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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."
Smart parents that take the time to educate their kids as well as spending time with them.
example? sure. My daughter can code html very well. I sat down for a few months and showed her how to get going and now she sells myspace templates for $15.00 each to kids at school. She also understands how a car works because I made her come out and help when I was working on the car or my project hotrod. Explaining things to her and answering all her questions. She also can use a GPS (real one not these fluffy naigation toys) as we are always geocacheing every sunday. One year we went geocacheing without a GPS, only topo maps and a compass. she loved the "low tech" approach. She is one of these Abercrombie wearing socks and flipflops in the winter stylish cheerleader types. yet she get's her hands dirty, can change a distributor as good as any certified mechanic and knows when to set aside prissy for fun and work.
She can do things that 99% of her friends can't. she has a higher automotive education than most girls, etc...
THAT is the solution. School will not teach your kids, you have to. Sadly most parents today do not want to bother with teaching their kids.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It could be scuba diving, or building a house, making cookies, or solving fractal matthematics, but the answer was always "I've never tried it."
The danger is not that your children will fail, and have permanently damaged egos-- the danger is that your child will never experience failure, and thus learn the important skill of picking up the pieces and moving on. Parents naturally want to save their children from the suffering that comes from defeat (e.g., the track race on field day, the art competition, spelling bee, science fair, etc.), but this is an important experience, and one that they will eventually have, regardless of how much parents shelter them. I would much rather have my child feel crushed because he lost the Boy Scout knot-tying competition than have his first failure be at that new job out of college. The young adult who knows ego management will be in a much better position to dust himself off and carry on than the college grad who takes failure as a sign of permanent inability.
Last night's On Point featured Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist who funded Netscape, Google, AOL, and so on, and he said something that struck me-- he said that he has failed often, but that his successes outnumber his failures. He also said that his firm has a reputation of betting on the entrepeneur who has failed once before. The entrepeneur who fails, learns from it, and tries again is the kind of guy he wants to invest in.
Scientific American ran some articles last year on child prodigies and expert minds (eg, Expert Mind). The general idea was that child prodigies are not necessarily ``smarter'' than their peers. Instead, they are so passionate about a particular task that they practice significantly more than their peers. That is, hard work accounts for a lot. Being slightly gifted at some task and doing well can be more encouraging than failing, but that just gets the ball rolling. For example, Tiger Woods played hours of golf--he would practically beg his parents to take him out to play.
People aren't born knowing chess openings or golf swings. Helping children find activities that really interest them can be hugely rewarding-- not because they should become child prodigies, but because then the process itself is satisfying, too.
It doesn't help those who are fast learners to sail through anything, yet the American educational system ignores the so-called "gifted", or just piles on more homework instead of making things challenging.
The result, children like the Jonathan of the article. They crumple at the first difficulty and never recover.
I don't think the bulldozer parents, those who shove all obstacles out of their children's way, help either.
Consistently telling a kid that (s)he is stupid will cause the kid to believe he is stupid. Wow! such insight!
Wrong-o. Consistently telling a kid that successes are due to being smart will cause them to believe the opposite as well - namely, that failures are due to *not* being smart. On the other hand, telling a kid that successes are due to hard work will lead them to believe that failure can be turned around through diligence.
Read it slower next time.
As someone who failed their A-Levels (that's post school, pre uni 16 - 18yr old education for the non-Brits) miserably having been told for years I have to succeed, that I have to get top grades and so forth to go to uni and do amazingly only to not do so great and fall into a pit of "I'm stupid, I can't do this, it's too hard for me" and then giving up.
7 years down the road, thanks for the open university (www.open.ac.uk), an establishment that gives not a shit about league tables but instead actually cares about learning, education and research you know, the things Unis are meant to be about I am now a first class honours computing and mathematical sciences graduate. Not only that but I achieved this whilst working full time and in 3 years, so around 40 - 45hrs work a week and around 32hrs studying, I also feel that what the article suggests is true, that intelligence isn't something that's entirely fixed - some take things in easier than others certainly whilst others have to work hard but I do not feel any more that there's many areas beyond my grasp if I have the time, money and inclination to learn them. This is why I'll soon be starting my second degree in Physics which I will follow up with a Masters and hopefully eventually a phd. Why you ask? Because when you're not forced to learn, and when you're learning because you want to learn, learning is fun and there's little you can't do if you have the raw motivation of wanting to learn behind you.
Fuck the people who tell you you're stupid, it's them that make you stupid. Don't let them get away with it - defy them and learn anyway so that you can come back and gloat about how wrong they were.
That's why the trend towards things like "noncompetetive sports" for kids drives me up a wall.
The theory, apparently, is that if you don't keep score, the little snowflakes won't get their feelings hurt by losing.
That's not to say that winning is everything; in fact I think kids can learn more about hard work and perseverance from losing.
Just wait until these kids start applying for colleges and jobs, unaware that reality deals harshly with those unprepared to earn their place in the world.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
RTFA. It's not about mental ability. It's about how open children are to changing their abilities.
Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can. If they have been told that their mental ability/disability is fixed then they won't.
America, Home of the Brave.
Well... from the article:
"Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort."
That little prick was writing operas by the time he was 4 years old. How much "tremendous and sustained effort" can a 4 year-old have made?
Why are we so unwilling to admit that some kids are born smarter than others? From high-school on, I always found tall, slender, smart girls hot. I married a tall, slender, smart girl. My daughter is now a tall, slender smart girl. I am not particularly smart (except for when it comes to picking a mate). Who wants to bet that Britney Spears' kids probably won't win a Nobel prize in physics, even though they are probably go to fancy private schools and will have every advantage (except a stable home life, of course)?
All I'm saying that if you want to have really smart kids, it's good to start with at least one really smart parent. Beyond that, the affiant sayeth not.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For those of you who are too, ahem, busy, to read the article it says that if you create an environment where the child's ego and self-worth are linked to his or her intelligence they will likely avoid situations that will challenge them intellectually.
Actually really interesting stuff.
-- The unsig...
The point is found in the opposite, that if you don't believe you can improve yourself, you will never bother trying, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As Homer Simpson would say, "The lesson we learned here today is never, never try."
Here is a tried and tested way to almost gaurantee you have a smart child:
- Start reading to them VERY YOUNG.
I was reading on my own before the age of three and have had a life long adoration for literature. How did I learn to read? Simple. My mom read a book to me EVERY NIGHT as far back as I can remember (and then even before that) and let me follow along with her as she pointed to each word she read. Eventually, I didn't need her to do that anymore and I would toddle off into a corner with a stack of books on my own.
- Read books yourself. If your child sees you reading books for enjoyment and paying attention to the newspaper, your child is more likely to do the same.
- Allow your children to engage you in intellectual conversations. The worst thing you can do is, when your child starts a conversation or asks questions or wants to give you their thoughts on a topic, is slough it off or reply with only the vaguest of attention. No, you can't give your child constant un-divided attention. Your child needs to know that talking and debating and sharing thoughts and opinions and information is valued, encouraged and important. If all you engage each other in is conversations about last night's episode of your favorite sit-com, your kid is going to learn that consuming entertainment and keeping your mouth shut is what matters.
- Give your child freedom. I was able to bicycle and walk around the neighborhood (and beyond) when I was seven and eight years old. I was able to take the bus about fifteen miles into downtown Portland to explore the city, hang out at Powell's City of Books and practically live at the central library. I has a yard bigger than a postage stamp that you could almost get lost in. I built tree forts with my friends, invented games, dug giant holes and tunnels under ground. Played with my grandfathers carpentry tools to make stuff. Had a chemistry set. Had a library card. Had time to myself. Today, kids have their whole life planned and structured, are often restricted to a small area of freedom, can't roam anywhere on their own, and can't play with anything sharper than a spoon. As a kid, I smashed my fingers, sprained my hand and foot, cut my finger to the bone (and would have needed stitches, if we weren't camping 200 miles from the closest city at the time), hammered my finger, burned myself, cut myself with a handsaw and lots of other stuff. At twelve, I went down to the local car body shop and they let me have a chunk of steel. A simple rectangular block of it that I ground, sanded and shaped into an actual knife all on my own. Then I learned how to make a handle and rivet it all together, including using an expensive (and maybe dangerous) heavy duty drill press. Did I do lots of dumb stuff? Did I probably avoid serious harm many times, just by the skin of my teeth? Probably. But god damned, if I didn't learn a lot in the process and develop a lot of character through my inquisitiveness.
I think the real point is that environment can spoil natural intelligence if the intelligence is not fostered with a good work ethic. I doubt many on this forum would deny the genetic predispositions to intellect.
-l
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It seems to ignore a third view -- that intelligence is (pretty much) fixed, but we need to learn to use it. The capacity of a beer tankard might be fixed, but a pint tankard is as useless as a half-pint tankard until you put some beer into it.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
That little prick [Mozart] was writing operas by the time he was 4 years old. How much "tremendous and sustained effort" can a 4 year-old have made?
The article isn't saying that everyone is born with the same intellect - the article is saying that everyone can develop their intellect through "tremendous and sustained effort."
If Mozart had been a lazy SOB and retired at age 4, and I hadn't been a lazy SOB, the article suggests that I could lap Mozart despite starting much lower than him.
DATABASE WOW WOW
But, what you can do to increase the chances that someone will be SUCCESSFUL in life is to encourage and reward effort and work. For instance, if you kid gets an A, say "wow, you WORKED REALLY HARD to earn that A, great," and don't say "Wow, you're so smart!" Because if the kid later fucks something up, you want their mental arithmatic to be "I need to work harder" -- which anyone can do -- and not "I am a dumbass, which can't be changed." -- which doesn't encourage success. Ditto if they're failing: "you need to work harder at math" is what you should say, according to the latest research (which TFA is about, although I didn't read TFA, but rather another about the same study).
Some of the most successful people (CEOs, high achieving and famous game designers, etc.) I know are not super smart, they are just very motivated and work very hard. Some of the biggest failures I know (suicides, guys actually living in their parents' basement, etc.) are incredibly smart. As I get older, it seems that motivation, effort, and the skills needed to apply effort are way more important than raw IQ.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Heh, among my study group friends we had a saying, "Remember the Indians". Racist overtones aside, we were alluding to the immigrant students in our classes who seemed to always be asking incredibly stupid questions in great volume.
Everybody else just kept rolling their eyes since they already knew(or at least thought they knew) the answers to what was being asked. Then when test time comes around, the grades were what mattered, and while some of those people rolling their eyes actually did know the answers already, the majority didn't know them as well as they thought, or at least not as well as the students who were constantly hounding the teacher with questions and studying for hours to make up for any lacking areas of comprehension.
So we'd repeat that phrase to remind ourselves to never forget that lesson in hubris, and if we ever doubted our potential to get a good grade, we always had the opportunity to ameliorate our shortcoming with time and effort in the same way that those students kicked our asses.
Which is pretty much how the parent poster put it. Your genes AND your personality define limits on your ability to exert yourself physically. Your upper limits for intelligence, physical fitness, and many other traits are indeed in your DNA, but you must reach them for the limits to be relevant. If you teach a child that athletic ability does not improve with exercise, he will not be likely to exercise and obtain the corresponding benefits. The article suggests that if you teach a child that academic aptitude is not strengthened primarily through study and hard work, these, too, will be eschewed.
But, by the same token, two children of different families or different ethnicities can do the same exercises (mentally, physically, whatever) and (1) progress at a very different pace, and also (2) reach different absolute limits of ability regardless of effort.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.