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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."
so duz this meen i cin git more smartz or will i allays be like dis ? i don unnerstand.
The early intake of PCB's seems to have made me [NO CARRIER]
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
People are different. film at 11.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
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.
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.
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.
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
Small mammals are scurrying for cover,
All the birds have taken wing.
The hordes of self-proclaimed geniuses who wander the halls of Slashdot approach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am learning electric guitar. I see the aforementioned "nature v. nurture" debate all the time. When discussing technique, some people progress a bit faster on the instrument than others and attribute it to natural talent. But everyone hits a wall eventually and then it boils down to perseverance and dedicated practice. Neither of those things is fun, especially when you just want to rock out. Luckily there are few things I like more than a challenge, so my slow rate of progress does not always deter me.
But I think kids have an advantage here, not because of their more malleable brains (although that helps) but because they often have fewer preconceptions that they should be immediately successful in what they do. I tend to stick to doing what I'm good at for most of the day and try to avoid being bad at things. I think our culture reinforces this point quite a bit with talent search shows and whatnot. But that is another discussion.
I think you are thinking of this story: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html Harrison Bergeron
Its the only one I like by Vonnegut.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
"It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."
-- Miller, W. I. (1993).
Humiliation. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
I think it's important to teach children that they are NOT special, that they can't do everything necessarily, to be cool with that, and that they have to be aware of their areas of lack of knowledge and work further towards improving them. The more you learn and the more you understand, leads to greater appreciation of how much you still don't know. Know that there are others who have skills and knowledge you don't have and suck up to them to learn from them.
The power of intelligence rests on understanding your own limitations and working hard to overcome them. Adults who think they know it all are most often idiots, and unfortunately many are also raising children.
Which leads me to another fave quote:
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
-- Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man. (London: John Murray)
Er, no, I'm not confident I know everything about this topic! ;-)
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.
Most of the more down-to-earth people I know see it exactly the other way around: The struggle is what they hate, the kill is what gives them satisfaction.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...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.
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...
> I can't spell for shit, have poor grammar...and my writing looks like a horrible mess.
:)
But you know where the shift key is, and you placed your apostrophes correctly.
--BK
In many cases children are merely vanity accessories for their parents' fashionable self-esteem. A good, smart child is better for showing off than a dented, rusty child, with bad brakes, and a...oh, sorry. Was I talking about children or cars?
Commodities. Many parents have reduced their children to off-the-shelf extensions of their own egos. And what do many do if they raise a lemon? They complain to the manufacturer! No, seriously, it's the teacher's fault, society's fault, anyone's fault but theirs.
Is overpraising a child detrimental? Only when the praise serves as a vain reminder to the parent or teacher that they should get the gold star for the child's accomplishments. The best parents/teachers are those that acknowledge that a child receives personal accolades upon merit, and are willing to accept an altruistic repose with regard to success ownership.
Can parents over/underpraise their children? Yes, but you must know the root cause of why they do it in the first place. After all, the children are merely pawns in the vainglorious pursuit of parents salving their own psychological issues when they were children.
- "Perhaps it's a psychogenic disorder."
-v.- "Of what specific nature?"
In education we call this "failure attribution" and the article misses another possibility: The Teacher Just Doesn't Like Me. My context is high school. Unfortunately I've met numerous parents who perpetuate the idea that low performance stems from personal feelings of the teacher. This is usually the result of:
The point is that it's possible to attribute your failure to others, and that this behavior is learned. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's entirely learned. Parents go so far out of their way to protect their child's self esteem that it becomes completely divorced from reality. So you get kids who do bad things and feel great about themselves. Or you get very lazy children who want (and expect) you to pick up their slack. To the point, you get children who have no interest in self-improvement because they think they couldn't possibly be improved upon. Call me old fashioned, but things can always be done better.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
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."
Funny how you put together one of the more coherent, better spelled, and most readable /. posts ever.
If you had the defeatest attitude that you could never get better, that those with good grammar just had it and others don't, I suspect that would not be the case. Your efforts may have been greater than others, and you may not be an Oscar Wilde, but at the same time you are probably well above average (for the nation, keep in mind that average is really stupid).
I left this post completly un-edited, even for spelling that auto spellcheck is flagging, I do that so you can see true bad spelling and grammar, and yet there was only a couple words wrong.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I liked the article.
I'm thinking of using it to counterbalance what I feel is an overemphasis on Myers-Briggs categorizations that are being used in some of the classes I work with. (I supply "back office" support to an adult education program that changes individuals from welfare recipients to taxpayers).
I also like most of what I see in the slashdot comments. Though it does seem to me that several have missed the point: it isn't about spending quality time with the kids; it is about setting up a situations where they might learn how to learn.
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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Accomplishing any task requires 3 things.
1. Innate ability.
2. Training / Education to develop that ability
3. Diligence to work on the task until it's done.
I will probably never run a mile in 4 minutes because I don't have the innate ability to do that, and even if I did, I haven't developed that ability through training and diligence. I can design a web site or repair a pinball game, because I have the talent, the training (some of it self-taught, but that counts), and I work at it.
no big sig
Your here on Slashdot so I'm guessing your better at Maths and Sciences.
:)
Do you see where I'm going?
Your just not a all rounder.
I'm the same.
I never picked up another language after spending years on it yet given a month I can master a programming language.
Frustrating yes but it does have advantages.
Although I do try to keep my spelling/grammar impeccable on the net just to try and hold back the wave of IM speak.
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
I eagerly await the research that identifies the genetic marker for a predisposition to seizing onto overly-simple explanations for complex traits and/or behavior.
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.
>Your here on Slashdot so I'm guessing your better at Maths and Sciences.
>Although I do try to keep my spelling/grammar impeccable on the net
I see it's not working out so well.
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,
Also he didn't write an opera at age four, he's first opera was written at about age 11.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
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
Homer was saying not to attempt anything, ever.
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?
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.
Deleted
My sister is 16 years younger than me, and when she was about 8 I started taking her whitewater kayaking (a sport that I love). She got incredibly frustrated when she couldn't get the boat to go where she wanted it to (a common problem when learning to whitewater kayak). This mirrored other experiences where she would get extremely frustrated when accomplishment didn't come easily.
Rather than refer to intelligence or smarts or ability, my tack was always to emphasize that it is difficult to learn things. I tried to manage her expectations by reminding her that the process of learning always involves failure, so if she wanted to learn anything she better get used to failing and getting frustrated as she learned. "If you could do things right away it wouldn't be called 'learning'."
She did become an ok kayaker, although she's more into karate and volleyball now. But as she's grown up we've seen less pouting and tantrums, and more and more confidence.
I guess that implicit in my message is the assumption that she could learn anything if she tried hard enough. But I didn't couch it in that language.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No.
Do a bit of reading on the Suzuki method of teaching children how to play musical instruments. I'd suggest this here for a few reasons. First, Suzuki's fundamental underpinning of his entire work is simply that TALENT IS NOT INNATE. He absolutely did not support the idea you've presented that some people simply have more music ability. Next, this may help you understand what this new research is and is not stating.
It takes motivation, persistence AND some method of proper feedback for helpful assessment and correction.
For the Suzuki method, the feedback is (at least) two-fold: lots of guided practice from teachers and parents and an enormous amount of active listening so that your mind gets attuned to how things should sound.
Let's say for example, I'd like to develop perfect pitch. If I simply start singing "do-re-mi"'s all day long, I'll very likely just make things worse. I will probably lay down deep patterns of doing it the wrong way. I'd have to spend even more time to unlearn/relearn. But if I use something like a tuner or a computer program to assist/evaluate, then I imagine after a few thousand times of doing this, I'd get much, much better.
This recent research isn't suggesting any such nonsense as motivation and desire could make someone a great guitarist in a month. Nor that the most motivated and persistent would be the best after a month.
It's simply rather clearly and poignantly demonstrating a significant and measurable difference of what happens in children's approaches to learning and challenges when you focus praise on either 1) intelligence ("you're so smart") or 2) effort ("you really worked hard"). The praise of a state ("smart") influences kids to switch to a mode of protecting that image to a degree which impedes learning whereas the praise of the "hard work" influences them to tackle challenges with relish.
If the Scientific American write-up didn't adequately describe some of these easily repeatable experiments, look here: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine
The results were so immediate and clear that it'd be like a medical study where the study was simply cut short and those given placebos were immediately switched to the real thing.
So you think a five-year-old should be "responsible for [his] own education"?
This idea that parents should take themselves out of the schooling picture is asinine. It's up to the parents to make sure the kids are doing their homework. It's up to the parents to make sure that their child has enough ability to read, write, and perform basic math functions. Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the child. Not the school. You can't blame the school for your child's stupidity if you take zero active interest in your child's academic and intellectual development. Sure, the school is there to teach the kid, but the parents are there to make sure the kid is developing properly. If you send your child to school (any school, public or private) but never make them do homework and never expect them to pass a class, they're going to go to college with the idea that they don't need to learn and that it's ok to fail and anything and everything...and they're going to end up failing and finding themselves unable to get a decent job.
Failure makes us stronger. But if you only ever fail, and you never learn how to succeed, you're going to lead one miserable life.
As far as "forcing kids to learn what they don't want to learn" - it's great practice for the real world, where you constantly have to do things you don't want to do (mow the lawn, fix the toilet, deal with a child who won't stop vomiting at two o'clock in the morning, go to work, wake up early, etc.).
I'm a geek girl. Seriously.
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.
> 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.
This article is a subtle attack on the conceit of many geeks, particularly underachieving ones, who flatter themselves on "being smarter" rather than focusing on what they are accomplishing.
Too many people see intelligence as part of their identity, rather than as being the equivalent of a muscle they should be training. That itself is both a kind of narcissism and simple laziness: if I "am" smart, I don't have to do anything to validate myself. It's why so many geeks seem to "peak" intellectually at high school just like jocks peak athletically.
I hate to just plain disagree with you but...
Take stroke victims. In severe cases they can't walk or speak properly. However they can make a full recovery, not by regenerating the damaged neurones, but by utilising neurones in the brain that are normally used in other mental tasks. Their brains have adapted.
A a boy, my father lived next to a boy who had severe problems walking (can't remember the exact name of the disease). His father forced him to walk even though it was painful for him and in my dad's house they could here him crying and protesting against his father. However, he grew up able to walk and to hold down a job and not just sit about.
Look at the late Jane Tomlinson who managed to run 3 marathons, several triathalons and the Great North run and many other physical achievments despite suffering from terminal cancer.
Or, Crawford Carrick-Anderson who is profoundly deaf but has been 5 time Scottish champion, 2nd in Britain and 9th in the world in Motorbike endurance racing, as well as being in the British Ski-ing team. This is the "proper" championships mind you, not the "special" championships.
Or, Dame Evelyn Glennie who is, arguably, one of the worlds top percussionists despite being profoundly deaf.
Sorry to go on, but these are just 5 of the instances I happen to know about who have overcome great difficulties(disabilities, although I doubt they will call them that) to become top of their field or at least live a "normal" life.
America, Home of the Brave.
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 the lesson you learn from competitive sports is that losing isn't failure if it's an honorable loss. When my kids at school tell me about games they won or lost I always ask them what they did (or the other team did) better in order to win. The answers get better and better as the year progresses, which is a good sign.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
This point is perhaps particularly relevant to the extremely gifted. Lack of challenge and lack of feedback can easily produce the 'helpless' personality type even in people with an IQ of 200. Going to a school where there is no possible way of failing prepares you for real life in no way at all. Speaking from my own experience, here in Quebec, school grades of 98% are eminently attainable without real effort, and there is no higher grade (god help those in places with letter grades!). If you are one of the students who can do this (and the exams are structured so that you can usually do well simply on the basis of internal evidence; I think it possible that a sufficiently cynical teacher could teach average students to ace them cold), no one will believe you when you say you are having trouble understanding the material, and no one will provide you with any motivation to do any better—or frankly, any guidance about anything. When you get into the real world and people start asking you to do the impossible, guaranteed failure scenarios being a genuine part of reality, it all falls apart. It's a big shock, and many of the most valuable people are lost, I think.
On the contrary, my expectations were higher than anyone else's. That was one of the things that infuriated me about her teachers was their low expectations.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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 remember this lecture in that psych class I took in college. I thought it was dumb then, and I think it's dumb now. Or maybe it's just semantics. I'm hoping someone can explain this to me (although, my hopes are low given my tardiness posting). I define intelligence as adaptability, and proficiency in learning; i.e., one's abilitiy to assimilate new information and then apply it. I'm a scientist, which is why it's biased in this direction; my idea of intelligence is lacking in that it does not take creativity into account. Ignoring that failing for now, I think that intelligence is fixed, and failure to complete a certain task (at least, at first) is little sign of intelligence. It turns out that task completion is skill based, and skill is the product of experience and intelligence (e.g., exp*int, although I'm not so naive as to think it's that simple). Smart people fail all the time (geniuses, tend not to, but that's because they require very little experience). When I fail, it isn't because I'm stupid, and it's not because practicing is going to make me less stupid, it's because I don't have enough experience. Practicing will give me more experience and make me better at completing that task. The idea that intelligence = skill is a corruption of those words, in my opinion.
Children using the Suzuki Method would be a good example not only for your point, but the topic at hand. I'm amazed at what my 5 year old daughter can play (now starting her second year) and she was actually fairly far behind the others who started at the same time. Within the last month or two, she's passed most of them, and it's largely been a matter of getting her to understand the work ethic involved. We hear the same from all of the other parents.
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear
If what you're interested in is assigning blame, then you've missed the point.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
"Working around" does not mean the same thing as "changing". For instance, upthread you mentioned having terrible handwriting. And yet, I'm not having any difficulty reading what you've written: it's all perfectly legible. You may never be a professional calligrapher, but you can work around that by typing your words when necessary.
Hypothetical example: someone who loves science and technology, grasps the big picture, and is good at making connections and explaining concepts. But say he is really, really, bad at math. He can decide that the math weakness means he's "not smart enough" for a science-related career, and take a job he finds dull and uninspiring. Or, he can stick with it long enough to discover that he has the rare talent of being able to write clearly and accurately about scientific topics for a non-technical audience-- and fulfill his desire to work in a scientific field by being a science writer instead of, say, an engineer.
I agree with you that the human mind is not a tabla rusa where we can each be equally talented at anything with the proper effort and encouragement. However, I do believe that, from your quote, "Children with mental disabilities can find ways around it if they have had the sort of upbringing/education that has told them they can." It just depends on what one means by "work around".
I'm very bad at simple, mundane, routine tasks, because my mind wanders and I have a hard time paying attention. I'm never going to be particularly good at things that require real attention without engaging me cognitively. But I can work around that by using what I'm good at (coding & scripting to automate), and/or hiring out what I'm bad at (say, routine housework). But if i had been taught growing up that being bad at these things meant I was too dumb even to do incredibly simple tasks, I probably would never have learned how much better I am at more complex tasks.
If you mean their raison d'etre is to make kids unmotivated, I think you hit the nail on the head.
The school system isolates smart kids from any meaningful feedback except test scores, and it accustoms them to the constant drumbeat of, "Wow! You're great!" Eventually, they start to panic and feel like failures whenever they don't hear it.
The not-as-smart kids who are just interested in having a decent job and a decent life are unmotivated because they feel completely cut off from the real world. They all have, or start with, a strong desire to work to improve their own lives, but they're told to do schoolwork, and there is no credible person available to explain why schoolwork is relevant to the real world. Teachers can't convince kids they know anything about "the real world." (Teaching does share substantial "real world" aspects with other professions, but those common aspects are paperwork and bureaucracy. It's best not to mention paperwork and bureaucracy when attempting to motivate teenagers.)
In all cases, kids end up feeling trapped in the system and inhibited from working to further their own interests.
The intellectually oriented kids are best off. They understand that doing coursework prepares them in some measure for their future work. Obviously it isn't ideal, but it isn't completely worthless, either. (If you thought it was completely worthless, well, you weren't smart -- at least not about that particular question.) The not-so-intellectual kids have good opportunities in school to work to their own future benefit, and are repeatedly told so, but they don't really believe it. And you can't blame them. There's no practical way for kids to verify the value of the work. They have to rely entirely on the credibility of their teachers, who have little credibility to tell any kids (except aspiring teachers) that schoolwork has any relevance to their future. Every ounce of skepticism felt by students translates into lower morale, less effort, less achievement, and more frustration.
The solution? Make education an attractive profession. Double the salaries; recognize and reward talent; make sure teachers get more payback for their hard work than an occasional picture in the local newspaper. Teachers must be successful professionals, not just idealists or old-fashioned wives or people who just wanted lots of time off and didn't care what they were paid. Education has to provide opportunities for smart, competent, materially ambitious people. Otherwise you end up with only idealists on the one hand and underachievers on the other. Students respond to idealists but fundamentally don't identify with them; they tend to regard them as out-of-touch with the real world. As for the underachievers, well, who can feel good about taking advice from them and *shudder* following in their footsteps? No, kids need to be taught by people they can optimistically identify with. For the vast majority of kids, that means bright, hardworking, materially ambitious people, people who currently regard education as a shabby backwater.
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.
"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?"
No. Mozart was long dead before Earl Grey tea was known as such (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Grey_tea and compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart)
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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.
On the other hand, in some places the primary virtue of public school is that it insulates children from their parents and community :-)
Optional schooling or privatized schooling -- either one -- would limit the vast majority of lower-class kids, and a very large number of middle-class kids, to the class they were born into. They would be limited by the attitudes and understanding of their parents and the people they look up to. Perhaps by some theory they could be said to deserve that fate, but even from selfish point of view, our economic fate is tied to their future economic productivity. I think far more is gained by rescuing talented kids from those classes than is destroyed by marginally limiting the development of kids with savvy parents.
At 11, I was just learning the finer points of nose-picking and paste-eating. I think the most advance artistic achievement I had by age 11 was a birthday card I made for my Mom from construction paper and a doily.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Last Spring there was a concert by Music of the Baroque of a piece Mozart wrote at age 6. It was quite excellent. There was subtlety, humor and great use of dynamics. It was as good as anything else that we being written at the time. I remember reading the program notes because I couldn't believe it was written by a child. He and his sister were stuck in Vienna or somewhere together, away from their parents and they made a game of composition.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well I've been lurking around here since 2000(?), and since then I've a child of my own. As much as I love the tech stuff, OS wars, etc. family topics really grasp my attention. I'm so thrill to see such an interesting and 'intellectual' discussion/tips on raising children here at /. Thanks for so many useful comments and tips.
I think most of us wish to spend as much time with our children as possible. My boy's the greatest joy and grace bestowed upon me. But with longer work hours (thanks to remote login, globalization), made longer with CPEs (thanks to continuing professional education), plus the physical limits of the human body (we just want to crash when we finally head home), plus the nagging wife (maintenance), it can be challenging to set yourself in the right frame of mind for 'undivided love, attention and patience to the child'. By the time you're done with the chores (so you can continue to bring bread to the table), it's 2am, and the child's fast asleep. Hey, we don't all work on a farm.
My 2 cents: who said raising kids was easy? Say goodbye to the PS3, your health (sorry, no more sporting weekends), your social life (no more pubs after work), that new digicam/laptop (sorry, the child's education fund comes first). With the limited time and stamina left in us, what remains has to go to the child, if he/she's ever going make it (the education system's not going raise your child).
And this is just one child we're taking about. I heard siblings also comes into play. I've love to do that (not for the smart factor, but simply because I love a larger family) - if they could keep our jobs from India, and if there were 48 hours a day.