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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.
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.
"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.
...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.
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
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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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)
Homer was saying not to attempt anything, ever.
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
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 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.