31–40 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition, the work being praised needs to be effective.
I disagree. If your child does something to the absolute best of his/her abilities, but is not very effective, isn't that still praiseworthy? I have a two year old who exhibits no mastery of the English language, but I praise her when she tries out a new word on for size and keeps attempting to perfect it.
He is also fucking lucky... Which helps ! Winning the startup lottery does not equal being a life role model. I would not generalize on such people.
-- Thomas Jefferson
(likely fake, but still good)
Stop trying to game your kids. Praise them whatever. Love, security, praise, attention, just go for it. I doubt very much that all the noise around raising children can be filtered out to be able to differentiate between sentences. Just raise kids with love and fun.
May be that love and fun is all the kids need to be both happy and successful, but maybe not: I had very hippyish parents who didn't go much beyond love and fun and blind support. Myself and my two siblings all had very happy childhoods, but only my very self-motivated sister wound up finding success and happiness as an adult right off the bat, took me a decade to get my footing, and my brother - who was unquestionably the happiest and most loved kid in the family - is a broken and miserable adult.
Ultimately it comes down to regarding your kids as individuals and tailoring your parenting to each kid, which is what this study is trying to help parents do w.r.t. smart kids.
TL;DR: If you're interacting with a kid, try to avoid saying, "you're so smart!" and instead say, "You've picked this up really quickly" or "you're such a hard worker". If you tell a child they are smart then they will stop trying either because they assume they can get by on their intelligence or because they are afraid of failing and loosing your praise about how smart they are.
"You worked really hard on it that!" seems a bad thing to say without having observed the kid working hard. I know if I'd been told I worked hard on something that came easily, it would have cost the speaker credibility. My tentative plan, for my son, is to phrase it as a question. "Did you work hard on this?". If so, praise the hard work. If not, "let's find you something more challenging".
I'm not saying this is a bad idea for sure but I've run in so many cases with my kids where my "clever" way of communicating with them came back and bit me in ways I never would have considered. And since they can't necessarily communicate things well it could fester or direct his thinking in directions you won't know about for a long time.
Parenting is hard. :)
Stop trying to game your kids. Praise them whatever. Love, security, praise, attention, just go for it. I doubt very much that all the noise around raising children can be filtered out to be able to differentiate between sentences. Just raise kids with love and fun.
Could it not be equally harmful to a smart kid to give them the impression that their intelligence is worthless? It seems there should be a balance where kids retain their motivation while also learning how to make the most of their personal advantages and disadvantages. If a smart kid is always taught the convenient fiction that everyone is exactly the same, then when they interact with an athletic kid who dominates…
Your implicit assumption is that your kid will not succeed at something athletically no matter how hard they try. If a kid dreams of going for the NBA or the NFL, why not let them try?
What's the benefit of praising a child for their intelligence if intelligence is immutable? Is it a self esteem play or what?
So what? If they're smart they dont need to work anyway...
But my adult life (I am 28 now) went nowhere precisely for this reason.
As a kid, I could literally skip all classes and homework, then figure the subject "on the spot" during tests, and score high enough to still pass.
This doesn't work as adult, but I don't know how to do it right now...