How NOT To Talk To Your Kids

I got an email the other day from a colleague participating in the program revision work I’m doing with Scouts Canada:

I know you enjoy watching TED Talks.  I saw this one recently and was interested in your thoughts on it.

I watched the TED talk and replied:

Duckworth’s point is that success isn’t determined by IQ – doesn’t matter how smart you are – what seems to matter is what she calls “grit” – a willingness to keep at a task even when not immediately successful. For me, the important element in the talk was Duckworth’s citing of Carol Dweck’s research on a “mindset for growth” – what Dweck’s research has shown is that helping kids understand mistakes are part of any learning – being wrong is how growth happens, allows many of them (bright or not) to be willing to stay with a task until they get the hang of it.

It’s an important aspect of what we’d like to convey to scouters!

Here’s an article about Dweck you’ll find interesting on “How NOT To Talk To Your Kids“:

The gist of Dweck’s argument ( I extracted a couple of quotes from the article):

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck 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.” She contends kids need to understand ” the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter.”

“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.  Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.”

“After reviewing 200 self image studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

“Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further.”

I offered back a You Tube video which shows the effects of mindset on persistence and willingness to tackle problems just outside the child’s comfort range. The point is not to offer praise affirming a child’s “intelligence” – more effective is praise that strengthens specific problem-solving strategies, stick-to-it behaviour, willingness to persist.

This is stuff Scouters need to understand to help them be more effective with youth.

Mindset Evidence

If we created learning situations so they were like the best kindergarten classroom—helping learners feel confident that nothing, or very little, is beyond their capabilities, to have a reason to shoot at being able to do anything that seems worthwhile, able to explore freely and pursue tenaciously, explore with an open mind, to feel free to take intellectual and social risks—to ask outrageous questions, to make wild and improbable connections, to take on tasks that might require a long time to complete, and even to abandon some tasks unfinished—what might learning be like for learners of any age?

Montessori had some wonderful intuitions about learning and learner – the sad thing is how ritualized Montessori classrooms have become – but we still have a lot to learn from her work.

Mindset interventions impact females and students of colour the most because society’s both overt and covert messages to these individuals are generally negative and non-supportive – receiving direct supportive feedback counteracts the continual bombardment that sets lower expectations for these students.

I have always believed people can learn anything they choose to learn because that was true for me. The key is “choose”.

I’ve seen kids take on tasks beyond anything their parents/teachers would have chosen for them and found ways to be successful because they chose to undertake the learning. They found support when and where they needed it, they stepped back from mistakes, persisted and explored other avenues of achieving what they wanted.

I can remember several kids (boys) who told me firmly they were not going to read with me (when they came for assistance) – I assured them I wouldn’t make them read – but we engaged in lots of activities that required them to read and write while doing other things – building models, cooking, doing science activities – and slowly they overcame their anxiety about literacy and we were able to actually “read” together, although I never did point out to them that we were! It wasn’t necessary – they understood they were becoming readers and writers.

I’m willing to take on new learning in lots of different domains – these days I look for support mainly online – exploring what others have accomplished and setting up tasks for myself that I problem-solve my way through – cooking, garment sewing, knitting, quilting, gardening, reading, water colour painting – whatever it is I want to try – there’s tons of help to draw on. My “mindset” is “have a go” – often making lots of “mistakes” along the way, but in the end achieving what I set out to do.