
Once again, praise kids for effort, not for 'smarts' - saturdayplace
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/
======
Macphisto
When my Daughter was born (now three) my wife insisted that I and everyone who
has regular contact with her focus on her hard work and not simply say "you're
soo smart!". It's tough to make that association but I think I've seen actual
results from it. My daughter is about three weeks into ISR swim classes and I
can see her shift into her "hard working" face even when she's a little upset
or crying. She knows that she has to work hard (show visible effort) at
staying calm or calming quickly or trying new things if she wants her reward
(her favorite thing in the world: Futurama). It's one of the few developmental
guidelines my wife has laid down and I've come around to see it as the most
important because to be frank I didn't learn that lesson until WAY too late.

~~~
westicle
The fact that your three year old daughter loves watching Futurama already
says a lot about her mental aptitude/attitude.

I'm sure she doesn't "get" a lot of it at this stage, but I bet she will learn
a surprising amount from sticking with it.

~~~
Macphisto
Actually that's the strange thing. She's learned not only the specific funny
quotes but she uses them in situationally-correct instances. When crashing two
cars together, "Buckle your sphincters!". When I pull her out of the tub and
she can't see because her massive amount if hair is in the way, "My lawyer
will hear about this!" When she wants to make us laugh she puts both her claws
up in the air and goes for a Zoidberg scuttle.

I've had to defend the fact that I let a three year old watch Futurama many a
time. Mostly to people who would rather I show things like Dora (I don't like
my kid yelling at the TV) or movies like The Little Mermaid (truly horrific
from viewpoint of relationship modeling). Admittedly sometimes my kid walks
around quoting Bender "Ass Ass Ass Ass Ass!" and it might one day get sent to
the Principle's office but she also admires female star ship captains,
recognizes hard work (fry and the holophoner), and naturally distrusts
cephalapod doctors. There are a lot more issues I hope she can start to pick
up like the value of friendship, that math is awesome and to never be without
your doomsday device "for duck huntin'!"

Sorry for the tangent.

~~~
jacques_chester
Mutant anthrax is for duck huntin'. Doomsday devices can be used for, amongst
other things, triggering chronoton implosions and powering bending units.

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_delirium
These things seem to go in waves. In the 1990s, I remember the _opposite_
worry, that a bunch of new educational theories had put too much emphasis on
praising effort rather than results, the whole A-for-effort thing.

It's interesting that the politics have shifted a bit, though. I remember the
emphasize-effort view being associated with clearly "liberal", almost hippie
approaches, that what's important is encouraging every kid to give it their
best try, so they actualize their own potential, etc. Meanwhile the more
"conservative" view was very results-oriented, sort of: I don't give a damn if
your kid is trying hard or lazy, all that should matter in math class is
whether he does the math right or wrong. The current wave of articles don't
seem to have that same political divide.

~~~
anateus
Emphasize effort doesn't mean emphasize effort that lead to bad results. That
is, it's not "as long as you put in effort" (which is the approach you're
talking about), it's that when there _is_ success the thing that should be
praised is the effort to reach that success.

~~~
angstrom
Sometimes you need to learn from your mistakes, regroup, change strategy, and
try again. It's a balance between avoiding failure and learning from it, but
not fearing failure of something that is just beyond your reach. Otherwise, we
risk making the bar so low that we're praising effortless success.

------
brg
There's an excellent quote from the Korean file "My Sassy Girl" about this. To
paraphrase, "Never tell a child he's smart, after a while he'll begin to
believe it and start to get lazy."

~~~
kmfrk
It's such a shame that people who want to be popular define "smart as"

    
    
        smart = results/effort
    

It gives them an incentive to slack, and while that may work in the lower
tiers of the school system, they're going to hit a brick wall at some point,
and for many, it will be too late for them to do anything to catch up.

I also recall someone on Quora referring as the distorted picture in places
like Stanford described as the "duck syndrome": on the surface, everyone seems
to be coasting calmly, but below, they are paddling like mad.

* * *

Praising kids and people can be so friggin' difficult. I remember playing
football (soccer) in school, and I was a bit of a geek, but when I played, I
would sometimes get all these "compliments": "Nice one, kmfrk!", "You played a
great match today" from class mates and the gym class teacher. Most meant well
by it - some didn't - but even though I wasn't very old, what was going on was
very transparent. (I was a blatantly bad player, except as a goalie, so I took
the compliments about my role as the latter more to heart.)

It downright annoyed me, because I knew that I was awful.

It has made it very hard for me to discern actual praise in my life.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Your equation is mathematically equivalent to:

    
    
        results = effort x smart
    

The problem is optimizing this equation for smart, rather than for results.

~~~
blakeweb
I like that construction. The article also emphasizes teaching kids another
contributing equation:

    
    
      smart = sum(previous efforts)
    

Giving a final equation:

    
    
      immediate results = immediate effort * sum(previous efforts)

------
Mahh
I feel like reading this article may make me react in the same way that the
sample groups of the tests did. Hopefully in the much greater long term,
that'd be nice. Good thing I read it(maybe).

I had noticed the same pattern in myself. My parents would tell me that I'm
smart, and then I'd get pissed and frustrated at my math homework if I didn't
understand the concepts within a grand total of 15 minutes. Then Discrete Math
hit me and I realized that there would be no way for me to survive on just 15
minutes of attempts of any problem/concept(but I'd still be frustrated all of
the time).

~~~
Roritharr
That is exactly what happened to me, made cs at the university unbelievably
hard...

------
espeed
Watch Malcolm Gladwell's interview with Fareed Zakaria for his book "Outliers"
(part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCt1Wc8Kx4U>, part 2:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3NalDYIT8>).

In "Outliers" Malcolm explores what makes a person successful and asks the
question, "Why do some talented people flame out early while others go on to
brilliant careers?"

Malcolm's main premise is, "Success doesn't have much to do with talent. It's
almost always a product of hard work and the culture of which we live our
lives."

But I think Malcolm is really describing the development of genius and how the
environment/culture either encourages or discourages people from focusing on a
certain areas or ideas. Go the wrong way and you miss developing into your
true potential.

From my perspective, genius is not so much measured by IQ, although a high IQ
helps, but genius can be measured by how rare and valuable your perspective is
and how effectively you see patterns in- and make associations or connections
among disparate ideas. Paul Cooijmans has a similar perspective
(<http://www.paulcooijmans.com/genius/>).

Developing these rare or unique perspectives usually takes deliberate and
devoted focus on something (like when Malcolm talks about the 10,000-hour
rule).

Einstein wasn't a genius because he was most skilled in math -- he wasn't --
Einstein became a genius because he relentlessly explored a problem, following
it our farther than anyone had taken it before. This allowed him to see
connections that no one had seen before, and these connections/discoveries
were valuable to humanity.

So yes, praise kids for their effort -- it's one of the requisite components
of genius.

------
ojbyrne
Using "Once again" in the title seems misplaced, since the article is from
2007.

When I was growing up, it seemed ok to be praised for being smart, because
life outside of being smart was terrifically difficult. Taking the school bus
to school, being bullied, having a weird foreign name, the Canadian winter,
those all seemed to promote some resilience, and being smarter than your
average bear just seemed to be a light of hope.

------
mkross
<http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/> is the non-print version for anyone
that ran into problems with the javascript on the print page.

------
michaelty
This advice applies not only to kids, but to everyone around us.

------
6ren
> These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new
> neurons when challenged.

> To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific.

> Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies
> he could apply the next day.

This strongly reminds me of how successful companies experiment to improve
their products' performance. These experiments, by definition are trial-and-
error, and involve mistakes and backtracking, because they don't yet have
enough data to develop a theory that predicts exactly what will work. Over
time, as it does become formalized, that aspect is no longer profitable
because then anyone can do it.

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robryan
Calling someone smart has little meaning, because it means different things in
different contexts and one persons smart may not even be considered smart at
all to others. A lot of it is age related to, being good at multiplication in
the first grade is going to get you called smart, later in life it's just
assumed.

Also as a related example people confuse memorization with smarts, here in
Australia times tables are generally taught up to 12*12, if a kid if very fast
at these but falls over once the number goes over 12 they have just put a lot
of time into memorization without picking up the principles properly.

------
PaulBland
When praise becomes the reward, the strategy is to do whatever it takes to get
praise. When success is the reward, the strategy becomes learning how to
succeed, which often means passing through failure. We all have an innate
ability to find the success strategy. For example, video games have no mercy--
the only way to succeed is to keep trying until you get better. And yet most
kids will continue to play a new game until they improve because, in this
case, learning is an adventure, its own reward. The best teachers seem to
apply this to the classroom.

------
tsotha
Praising kids for effort is a mistake. That leads to adults who excel in
giving the impression of expending great effort without properly planning for
success. Praise kids for what you want - achievement.

~~~
bonch
Like most things in life, there's a middle-ground and a balance between the
extremes that isn't easy to figure out. There's no easy answer for such
things.

~~~
barista
There's a good bookm that reiterates the point in the article. Brain Rules.
Worth a read.

It also depends on how strong your kids are. There is no silver bullet

------
dmoo
To be honest your kids can usually figure out if they are smart or not pretty
quickly once they enter the school system. The thing is there are lots of
smart people out there. As you progress through the education system you
usually meet people smarter than you and hopefully realise that you need to
work to keep with them. It's like thinking you are the king of code in your
job and then discovering HN - you quickly realise there is always someone
smarter so you need to work to get their level.

------
ericd
The real world doesn't care nearly as much about effort as it does about the
end result, except as a mitigation for failure. Why effort and not .2 x effort
+ .8 x accomplishment?

~~~
nostrademons
You can control your effort directly. You can only control your accomplishment
indirectly, through the effort you put in.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, but the accomplishment is by far the most important part. It's very easy
to expend a lot of effort doing things that don't actually increase one's
chance of success on something, and I don't think that should be praised.

~~~
nostrademons
The reason to expend lots of effort on useless things is so that you're
mentally conditioned to succeed when the important things come along.

Truly life-changing opportunities are fairly rare, and they usually pop up
when you don't expect them. To capitalize on them, you have to be prepared. If
you've been sitting around slacking off for the previous several years, you're
probably not going to be in a position to pounce when the opportunity arises.

------
Swannie
Anyone have some good advice on getting out of this sort of pattern, if it was
established in your youth?

The only teacher that broke that habit at my school was my Chemistry teacher.
He knew I was very smart, and I started handed in the bare minimum of lab
reports. For example when he was expecting 6 steps of working and 10 lines of
analysis, he got 1 line of working/answer, and two lines of "bloody obvious, X
= Y" style analysis :P. He fixed that by shouting "What is this? Hmm? You're a
lazy toad!!!" at me in front of the whole class... not very professional, but
it worked. He always got the best of my effort. And I think he always marked
me down compared to the rest of the class: whilst my work may have been to the
same standard as them, it wasn't close to my best work.

In the world of work, the best antidote has been working with other very smart
people. To stand out or earn their praise, being smart isn't enough, you have
to get things done too. When I was slacking off for 20mins here to check
Facebook, and 10mins there to read some news... they knocked out 30mins of
code and moved on. Crap!

So I now look for smart people to work for/with, ones who work harder than me,
because they inspire me to actually work, not just coast-work-coast through my
day.

------
stretchwithme
Its not that we think too much of ourselves or too little, but that we think
about ourselves too much.

Here the praise is feedback about actual effort made, not about some abstract
concept of how great or smart we are. The abstract raise focuses the mind away
from the real world towards an abstraction.

------
jcnnghm
Why not praise them for both. Joel Spolsky wrote a whole book on the
importance of hiring smart people, but also people that get stuff done. I tend
to think that having a strong work ethic is more important than being smart,
as longs as you are smart enough to complete the task at hand, but if you
spend all your time grinding on the wrong thing, you aren't going to get
anywhere.

Praise kids for effort put into intellectually challenging work that they
complete with good results. We should praise intelligence, it's what our
society runs on. Intelligence certainly doesn't need to be devalued any more
than it already is.

~~~
jodrellblank
_Praise kids for effort put into intellectually challenging work that they
complete with good results._

Because you don't want to tie praise to good results, because that stops
people from trying things when they aren't sure if they are going to succeed.

It's an issue of practical psychology and incentives, not a politically
correct devaluing of successful people.

------
fourspace
The author of this article has an excellent book titled "NurtureShock" (co-
authored with Ashley Merryman), covering this and other relevant subjects. I
highly recommend it, even if you don't have kids but especially if you do.

------
iuguy
I'm reminded of Philip Larkin's "This be the verse", sometimes referred to as
"They fuck you up, your parents do" -
<http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm>

I was one of those kids praised for smarts and I attribute that to my innate
laziness. I somehow believe that we're missing something when we tell people
not to praise being smart. Surely a better way would be to adopt a more
rounded approach? But then again, I'm neither a child psychologist nor a
parent so what would I know?

------
sliverstorm
The article actually gets it wrong.

 _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._

No, I don't think that's it. At least for me, I have caught myself thinking
many times "I'm not good at X, so odds are I won't be able to be one of the
best at X, so it's not worth trying"

(My parents never praised smarts and neither did my teachers, but I
unfortunately discovered far too early I could skate by in even the hardest
classes with very little effort.)

~~~
sgibat
I was praised for being smart, and my experience, at least, is more similar to
the article's.

------
gChinkin
I wish my parents had doen this. I definitely fell into the mindset where "oh,
I'm smart, so I don't need to try". Needless to say, I'm now playing catch up.

Another consequence of this upbringing is that learning became a grind for me
- pursuing intelligence rather than interest.

I burnt out at the age of 12, and the past 8 years have been trying to find
direction and motivation for my academic life.

------
dwc
1) Praise kids for results.

2) When there's no success yet, recognize effort and praise progress toward
the result.

3) Recognize smarts and talent in general for how they help get results.

We should be encouraging, about intelligence, effort and results. But it's
important to remember the goal (result), otherwise there's no clear focus.

------
vacri
They may have gone to a lot of effort, but I have to say it's not smart to put
content on a page that doesn't work when javascript is off.

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huge_dong_420
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc>

insert upvotes and a repost to the front page

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infocaptor
This article is right on the spot. When I grew up, I never remembered myself
being told as smart. I never was. But I always worked hard and probably took
longer to finish home work and stuff like that.

I think persistence and hard work are very closely related. Will Smith during
his interview on PBS once said something like "If you put me in any challenge,
no matter how smart you are and I may not have the natural talent but I will
practice and work hard till I die or win"

When I got good scores, my dad never told me I was smart but always said "Your
hard work is paying off". I guess he did this naturally and did not put any
logic or theory behind it but now it all makes sense.

With my kid, I am going to be more aware of what I am going to praise him for
and track the changes. Amazing article.

~~~
jarin
Conversely, I was always told I was smart. I always aced tests but I struggled
constantly with doing my homework (not because it was difficult but because I
avoided starting it until the last minute).

------
alphadog
That's not what my Chinese mother told me.

~~~
zackattack
yah your chinese mother told me she only cares about results ;)

