So you think your kid is smart

If you think telling your kids they did well in some challenge simply because they were smart would help them succeed in school and in life, think again. The article entitled The Secret to Raising Smart Kids in the A Scientific American Mind article on Nov. 28, 2007 by Carol S. Dweck offered 30 years worth of research saying that you may just be doing the opposite. 

Dweck herself was involved in conducting those studies and came up with a theory that classified kids who are “fixed-minded” and “growth-oriented.” She does not discount the reality that people have different qualities of mind but she is convinced that those who became transfixed in their own talents or abilities get discouraged easily to take on bigger challenges. By contrast, those kids who have the attitude (could be taught by parents) that they will be able to improve if they do not stop learning, go on to be the more successful individuals, in school and even in later life.

I read this article with keen interest. Being child-free and being given the privilege of first filtering all my idiocies before it becomes an acceptable column, people think I would be the most receptive audience to their speeches of how smart their kids are. While their kids may start out smart, it may be another story of how he or she will turn out in a life of learning. In one experiment, researchers had kids praised as “wow, you must be really smart at this” or “wow, you must have worked really hard.” The experiment found that those who were praised for their intelligence made for a “fixed mindset” — they became discouraged by increasing difficulty of problems given to them, doubting their abilities. Their scores even went down even on relatively easier problems. However, those who were praised for their hard work did not lose heart and their scores even improved. This holds promising advice on how to encourage your kids to learn, instead of being possessed by their talents so much that they forget that they have to move their talents along to actually become accomplishments.

The next experiment in the 70s had 5th graders being asked to think out loud as they solve pattern-recognition problems. Those who would verbally express their frustration at mistakes they made with remarks like “I never did have a good memory” were overtaken by the kids who confronted the challenge with expressions like “I will slow down and figure this out” or “I love a challenge.”

And remember your grade-crazy peers in school? One study suggested that if you care ONLY about grades, then that’s it — you just get grades but not “understanding” or “lessons.” The latest study in Dweck’s article was published in 2007 and it dealt with this difference between the math scores of junior high school kids who had a “fixed mindset” and the ones with a “growth mindset.” The researchers had 7th graders indicate whether they agreed with statements like “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t really change.” Again, those who agreed with the statement considered appearing smart and getting good grades as far more important than learning. Those who disagreed loved the challenges of taking on more difficult things even if they make mistakes. They even tried different ways of learning to understand better. As a result, the math grades of those with the growth mindset overtook the ones with the fixed mindset.

The good thing is this “growth mindset” could be imbibed. In classes where kids read and discussed an article entitled “Your Brain Can Grow” making them realize that as they keep learning, they make new connections that make their mind richer, the kids seemed to have acquired the attitude to work hard in learning things and not get easily discouraged. I loved the remark of one kid when after he learned that the brain can learn and grow, he said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”

I read this article aware of kids who are so self-conscious of their recorded high IQs that they wear them like IDs. Some of them skip classes, semesters and degrees only because they are so sure that that they already know what would be taught and that it won’t help to go through it again. I wonder if it would help if they knew that even Hans Bethe, Nobel Prize winning physicist who figured out how stars shine, attended classes until he died at 96 years old, curious to know what current physics had to offer.

Funny that we prefer to be called “smart” rather than a “hard worker” as if there was some cosmically assigned entitlement if you were “smart” and shame in hard work. There is a world of difference between being gifted and being accomplished. This is because the road to accomplishment is still a road, even for geniuses. And I think if you were really smart, you’d start walking it.

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