In praise of less praise

Laid-Off Dad refers to this interesting New York Magazine article on How Not to Talk to Your Kids, and sums it up nicely:

If you praise a kid’s intelligence, the article says, he’s likely to think you’re condescending to someone who you think has reached his peak. Whereas if you hold off on the flattery and instead urge him to keep trying, he’ll assume you respect his abilities and will stay motivated.

The article itself goes into more depth (five pages!), and sums it up in the middle:

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

I was talking with my wife about this subject last night about our son — sometimes it seems that he just throws in the towel on things or has trouble going to the next activity. We usually just tell him “you’re smart, you can handle this” — and I’m going to try to break the old habit of just going for the “easy praise” and moving to encouraging the effort vs. the talent in his successes.

I mainly want my son to know that it’s okay — or even expected — that he work hard, and as the article’s author says, “the brain is a muscle that gets bigger when it has to think about something hard.” Work can be its own reward — I’d like to make sure he has fun trying instead of thinking he’s too smart to try (or worse, afraid to try lest he actually fail at something he’s not good at right away.