How Not to Praise Your Children

There are many obstacles to success, but who would have thought that praise could be one of them? Psychologist Carol Dweck is so certain of it that she has devoted much of her career warning that a well-meant compliment could be dangerous to a child’s future.

Not that there aren’t healthy forms of praise. Dweck, however, a well-known Stanford psychology professor who spent much of the 1970s and 1980s fleshing out mindset and motivation theory as a professor at the U of I, says that her studies indicate many notions from the “self-esteem movement” in the 1990s could backfire. That is, comments such as “You’re so smart!” send a very different message than what’s intended.

Praising intelligence alone, Dweck says, tells children that you judge their smarts by their performance, and that you value them by how intelligent they are. Such a message can put them on the defensive as they seek to avoid appearing less intelligent.

“We have a whole line of research on praise,” Dweck says, during an interview when she was on campus for a MillerComm 2010 lecture. “And the counterintuitive finding—for some it’s a shocking finding—is that praising children’s intelligence can be harmful. The self-esteem movement convinced us that we had to praise our children in order for them to feel confident and motivated, but I had been studying mindsets for a long time and I knew it was the vulnerable kids who were over-focused on their intelligence and worried about how high it was.”

She put this observation to the test. Dweck led a series of studies with kids of different ages, and over and over they kept getting the same results: Praising kids for their intelligence led to poor performance and other negative behavior—even lying about their performance.

“When kids, after they performed a set of problems, were praised for their intelligence, they then did not want a challenging task afterward. They wanted to protect this idea that they were smart,” Dweck says. “When we gave them a challenging task later on, they lost their confidence, they lost interest, and their performance plummeted.”

If, on the other hand, they praised children not for their intelligence but for the process they engaged in, such as their effort, the children chose to continue with challenging tasks because it wasn’t threatening to them, Dweck says. Even if they were asked to perform a very challenging task they remained confident and interested, and their performance “blossomed,” she says.

Dweck says her students encouraged her to write a book about her findings, and she wrote Mindset, published in 2006. She spells out her findings of how a fixed mindset—believing that basic qualities such as intelligence and talent are fixed traits—can lead to pessimism and unfulfilled potential, while a growth mindset—believing that basic traits can be developed by dedication and hard work— leads to greater success and satisfaction.

She describes how these mindsets are reflected in sports, romance, art, and friendship, but her commentary on how it applies to children and students has garnered the most response. After her book was published, stories emerged in Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, New York magazine, and other media outlets applying Dweck’s findings to accounts of promising young children who seemed to run out of motivation. Sales of Dweck’s book have been increasing largely by word of mouth.

“I think it’s resonated with people because people suddenly recognized that they have one mindset or the other, and what it means is that these mindsets are often implicit, they’re often not articulated, and people are not necessarily conscious of them,” she says. “So a lot of people who learn about it think, ‘Oh, that’s why I do this,’ or ‘That’s why I dropped out of this when it got difficult.’”

Studying mindsets was a personal exploration for Dweck, too. She recalls how one of her elementary school teachers would seat kids by order of IQ. Even though she was typically head of the class, it was hard for her to avoid the fixed mindset, at least in early life.

“I grew up in this era of the IQ test and the idea of fixed intelligence, and I became very caught up in being intelligent, in being the top of the class. It was very intertwined with my identity,” Dweck says. “But it was through my work uncovering the mindsets that I couldn’t possibly stay in a fixed mindset.

“I think once you understand the growth mindset,” she says, “you really understand its advantages.”