, but he was right: I wasn't working hard and I wasn't learning very much. Much as I dislike the guy, I have to admit he did me an enormous service. He recognized that I needed a kick in the teeth to take his advice seriously. The next three years I made sure I worked harder than everyone else around me, if only to prove that he was wrong, that I hadn't been a mistake. I stayed in EE and would have graduated near the top of my class if I hadn't had to factor in my freshman year grades.
So what does that prove? That you can make a kid neurotic if you push him hard enough? Maybe. But I know that if I had tried to skate through my post-college life being smart and not working, I would have got nowhere and done nothing interesting. Being super intelligent is like having giant biceps: impressive, but rarely useful. People admire intelligence, but they reward getting things done. Getting things done requires some intelligence, but much more it requires hard work and stick-to-itiveness. I'm not faulting my parents one bit: they manifestly loved me, found me good schools and interesting activities and fed my eagerness to do useful things. But I'm careful with my kids to praise the things they control and can change--like hard work and not being deterred when things are hard--and let the being smart thing take care of itself.
See, my parents did this thing where they'd tell me how smart I am all the time, then whenever there would be an argument or a disagreement "Oh, you're just SO smart and we're all SO stupid".
I'm already one of those people with a generally dry/sarcastic sense of humor (think Ruxin from The League, "I can't even tell when you're joking" kinda thing), so I have a hard time telling when I'm actually being an asshole or condescending or not, because while I seriously try to watch myself I still occasionally get the feeling that I came off the wrong way or, well, condescendingly. "You just think you're sooooo smart..."
It's funny how it seems each generation takes a new approach to motivating children. My wife and I try to take a "results are the goal" approach to complimenting my son. When my mother is watching him, she compliments his intelligence. My grandparents seemed to take more of a "helps to be made from good material" kind of approach.
Could it not be equally harmful to a smart kid to give them the impression that their intelligence is worthless? It seems there should be a balance where kids retain their motivation while also learning how to make the most of their personal advantages and disadvantages.
If a smart kid is always taught the convenient fiction that everyone is exactly the same, then when they interact with an athletic kid who dominates them at sports but struggles academically, what conclusion will the smart kid draw?
And finally, is this "praise effort and self esteem" movement responsible for the current wave of anti-free-speech protests on college campuses?
>Could it not be equally harmful to a smart kid to give them the impression that their intelligence is worthless?
That just doesn't make sense. Praise your kid for doing not for being. Who's advocating teaching smart kids everyone is the same? It seems like any child is going to realize this isn't true.
>is this "praise effort and self esteem" movement responsible for the current wave of anti-free-speech protests on college campuses?
Absolutely not.
That is a result of the cultural admiration of protesting / fighting for rights / rebelling against X. Admiration of the real civil rights movement, environmentalism, etc.
The problem is that as a society we're running out of clean cut black and white issues (no pun intended) to be opposed to. There are still problems, but not nearly as many _simple_ problems. Things are complicated these days.
So they're straying off into the weeds trying to attack complex social issues with the same strategies that worked against simple ones and coming out looking like fools. And likewise the targets of their protests are straying because complex issues don't have a big bad evil you can hate, and that nuance and detail are being lost.
The once reasonable protesting class are being supplanted by increasingly unreasonable protestors who are rebels searching desperately for a cause.
This isn't about pretending everyone has the same abilities. It is about focusing reinforcement on the choices and actions a kid takes rather than on characteristics they have.
By reinforcing the action, you help a kid understand that it is their effort that led to the achievement, which encourages the kid to make efforts when she wants something.
Reinforcing the characteristic, on the other hand, suggests that it is the kid's innate characteristics that led to the achievement, which encourages them to defend that identity.
> athletic kid who dominates them at sports but struggles academically, what conclusion will the smart kid draw?
Your implicit assumption is that your kid will not succeed at something athletically no matter how hard they try. If a kid dreams of going for the NBA or the NFL, why not let them try?
What's the benefit of praising a child for their intelligence if intelligence is immutable? Is it a self esteem play or what?
My daughter is only two, but she is clearly smart. Some people tell her how smart she is, but I largely do not. What I try to do instead is to encourage her to keep trying and keep pushing and that failure is temporary. When she was one and learning to climb up and down stairs (which she loves to do over and over again), I would keep telling her "you can do it" as she went down each step and tried to gauge whether or not she could go further. When she was finished I would tell her, "you did it," and she started saying "I did it" when she completed a flight.
She also stumbles and falls a lot as we climb different things and walk over different surfaces. I tell her "keep going" or "you've got this" and she gets right back up and keeps trying. I find that if you focus on saying that she'll be alright or making sure she is not hurt (when she is clearly not), she'll dwell on that, start crying and stop doing what she is doing.
This story and the other links published here got me thinking about this. Innate ability is clearly important when you really think about it, but what I want to instill is this idea that it's normal and natural to fail along the way to success and that even if you are really talented at something, you'll have setbacks.
What does an intelligent kid do? Find the easiest way to do a task or question whether the task is necessary at all. That's just humans conserving energy. Which is smart. This is not the hard part for them, they excel at this.
Effort is consciously fighting against the drive to stop working. THIS is the hard part. Above average children never have to learn this, because they get through school and life that easy. It's only when they are forced to leave their comfort zone, when problems show up.
Intelligent Children who aren't kept or lead out of this effort-avoidance (which is a kind of motivation as well: the motivation to avoid effort in order to conserve energy) also tend to get worse grades after they got good ones.
Because praising them signals them that they actually overachieved and can therefore put even less energy into accomplishing a task.
So the way to go is praising them for doing something that they didn't want to do or for repeating effort.
Part of the problem with telling your kid that they are smart is that most parents think their kids are smart. The average IQ is about 100. It's one thing to tell an objectively intelligent person that they are intelligent, but it's quite another to get someone who doesn't have great innate gifts thinking that they do and then perhaps causing them not to work harder.
You can outwork someone and make up for an intellectual or physical disadvantage, but you may be less inclined to do so if people tell you that you have greatly innate gifts than you do.
Let's also keep in mind that a lot of very intelligent people are able to focus and think more abstractly, allowing them to be very efficient workers. I just see a lot of parents telling their kids how smart they are, thinking it will build up their self esteem, but I wonder if this is counterproductive if they are actually of more average intelligence.
I have a pretty good boss. Of course, we're all adults. Anyway, our boss has this way of treating everyone differently -- knowing which buttons to push. With me he'll always give me the occasional harder task saying "This is going to be easy for you"; with my coworker, he has to press harder and say "this is important, don't screw it up".
I was recently depressed and without really having been told anything he gave me this hollywood-movie pep talk along the lines of "it's important that you know that you have great talents so don't sweat the small stuff and tell me if you're in trouble".
Maybe this is pretty much off-topic, but the point I wanted to make is that people react to different things and much of the art of squeezing motivation and productivity out of them has to do with understanding this.
People say I'm smart. I don't buy it. I know a lot of things, sure, but anyone can do that. And I'm lazy, so I tend to be a bit slack about everything, but I like to think I can get things done when it counts. After all, when I apply for college, I'll be competing with all kinds of smart kids. And dammit, I happen to like learning things, and as much as I am lazy, my personal desire to learn things kinda outweighs that.
Which may be why I've spent so much time when I've been ostensibly slacking off trying to understand monads, reading HN, and, every few months or so, once again trying to bash my way through SICP...
TL;DR: If you're interacting with a kid, try to avoid saying, "you're so smart!" and instead say, "You've picked this up really quickly" or "you're such a hard worker". If you tell a child they are smart then they will stop trying either because they assume they can get by on their intelligence or because they are afraid of failing and loosing your praise about how smart they are.
[+] [-] moyix|9 years ago|reply
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growt...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/22/growth-mindset-3-a-pox-...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/07/growth-mindset-4-growth...
[+] [-] tn13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] extr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Practicality|9 years ago|reply
It's actually working very well, but it took quite a while for her to believe us. In the long run she is showing a deep appreciation for how honest we are with her.
This would likely work with most smarter children. If you don't play mind games with them they will stop trying to play mind games on you.
-- Edit on my side note here -- She still plays games with most other adults but I would be a hypocrite to try to eliminate it completely. Mostly I just caution her on how it erodes trust and trust is very valuable. Besides, most adults are not completely honest with her so it's only fair.
[+] [-] lossolo|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: What i wrote about lesson was not meant in a good way. As someone said in comments i was punished for being different - that was the lesson.
[+] [-] Practicality|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, I think it's a horrible lesson and a shame that too many people in powerful positions get away with it.
Yes, you should actually learn the material. No, you should not be punished for being gifted. The school should have recognized what they were dealing with, given you the test the second week and promoted you. Then perhaps you could have been challenged.
This whole "everyone has to go at the same speed" thing is what destroys gifted people.
You could have gone to college early, who knows maybe learned a lot and discovered a treatment or even a cure for many types of cancer or be the next great inventor.
Instead this school taught you to be mediocre and fit it.
What this school did to you and what it does to others is a travesty.
As a society we are destroying our most gifted people, simply so people "feel better"
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|9 years ago|reply
Turning up every day would have wasted your time, because you would have been bored and frustrated.
A good school would have forced you to turn up but would have let you run ahead at your own pace - or maybe moved you to an environment for the gifted.
Talent is rare and useful. Gifted kids should have the same boundaries and support as everyone else, but work challenges should be stretched in line with their abilities.
[+] [-] gkya|9 years ago|reply
I've been through similar situations (tho my breaking points have been more often and exaggerated) and quite quickly I've learnt to quack like an average guy, and to walk like an average guy, but to not be one, in school. I've always been a step ahead from my peers in learning quickly and in investing minimum time to get maximum output from my studies. So I just went to school and acted like the next guy, and did whatever I wanted (whatever being programming, literature, philosophy, etc.) in my spare time.
There is no justice in this, as the headmaster of your school said to your parents, some are just naturally more inclined to apprehension. Furthermore, some like doing it more than others. But sometimes educational staff feel the need to normalise the outliers, because they believe that the rest will believe that them themselves are idiots and won't engage. So they confine those outliers, the smarter ones, to normality, to the average, sacrificing them for the rest. Not only are their assumptions wrong, but the effects may be really bad on the students, dissuading them from exploiting their gifts in the future.
Some people are better at learning. Others are better at other things. Do we break the noses of very good-looking students in the school because they have unjust advantage in getting into relationships? Do we somehow shorten taller students because they score more baskets that the others? Do we deflate the breasts of more bustier students because other girls may get jealous of them? I'm sorry if I sounded a bit harsh and immodest. I don't claim that some are better overall than others, but they are better in some treats. But in situations like in your anectodes and in many experiences I myself had as an outlier, I've seen that this sort of practice leads to a missionary of reducing everybody to the lowest common denominator with regards to educational abilities, rendering public schools futile.
[+] [-] oldmanjay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|9 years ago|reply
There was a gifted kid in my third grade. He was moved up one grade straight to 5, and again to 7 to finally match rest of the class.
[+] [-] continuational|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calsy|9 years ago|reply
Did your parents agree with this way of schooling? That you were too smart to go to school? That's the only way I could see this happening. Did you study when you weren't at school, or did you simply chill out till test time?
[+] [-] justinhj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iwannayoyo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fordrus|9 years ago|reply
Now, regularly scheduled thoughts :) :
What is a good, short method/word for praising effort?
with my 8.5-month old, "Good Job," specific variants on it ("Good Job climbing that staircase, tiny!") and such have worked wonderfully, but I seek something more-
It's so easy to praise a child's intelligence - "You're so smart!" "That's so clever!" - but much harder to praise effort, in my experience so far, because "I can tell you worked so hard to do that, that's so great!" just doesn't roll off the tongue very well! And this is important- "Good job!" is at the nexus of how I praise my little boy partially because he totally understand it. He's got that, even if he may not know the individual words exactly, he absolutely knows what Daddy means when, "Good job, baby!" comes out of daddy's mouth. I have VERY LOW FAITH that I could get, "I can tell you worked so hard to do that, that's so great!" to work the same!
(Incidentally, I also now feel I know more about why, in America at least, we often say, "I'm doing good," and variants thereof, instead of "I'm doing well." "Well" just isn't in the primal vocabulary quite as deeply, maybe because of its association with "Well, I was going to, but then I didn't," type of statements. "Good" is simple and meaningful, and I often find myself telling my son he's done something so "good," and then correcting myself a little, because, well, I want to teach him correct grammar, but more than that, I want to communicate with him meaningfully - and "good" gets a meaning across with which he's already familiar, while "well" does not, and has other common uses.)
So what's the simple-language equivalent of, "You're so smart," or "That was so smart," but for intellectual effort?
Maybe I need to invent a word for this and see if it catches on! :D
[+] [-] 300bps|9 years ago|reply
Oldest is 12 now, all three do very well.
[+] [-] rhizome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchess|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nzen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|9 years ago|reply
Praise them whatever. Love, security, praise, attention, just go for it.
I doubt very much that all the noise around raising children can be filtered out to be able to differentiate between sentences.
Just raise kids with love and fun.
[+] [-] toddchambery|9 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/05/caplan_on_paren.htm...
[+] [-] AStellersSeaCow|9 years ago|reply
May be that love and fun is all the kids need to be both happy and successful, but maybe not: I had very hippyish parents who didn't go much beyond love and fun and blind support. Myself and my two siblings all had very happy childhoods, but only my very self-motivated sister wound up finding success and happiness as an adult right off the bat, took me a decade to get my footing, and my brother - who was unquestionably the happiest and most loved kid in the family - is a broken and miserable adult.
Ultimately it comes down to regarding your kids as individuals and tailoring your parenting to each kid, which is what this study is trying to help parents do w.r.t. smart kids.
[+] [-] pasquinelli|9 years ago|reply
i really like that, nice and succinct.
i figure that the ways that i am which are outside of my control, or even my awareness, dwarf the ways i am that are within my control. my efforts to be a good parent are almost insignificant compared to, i don't know, my posture and facial expression while speaking with the cashier at the grocery store, and all the other things like that.
maybe your last sentence should be, "Just raise kids with love and fun, and work on your own damn self."
[+] [-] thearn4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|9 years ago|reply
Do not patronize, and do not try to apply cookie cutter logic. Be nice, be honest and pay attention to their individual qualities.
[+] [-] ganeumann|9 years ago|reply
The non-STEM stuff was confusingly ill-defined and in those subjects I was average, at best. And because I wasn't good at them, I avoided them: I didn't do anything to be smart, I always had been, so what could I do to become smart at reading Shakespeare? I had no idea how I could learn to understand something I didn't understand because understanding seemed to have been something I was just born with.
I did well enough on the SATs to get into a top college and decided to major in electrical engineering. I skated through freshman year, earning a low B average.
Towards the end of the year I met with my advisor, the head of the department for the first time. Without preamble he said "We made a mistake. You're not really the person you looked like you'd be in your application." I didn't really grasp what he was saying. "You're not getting the grades your record indicates you could get. You're not working hard enough. You should think about transferring to a less demanding school. In any case, EE requires a commitment and I think you should pick a different major."
I was stunned. This was the first time in my life that anyone had ever done anything but praise my academics. I was angry. How could this adult, who claimed to be some sort of mentor, talk to me like that? In fact, writing this years and years later, I'm still a little pissed off.
But looking around, all my friends and classmates were working their asses off, getting ready for finals. The guy may have been a jerk, but he was right: I wasn't working hard and I wasn't learning very much. Much as I dislike the guy, I have to admit he did me an enormous service. He recognized that I needed a kick in the teeth to take his advice seriously. The next three years I made sure I worked harder than everyone else around me, if only to prove that he was wrong, that I hadn't been a mistake. I stayed in EE and would have graduated near the top of my class if I hadn't had to factor in my freshman year grades.
So what does that prove? That you can make a kid neurotic if you push him hard enough? Maybe. But I know that if I had tried to skate through my post-college life being smart and not working, I would have got nowhere and done nothing interesting. Being super intelligent is like having giant biceps: impressive, but rarely useful. People admire intelligence, but they reward getting things done. Getting things done requires some intelligence, but much more it requires hard work and stick-to-itiveness. I'm not faulting my parents one bit: they manifestly loved me, found me good schools and interesting activities and fed my eagerness to do useful things. But I'm careful with my kids to praise the things they control and can change--like hard work and not being deterred when things are hard--and let the being smart thing take care of itself.
[+] [-] aianus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkane848|9 years ago|reply
I'm already one of those people with a generally dry/sarcastic sense of humor (think Ruxin from The League, "I can't even tell when you're joking" kinda thing), so I have a hard time telling when I'm actually being an asshole or condescending or not, because while I seriously try to watch myself I still occasionally get the feeling that I came off the wrong way or, well, condescendingly. "You just think you're sooooo smart..."
[+] [-] swalsh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RMcNeely|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|9 years ago|reply
If a smart kid is always taught the convenient fiction that everyone is exactly the same, then when they interact with an athletic kid who dominates them at sports but struggles academically, what conclusion will the smart kid draw?
And finally, is this "praise effort and self esteem" movement responsible for the current wave of anti-free-speech protests on college campuses?
[+] [-] colechristensen|9 years ago|reply
That just doesn't make sense. Praise your kid for doing not for being. Who's advocating teaching smart kids everyone is the same? It seems like any child is going to realize this isn't true.
>is this "praise effort and self esteem" movement responsible for the current wave of anti-free-speech protests on college campuses?
Absolutely not.
That is a result of the cultural admiration of protesting / fighting for rights / rebelling against X. Admiration of the real civil rights movement, environmentalism, etc.
The problem is that as a society we're running out of clean cut black and white issues (no pun intended) to be opposed to. There are still problems, but not nearly as many _simple_ problems. Things are complicated these days.
So they're straying off into the weeds trying to attack complex social issues with the same strategies that worked against simple ones and coming out looking like fools. And likewise the targets of their protests are straying because complex issues don't have a big bad evil you can hate, and that nuance and detail are being lost.
The once reasonable protesting class are being supplanted by increasingly unreasonable protestors who are rebels searching desperately for a cause.
[+] [-] shimon|9 years ago|reply
By reinforcing the action, you help a kid understand that it is their effort that led to the achievement, which encourages the kid to make efforts when she wants something.
Reinforcing the characteristic, on the other hand, suggests that it is the kid's innate characteristics that led to the achievement, which encourages them to defend that identity.
[+] [-] landryraccoon|9 years ago|reply
Your implicit assumption is that your kid will not succeed at something athletically no matter how hard they try. If a kid dreams of going for the NBA or the NFL, why not let them try?
What's the benefit of praising a child for their intelligence if intelligence is immutable? Is it a self esteem play or what?
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pwthornton|9 years ago|reply
She also stumbles and falls a lot as we climb different things and walk over different surfaces. I tell her "keep going" or "you've got this" and she gets right back up and keeps trying. I find that if you focus on saying that she'll be alright or making sure she is not hurt (when she is clearly not), she'll dwell on that, start crying and stop doing what she is doing.
This story and the other links published here got me thinking about this. Innate ability is clearly important when you really think about it, but what I want to instill is this idea that it's normal and natural to fail along the way to success and that even if you are really talented at something, you'll have setbacks.
[+] [-] Jugurtha|9 years ago|reply
[0]: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct0...
[+] [-] cel1ne|9 years ago|reply
What does an intelligent kid do? Find the easiest way to do a task or question whether the task is necessary at all. That's just humans conserving energy. Which is smart. This is not the hard part for them, they excel at this.
Effort is consciously fighting against the drive to stop working. THIS is the hard part. Above average children never have to learn this, because they get through school and life that easy. It's only when they are forced to leave their comfort zone, when problems show up.
Intelligent Children who aren't kept or lead out of this effort-avoidance (which is a kind of motivation as well: the motivation to avoid effort in order to conserve energy) also tend to get worse grades after they got good ones.
Because praising them signals them that they actually overachieved and can therefore put even less energy into accomplishing a task.
So the way to go is praising them for doing something that they didn't want to do or for repeating effort.
[+] [-] ak39|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Practicality|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwthornton|9 years ago|reply
You can outwork someone and make up for an intellectual or physical disadvantage, but you may be less inclined to do so if people tell you that you have greatly innate gifts than you do.
Let's also keep in mind that a lot of very intelligent people are able to focus and think more abstractly, allowing them to be very efficient workers. I just see a lot of parents telling their kids how smart they are, thinking it will build up their self esteem, but I wonder if this is counterproductive if they are actually of more average intelligence.
[+] [-] edtechdev|9 years ago|reply
I've found this TED talk the best explanation of growth vs. fixed mindset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN34FNbOKXc
[+] [-] thanatropism|9 years ago|reply
I was recently depressed and without really having been told anything he gave me this hollywood-movie pep talk along the lines of "it's important that you know that you have great talents so don't sweat the small stuff and tell me if you're in trouble".
Maybe this is pretty much off-topic, but the point I wanted to make is that people react to different things and much of the art of squeezing motivation and productivity out of them has to do with understanding this.
[+] [-] serg_chernata|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertyuiop924|9 years ago|reply
Which may be why I've spent so much time when I've been ostensibly slacking off trying to understand monads, reading HN, and, every few months or so, once again trying to bash my way through SICP...
[+] [-] jedberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erdevs|9 years ago|reply