The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids

This research is one of the most fascinating things I've come across in a while: The idea that, regardless of whether there is such a thing as an innate trait of "intelligence", your belief that you are either good at something or not will hurt your performance.

Being intelligent as a part of one's identity is not a good idea. I know this from my own experience--I skipped second grade, and was never comfortable in school.

This praise business to me is a subset of what I have come to believe is "raising the kid by remote control". For example, yelling from the other room "I can tell you aren't doing your homework". Far better to sit with the children during homework time, tv off, be available to them, answer any question they want to ask. This is all about them learning to be the pilot in their own life.

This is as important for the father to do as the mother. And yes, this takes time.

I'm not sure I see how that'd work with the really smart children. They can often get their homework done with the fraction of effort required from other kids. Praising the effort will then look ridiculous and seem like a lie. "Oh, I see that you've finished your math homework in 10 minutes. You must have worked really hard on that!"

So let them finish their homework in 10 minutes, and then find something that will take the child more than 10 minutes to do. And praise them for working on that. If praising the 10-minute homework effort is ridiculous, then don't do it. Raise the bar. There's got to be something in the whole field of mathematics that would take the kid more than 10 minutes. (General disclaimers apply, I'm sure there are limits to how high you can raise the bar before the kid goes homicidal on you.)

I love this article. Every little failure in school (failing to win first place in a competition, getting a B on a test) made me doubt my talent, and I started losing all belief in my ability when I started taking graduate-level classes in my field. I knew it was irrational and wrong, but for the previous decade of my life, working hard in school had been a reliable sign of a lack of talent. The kids who had a future in a subject breezed by and the kids at the bottom struggled. Now I was working hard, even struggling sometimes. Did I instantly abandon and unlearn a decade of programming? No. It was like the end of The Crying Game in slow motion, three years of discovering that where I thought there was some talent there was, instead, a disgusting, useless lump of flesh.

By the time I got to graduate school I was overwhelmed with a feeling of inevitable failure. I just couldn't stop thinking about failure. Every time I picked up my books I would think about how humiliating it was not to be good enough. I was actually doing acceptably well in my coursework, at one of the top PhD programs in the country, but it became impossible for me to even sit down and study for any length of time because I was so ashamed. I tried to talk myself into a more sensible attitude, but I just couldn't do it.

I have very few memories of the six months I spent living there. I didn't make any friends and can only recall the names of two people I met there: my advisor and one classmate who was friendly toward me. I remember my apartment and the office I shared. (I remember forcing myself to go to the office to study, and I remember sitting there wondering whether the other students could tell how stupid I was just by watching me.) I can remember a few of the places I went -- the zoo, a restaurant where I ate almost every day, a few movie theaters, a used bookstore -- but I don't really remember being there. I didn't use any drugs while I was there and rarely drank (since I had a policy of not drinking alone.) Yet I don't have any memories of specific times or events. I just remember being in my apartment, being at my desk at the office, feeling stupid, miserable, and worthless.

And so I dropped out and got a job in software. That was very lucky for me: I chose it because I thought it didn't require any real intelligence (which I was obviously lacking) but it turned out to be a good way to put my talent to work.

P.S. I normally post under a different name, but this is kind of a whiny sob story, and I'd rather just get it off my chest anonymously.

P.P.S. Now that I think about it, the only reason I remember my advisor's name is that I later saw him interviewed in a PBS documentary about a famous scientist he worked with.