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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."
This is also an implicit critique for those in certain fields of biology, who, unwilling to question their genetic reductionistic assumptions, continuously attempt to explain everything about humanity in terms of genetics or selection pressure, as though their particular field exists within an epistemological vacuum.
But you can over encourage your children and get them to not apply themselves. I've seen it happen...
If you allow your awareness to lapse and fade, you will become a victim of your own overconfidence. - the book of five rings
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Sure, having innate gifts helps, but it doesn't do any good if you don't show up and get things done. That's why doing homework is part of my kids' nightly routine. It's also why being borderline obsessive/compulsive tends to get you ahead academically and in many work environments. Of course, it means tearing my kids away from their current project for dinner time is occasionally an epic battle. I tell my son that our ability to intensely focus on things is our family's superpower, and should be used for good and not evil.
The other thing I've seen research on is that praising kids in general ways such as "you're smart" isn't very helpful. Being specific with your praise, such as "you've got a good memory and learn spelling words well" is more effectively motivating.
I think you may have missed the point of the article. It's quite possible to take the time to teach your kids, but have it blow up in your face because the methods of teaching are not optimal.
You seem to have done a great job making sure your daughter is open to traditionally gender-inappropriate areas of interest, and to have challenged her and stimulated her in positive ways. Often, though, parents will say, "C'mon, you're smarter than that" or something similar when their child fails. As failures mount (and they will, learning is a process that requires failure), the child begins to believe that they really aren't that smart, and that a lack of intelligence is why they fail.
What I've taken from the article is that a better way to handle that would be to say, "C'mon, let's figure out how you can be smarter about that problem next time." This implies that intelligence is malleable and trainable.
How have you handled your daughter's failures?
/For the record, I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject lately, as I'm a fairly new father of a girl -- and I'm always looking for insight.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My brother and I are both smart in different ways. I'm more able to apply myself to jobs I don't enjoy doing, and accomplish them, but he's got more IQ and is better at what he enjoys. I did better in high school and college because of it (and I don't have his personal issues), but he's at his dream job and is very good at what he does. I still haven't quite figured it out yet.
Both of our parents pressed us to be smart and good at our studies when we were younger, read to us and with us early, and did their best to help us do what we wanted to do.
It's true that you need to spend time with your children to educate them, but you need to have a balance. You also don't want to be one of those control freak parents standing behind them at the spelling bee going "eyes on the prize!"
Basically, I think the important things are to spend quality time with your kids. If they show interest in a particular area of study, skill or art, encourage them by providing what they need to pursue that. Kids with a keen interest in intellectual pursuits you might want to take them to the library, purchase books on their area of interest, or buy them needed equipment, like, a microscope for the aspiring biologist or a telescope for the aspiring astronomer. Take trips to places that will pique their curiosity -- and remember, children curious.
Because they're so curious, you want to try to answer their questions -- or, better yet, show them how to answer their own questions when appropriate. Show them all of the resources available to them -- Internet, books, the library, videos on the subject, software maybe. And, if you yourself have plenty of knowledge in the area they are interested in, teach them what you know about it.
The real answer is to just be supportive. You can't push them to hard, and you can't be an absentee parent. Bear in mind that children have different styles of learning and might need different approaches. Some will take time to learn, others will learn very quickly. That's really the best advice I can give anyone.
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More to the point, you've nurtured her inquisitiveness.
Inquisitiveness is the derivative of "figuring stuff out".
Guess that's why I hate GUIs so much; looking at icons all day sometimes seems like the antithesis of grasping the fundamental ideas and letting them dynamically unfold within the mind.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
How? ok I have a great example....
I asked her to change the manual transmission oil on my Sidekick sport, no instruction at all just a command and acted like I was doing something.
when she opened the book and crawled under the car with a breaker bar to remove the oil drain plug I almost snickered... I let her get covered in old 90 weight oil, I then quietly slid the oil pan under for her and said, "need this?" she cleaned up the mess and finished the job and I said " good job! Mistakes make you better at what you do."
Expect kids to make mistakes and praise them for making them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Many of us here are the people described in the article, and we hold "being smart" as the highest possible attribute. We worship "smart" here. Ironically, of course, since one can't claim any more honor from being born smart than from being born handsome or good at sports, traits that are scorned here.
Well, that's the focus of the article, isn't it? I totally agree with you, by the way - there's nothing to be proud of in relying on abliity alone to outperform the less talented if you're still underachieving.
I was certainly one of the ones that got the 'wow, that kid's smart' a lot. Probably more in school than from my parents, who emphasized work over talent. And I was an underachiever (relatively) until I realized how shameful it was that I was getting grades without any effort that my friends had to work their asses off for. And some of them resented it. I came to realize that a great deal of unused talent isn't something to be proud of; it's something to be ashamed of, if anything.
I've got kids now, and they're young, but they seem pretty sharp. And while I'll never tell them that they're dumb, praise comes through recognition of hard work - not talent.
The article never really states that intelligence is terribly malleable. This is more of a general impression left with the reader - which is mostly incorrect. The article mainly states that it is preferable that children hold a more rose-tinted view of the nature of intelligence, as that tends to make them less prone to fatalism and more prone to work hard. Sort of like how a belief in Santa can make kids behave better.
Very interesting. I stumbled onto the incremental learning approach, pretty much by accident. My father was a high-pressure parent, always in search of better grades. Nothing short of straight-A across the board was really satisfactory. By the time I was in high school, I built a system to print counterfeit report cards -- end of problem. This was back in the early 80's, so it was considered beyond the capabilities of home computers. I proved otherwise.
With my own daughter, I watch her grades but without pressure. If she gets a mediocre grade in a subject that she hates (usually because she has to work at it), I try to make the subject a little more interesting and encourage her to try and bump her next grade by a half a letter. "Science is boring? No way! At work, we boil Santa's elves in nitric acid so we can test them for lead! You need science in order to boil the elves and see if they are safe for kids!"
Unlike one of the other posts, I have been deficient in teaching my daughter the art of automotive maintenance. She is 10 now, so I will start with the basics of checking oil and tire changing.
On the other hand, she has awesome language skills, and has become a huge sports fan. She could easily become a sportswriter. I might encourage her to write a book on Lulu.com or try a little blogging on sports websites.
Another piece of the puzzle is how the other kids in the neighborhood are being raised. Parenting is a team sport. If the kids next door are allowed to slide through school unchallenged, that problem finds its way into your house eventually. School systems try to adapt to substandard parenting by slowing everyone else down so that the average kid can pass. Parents can raise the average with positive motivation. People try to choose a town with "good schools", but in reality they are looking for a town with parents who take the time to get involved and pay attention to their kids.
...at least as far as how to make your kids smarter from the start. QUIT LETTING THEM WATCH INORDINATE AMOUNTS OF TELEVISION, MOVIES, AND VIDEO GAMES. Make them read. The more they read, the better their critical thinking skills, the better their grasp of grammar and spelling, and the more knowledge they will gain. I wasn't allowed to watch TV when I was a kid. Period. We owned an Atari 2600 (when N64 was the newest console), but that was it. While banning your children from the television entirely isn't the best idea, I read a ton, and now I'm generally more intelligent than most people my age - not just book smart; I just comprehend things better than most of the kids who were in my classes in college and whatnot. Raising your kids to never fail is bad, but raising your kids to never do any mentally-intensive work is bad, too. Playing Call of Duty for ten hours on a Saturday isn't going to do a whole lot for your cognitive development.
I'm a geek girl. Seriously.
what utter crap.
I can't spell for shit, have poor grammar, have never been able to learn another language despite huge amounts of effort I've put in (Learning a different language is an attempt to improve my skills in my native language) and my writing looks like a horrible mess. In short despite all my efforts I am still unable to do these things and I am the last person that you would expect not to try in as many ways possible to overcome these problems.
Anyone that says otherwise it talking crap because 'everybody must be equal', if there not talking crap they can try to sort me out and prove me otherwise, I doubt I will have any takers.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I do think intelligence is fixed, what you can do with it is not. All people are intelligent (yes some more so) but all brains are of similar size/structure. Some people have a desire to learn and achieve, some people don't for a variety of reasons (lack of confidence due to previous failures or maybe just plain lazy). The former I'll surround myself with, the latter I don't want anything to do with.
I recall reading about a Nobel prize winner's acceptance speech that included this anecdote.
... encouraging him to experiment.
Once, when he was very young, he spilled a pitcher of juice (milk?) all over the kitchen while trying to serve himself a drink. Instead of yelling at him, his mother helped him clean it up. She then filled the pitcher with water and took him outside and told him "The way you did it before didn't work very well, how else can you hold and pour so you don't spill?"
In the speech, he thanked his mother for helping him win the science prize by teaching him to try new approaches when his attempts failed... and not to fear mistakes.
I really liked that story when I first heard it (and try hard to practice the same type of teaching with my own children). I wish I knew which prize winner it was so I could read or listen to his entire acceptance speech (and see if I'm remembering that story correctly)
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Being smart is somehow different than other traits though. If I were to tell a coworker or a friend "let me carry that, I'm stronger" or "let me reach that, I'm taller than you", no one would bat an eye. But if I were to say "let me solve that, I'm smarter", that's plainly offensive. Why is that?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
How much of what she knows is because she was teachable, and how much of it is because you taught her?
It's great that you have given her things to be interested in and helped her learn, but it isn't real clear that the interest is present in all kids...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You mean I'm not smart just because a bunch of people told me so? Who knew?
New York Magazine published a pretty good article about how actively boosting a child's self-esteem often has the opposite effect to what a well-meaning adult intends.
The 5000 foot view is that in 1969 a guy named Nathaniel Braden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem a wildly popular book among academicians, whose whole point was that self-esteem is the single most important personality trait. True or not, his conclusions spawned the next 38 years of effort to boost self-esteem, particularly among "low social status" (read "poor and minority") children.
Many years later, Prof. Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve U, then a leading member of the self-esteem movement (as a CWRU alumn, I remember reading his abstracts at the time and thinking it was all ridiculous--yay me!) did a massive review of the research. He found something like 15000 research articles on the matter. His team began their review by establishing academic standards and throwing out articles that didn't meet them.
They ended up with 200 articles out of 15,000 that could be considered academic research quality. Whoops.
Of the 200 valid articles they soon realized that most either failed to establish the efficacy of self-esteem boosters or denied it outright. Double whoops.
Baumeister became a convert and now preaches the evils of vacuous self-esteem bolstering.
Then came Carol Dweck, whose 10 years of experiments in NYC public schools pretty much killed the "science" of self-esteem dead, dead, dead. FWIW, my wife, a public school teacher when she's not birthin' babies, is a huge fan of Ms. Dweck.
That said, old habits die hard and to this day we still have identical trophies for every kid on the soccer team, and we don't tell them whether they won or not.
Slashdotter parents, RTFA, Google all the names in it, read the research. You'll be convinced, too, and moreso than if you stuck to SciAm.
Given two people with similar degrees from Oxford and from the Open University, I'll take the OU graduate every time.
The UK education system is seriously fucked up. It's goal based now. The purpose is to get you to pass exams, not to educate. We might be better off with the International Baccalaureate outwith political control. The other thing is that education should be life long. It should just be a standard part of being a citizen.
The brain changes shape, it takes several years, it has to modify the strength of all these trillions of connections but with enough effort eventually you get good at what you're learning.
Deleted
"Keep young children in the walled garden, those that survive and escape can be schooled those that don't are no longer a drain on my resources."
Don't we already do that?
It's called "religion".
Except the ones still inside the garden are now a valuable resource we call "consumer".
Don't leave the gate open!
http://www.rlt.com/ -- for Reason, Logic and Truth in your kid's education.
Not per se, no. But the implementation often does far more harm than good.
Many people seem to confuse criticism of how badly competition is often taught with criticism of competition in general. There also seems to be a fairly common view that sports are worthless unless there's some kind of competition involved.
I sometimes wonder to what extent it's connected to the grossly-simplified view of so-called "free market" economics that seems myopically focused on the competition involved. (Ditto evolution -- it's particularly exasperating when a screwed-up view of evolution is used to bolster a screwed-up view of economics.)
1) The goal of the modern education system (at least here in the US) is to bring every child to the same level. Many are brought up to that level, many are brought down to it. The author's tone suggests seems to support the notion that busy work is the path to 'smarthood'. Ala - 'kids that study hard are smart.' This is exactly the same crap that the schools like to dish out as well. While it is a valid teaching method for SOME, I believe the real value of keeping everyone overloaded with school work is control.
2) George Carlin puts it best, but you might consider that the vast majority of us in America aren't really being raised to be 'smart'. Rather, the entire system seems designed to create sheeple by the millions. This ties in with what I was trying to say above, but if the system can't keep you constantly toiling for your next biscuit, they'll quickly lose their ability to influence you. When the student becomes smarter than the teacher, it is often time to either find a new teacher or begin blazing new trails. When an employee discovers they're smarter than their corporate owners they will likewise feel the need for change. Of course, there are other barriers to that sort of change, but the principle still applies.
3) Perhaps the author just didn't ever get into the gifted program, and is still grousing about how much easier the 'smart kids' had it?
Kids may love competition, but what they don't love is getting involved in a moderately fun sport and then having their parents treat it like a life or death matter if they win or lose.
There's a rather large difference between them having a race amongst themselves and playing a baseball game in from of 100 screaming parents.
Non-competitiveness is, indeed, for the parents, so the parents will no long act like asses.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
My parents did the first for me.
My sister had accomplished the second. She was 10 years my senior, I was in 4th or 5th. I still remember that moment seeing my sister(sitting on the sofa and reading the third book from the Belgariad series from David Eddings. My attention was captured when she laughed and I looked up to find a huge grin running across her face. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued and I just had to know what was so entertaining, but she said there was no way I could understand without reading the book. Sure enough, I ended up reading my way through her shelves, starting with that series. This probably contributed to my growing up into a nerd given her particular areas of interest.
Thanks to their influences there was a stark distinction between my reading comprehension and vocabulary compared to my K-12 peers who had never discovered the joys of extracurricular reading. They instead found reading to be an annoying and stressful exercise since every association they had with reading stemmed from either a boring textbook or assigned reading forced upon them. Furthermore, both forms of reading involved deadlines, followed by tests. They couldn't understand why I found reading to be enjoyable, but given their only encounters with reading, I could hardly blame them.
> I seriously don't know if GP did that on purpose or not...
Could be that he's dyslexic?
Just that short spat of his writing reminds me of how my wife and some of her family write, who are all very dyslexic. Even though they are all VERY intelligent people and tend to lean towards being very good in the math & science side of academia, writing is something that they all work hard to do without appearing to be very unintelligent.
Unfortunately all you have to go by on the internet is someones writing ability, but it's not always a fair assessment of how smart or educated someone is or isn't.
As we learn more about brain plasticity and the mind as a dynamic system, rather than a simply structured one, the idea that there is a fixed property like "intelligence" in that system becomes increasingly naive and dated.
We don't think of physical strength or athletic ability as "fixed", just waiting for us to "learn to use it." We need to think of intellectual activity in the same terms that we think of physical activity.
Yup. One great example is that there are cultures with musician castes. It's certainly not the case that everybody who's born into such a caste is a great musician, but training children in music from very early ages is quite normal. Youtube has an nice video of a 5 year old in Burkina Faso getting some training on the balafon, that's illustrative.
Are you adequate?
I think a better way to put it would be, "The absolute most important factor of success is effort." When I was in school, I got top scores on all the standardized tests without working a bit. Because of this, I got all kinds of rewards and accolades for "my hard work". Instead of teaching me to value working hard and challenging myself, it taught me to expect honors and recognition without having to do anything for it.
I think it was lucky for me that:
At college I gradually had less accolades for not doing anything special, and gradually had to work harder to do well; so I never "hit a wall" where I thought I was dumb. I did feel jealous for awhile of other people who got rewards for actually going over and above; but I just had to suck it up and tell myself that they were rewarded because they put in extra effort, and I'm not being rewarded because I didn't.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
This is the secret to why immigrant Asian children have been outperforming Anglo children in school. The idea that hard work = good results is something very ingrained in cultures influenced by Confucianism. You work hard to get good grades to please your parents, and the Ancestors. If it takes burning midnight oil, if it takes going to cram school, whatever it takes, you do it. And if you fail, you do it again and again until you succeed.
Once these families get a dose of the self esteem ueber alles school of child rearing in the US, they tend to regress towards Anglo means after the second or third generation Asian-American children.
It's all about self-efficacy and internal locus of control. Self-esteem is about "I'm a worthwhile person because I'm me." Self-efficacy is more like "With enough effort, I can do anything I can set my mind to." A person with an internal locus of control blames "not enough practice" or "I didn't study like I should have" for failing a test. A person with an external locus of control thinks "I failed the test because I'm stupid" or "I failed the test because my teacher has it in for me."
Self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus of control are part of a bigger entity called one's self-concept. The individual parts that make up self-concept tend to get conflated, particularly in the case of those whose knowledge of psychology does not go beyond Psych 101 or High School psych courses. However, studies have shown that these are separate aspects of self-concept which can be experimentally manipulated and scientifically quantified.
Legitimate mastery experiences do far more to improve self-efficacy, and in turn, improve self-concept, than all the unearned praise you can lavish on someone. It is worth noting that Nathaniel Branden never published any peer-reviewed research on any of his ideas, and that most of them came from his guru Ayn Rand, who never took a psych course in her life, much less a philosophy course. Branden did receive a BA and an MA from accredited schools of psychology, although his doctorate came from a questionable, non-accredited source.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I grew up always being praised for being smart, for being gifted, and the like. I was reading at 2, talking and walking really early, and my twin brother was the same. I went to a gifted elementary school and because of that acceleration I breezed through middle and high school and got into a great college.
When I got there, I hit a wall. Many classes where "dumb" people did better than me and I managed a B-C average. Hell, sometimes I didn't care to go to class at all. I waited til the night before to study, and laughed at the kids who spent all week doing organic chemistry problems. I was always "busy" though not really doing anything but playing computer games.
I'm sure many people can relate to this. Still, procrastination and issues related to it constantly plagued me. Anyway, I squeezed by and graduated and got a job and it was great... for a while. Until it started being challenging.
During my last job, I finally figured out what it was, which is what the article says. A combination of an over-protective mom who couldn't let me fail and a slew of teachers who couldn't handle my ability to just devour information created a huge problem with the fear of failure. I had no idea how to deal with failure even as a kid, since I never *had* failed. I'd never been allowed to, that I can remember. If I was doing something wrong or slow, my mom would always cut in and fix it for me with a "you're smart, you can do this faster, let me do it for you". I never got to solve my own problems when I made mistakes. Since college and work can be tough, they finally presented real challenges for me and I didn't have anyone to save me. And of course, the problems there led to massive issues with avoiding potential failures: procrastination, laziness, shirking difficult projects. I've spent a lot of time reading books and in therapy to deal with it.
Finally, after having moved away from my parents and their influence, I started figuring out what *I* want and started breaking out of these habits. I pursued a Masters degree at night while working full time, and it was surprising how I could do both of these things and manage a 3.7 GPA and good salary while as an undergrad I couldn't do either of them. I'm still dealing with them to some extent, but I know I'm on the path to eliminating it completely.
If you can relate to these issues, check out The NOW Habit and books on the "Achilles syndrome" or fear of failure in general. It's possible to reverse the bad influences and teachings of your parents and teachers.
IAAC (I Am A Composer), and I have to say that these arguments get applied too often to music, and this triggered my bullshit Mozart fact-o-meter. Mozart was 8 when he wrote his first opera, and nobody performs it, because his later operas are so much better. Lots of talent, but lots of learning.
Most people never learn to compose because they think they can't. They've bought into the Hollywood Amadeus nonsense that God comes and talks to you, and then you just write it down. It's less glamorous to admit that that person, although talented, also worked extremely hard, and that you, with a similar extreme effort, could do the same. Writing music is hard work; it's the toughest thing that I know how to do that I can do well, but I resent when people act like it's magic. Being the absolute best at something probably does require a bit of magic, but too often we just use that as an excuse. Though not everyone has the same innate talent for music, it probably didn't hurt either that Mozart's father was also a composer, and he would have been surrounded by excellent musicians and trained on the piano before the toilet. Music, and only music, is all that Mozart did from birth. He worked in one style, that had certain formulas for creating melodies, harmonies and forms. (check out his dice music!) He was damn good, but he was also incredibly hard-working.
Also, as per one other myth from Amadeus: "He could hear the music in his head!" Any composer worth his/her salt can do this with tonal music from the Classical Period. Same way a good mechanic can hear a certain sound from your engine and know that it's cause xyz. It's what they do, and sort of an expected skill amongst composers.
There is a big difference: few people talk about their athletic potential as a significant component in their lives. There is no "Athleticism Quotient" to which parents gleefully refer when describing their children.
Indexing one's potential with a simple number is counter-productive and misleading. When you see why people do it - what inequalities it justifies, what differences it excuses, what failures it compensates for - one wonders why those numbers exist at all. The genes may explain as little about one's net intellectual performance as what kind of CPU I have explains for the quality of software that's running on my computer (given that the variances in "hardware" for human are fairly minor.)
I'm not sure what "ethnicity" has to do with it, by the way, at all. All the significant variables I've seen for academic performance involve things like the amount of time parents spend doing homework with their kids, the level of socioeconomic stress of the family, etc.
Step back for a moment and ask yourself, would you rather parent a stupid teenager or a smart one? The smart ones hack Dad's on-line brokerage account and drain his 401k to fund spring break in Rio de Janeiro.
As always, be careful when you wish.
On the other hand, the idea in the main article, that intelligence is mutable, and a persons' persepctive on the mutability of intelligence affect their ability to alter their own intelligence is useful.
And, as always, if you find yourself raising a child, your #3 job is to limit your kids' screen time (#1 is feed, clothe and house them, #2 is love them unconditionally). Limiting the time they spend in front of a TV or computer will do more to increase their intelligence than anything else you do. In fact, if you keep your kids TV viewing under 1 hour per day, you virtually guarantee that they will be in the top 1% intellectually in their generation.
I almost got in trouble with a similar approach. You need to be careful in this day and age. Others might not agree with your choice of parenting techniques and may wish to punish you for them.
[annecdote]
Recently, at the playground I saw my toddler was about to push an empty swing. I knew what was about to happen, but I also realized she wasn't strong or agile enough to give it a real good push. So, sure enough, she pushes the swing, it comes back and knocks her on her little butt - harmless but of course she starts crying. Another parent witnessed the event and rightfully accused me of letting it happen. I collected my little girl and told this other parent I was aware of the consequences and decided to let my little one give herself a "physics lesson". Heh, that was the term I used, "physics lesson". This infuriated the other parent who then accused me of child abuse and proceeded to call the police. In the end nothing came of it. So no harm done.
[/annecdote]
I support the idea of letting kids make their own mistakes at an early age to help them understand cause and effect, to understand the consequences of their actions. It is important at an early age to help them think because later in life the consequences could be much more severe. However the way things are going, my actions above might someday be illegal and I might've had to answer to social services or worse.