The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientific American has an interesting article on the secret to raising smart kids that says that more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings. In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. One theory of what separates the two general classes of learners, helpless versus mastery-oriented, is that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different "theories" of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount. Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. Mastery-oriented children think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating offering opportunities to learn."

Comments

I think you missed the point.

[darkvizier]

The article is saying that consistently telling a child that they are 'smart' will lead them to be stupid. The belief that this is some built in, static attribute causes them to stop making efforts to improve.

Article makes sense to me

[Selanit]

The basic point of the article is:

1) Intelligence is not a fixed, immutable property.
2) People who believe it IS fixed and immutable tend to avoid intellectual challenges.
3) People who avoid intellectual challenges learn less, and more slowly than people who seek them out.

Therefore, in order to raise smart children, we should:

1) Teach them that intelligence can be increased. (E.g., "Einstein was a great mathematician because he worked really hard at it for a long time" rather than "Einstein was a born genius.")
2) Assign responsibility to effort rather than innate ability. (This works both ways; if the child does well on an assignment, you can say "That's a good job." But if they do poorly, you can say "You didn't put in enough effort." Either way, the problem is with the child's actions, not with the child's identity.)

This makes a great deal of sense to me. I have observed that I learn more from trying things that are hard than from repeating things I find easy. I think the same thing probably applies to other people; so in order to encourage learning, we should encourage people to believe that it's a good idea to try out things that are hard to do and see mistakes as opportunities to learn.

Re:Mental Abilities

[Joe the Lesser]

C'mon, do you really believe that a four year old Mozart sat down at the piano by himself and composed an opera while drinking earl grey tea?

Gifted children are taught by their parents, pushed by their parents, and learn to please their parents by doing what their daddy wants them to do.

quoted from wikipedia

"he often spent much time at the clavier [keyboard], picking out thirds, ... and his pleasure showed it sounded good [to him]." Nannerl continued: "in the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier. ... he could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time. ... At the age of five he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down." His father was a music teacher, his sister was being taught advanced music when he was young and they clearly spent a lot of his early childhood experimenting with music, whereas you and I might have been left to watch Sesame Street. I do believe Mozart was intelligent (nature may provide the difference between good and great), but children are amazing pattern learners (see learning foreign language), and so it is not hard to understand children musicians. I myself was an adept saxophonist at age 10 with little support. I bet most children could be nurtured to be gifted musicians with the right support. Mozart was challenged with music at a young age, most kids are assumed to be idiots and forced to listen to Barney.

Also he didn't write an opera at age four, he's first opera was written at about age 11.

It's about motivation and success, not being smart

[Colin Smith]

It's not about smart/stupid as far as I can see, it's about motivation and effort. You can be brilliant intellectually and completely unmotivated. In fact that seems to be the raison d'etre for teachers and our educational establishment.

From what I've seen of the world, motivation is far more important in determining success than intelligence.

Re:Correction

[StanS]

I would disagree based on my reading of the article. The kids that were praised for their hard work did better on future exams (even when presented with difficult problems), then kids who were praised for their intelligence. Once they hit problems that were not trivially solvable, they determined that they simply couldn't do it and just stopped trying (what this article calls learned helplessness).

I realize that this is totally anecdotal, but when I was quite young (1st or 2nd grade) I was told I had a learning disability and had to take special classes for years (until early high school), mainly focusing on how to learn/study. One of my best friends who was classified as gifted and was in fact placed in various gifted programs.

I trudged through grammar/middle school and many parts of high school, only becoming "smart" (to some of my peers) because I took a strong interest in several subjects and worked very hard at them (science, history and computer programming to name a few). Many subjects were incredibly difficult for me such as math, foreign languages and english (because my spelling and handwriting sucked, but these improved dramatically when I got my first computer with a spell checker!). I don't think I ever received a grade higher than a C for low B for any math class I ever took. But none the less I persisted and have done quite well in life and academically. I ended up getting a degree in computer science (in which I had to take many, many math classes), and got an MBA with a concentration in finance (honestly, easy stuff compared to what you need to do for comp sci).

My friend did very well in grammar school (straight A's), pretty good in middle school, ok early on in high school, and then just fell apart. He ended up dropping out of college after his freshman year. Like myself, he was not a genius when it came to math, but he just couldn't deal with it. Unfortunately for my story we ended up growing apart as friends (after he dropped out of college), and I have no idea how he turned out. He could have very well turned it around, he certainly had the talent.

The same thing happened to several others I know, many of them scored perfect 1600's on their SAT's (back when that was the top score), got into great schools, and then ending up dropping out (again, maybe they made it big later on, I lost track of most of them).

So based on my experience I would agree that hard work pays off (at least academically).