
Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart - eroo
https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/95208400815/the-learning-myth-why-ill-never-tell-my-son-hes
======
ChuckMcM
I've had mixed thoughts about this over the years. Sadly you only get to raise
your kids once, you can't try other scenarios and see of there is a better
path.

Highly verbal kids, and that is generally kids who read a lot, will be told
they are smart whether you do it or not. And if you're child's teachers are
telling you how smart they are, and they ask you "Dad, my teacher said I'm
really smart, do you think I'm really smart?" You'll have to decide what the
narrative is.

That said, it's great to reward struggle rather than success and to emphasize
that it is through failure that we value succeeding. Everyone I know who
shielded their children from failure has struggled later with teaching them
how to cope with failure. That isn't scientific of course, just parents
swapping horror stories, but it has been highly correlated in my experience.
Putting those struggles into the proper light is very important.

A less obvious but also challenging aspect of this though is that you must
teach your children that natural skillsets don't determine their worth. You
are good at maths but lousy at sports? Makes you no better or worse than
someone with the opposite levels of skill. That is much harder as kids are
always looking for ways to evaluate themselves relative to their peers. If you
endorse that you can find yourself inculcating in them an unhealthy externally
generated view of self worth.

~~~
dfabulich
> "do you think I'm really smart?"

Before the age of understanding: "In our house, instead of saying, 'you're
really smart,' we say, 'you practiced a lot.'"

After the age of understanding: "We try not to say 'you're smart.' Let me show
you why." Then you do a web search for [praise hard work not intelligence];
the first link is Mueller and Dweck's meta study, which has a very accessible
abstract.

BTW, the rule is reversed when it comes to moral traits. "You're so honest"
works better than "you behaved honestly," and specifically "don't be a
cheater" works better than "don't cheat."
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-
a-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-a-moral-
child.html?_r=0)

~~~
CMCDragonkai
We are what we do right?

~~~
ivanca
No, it just works better as a reinforcement saying it that way. You want them
to _keep_ an attitude by making it a part of who they are (e.g. _you are_
honest), but with intelligence is different, you always want them to become
smarter than they already are.

~~~
CMCDragonkai
I'm sure there are degrees of honesty as there are degrees in intelligence.

------
jwmerrill
> Dr. Carol Dweck... has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets:
> fixed or growth.

I'm sympathetic to Khan's overall POV here, but "research says there are
basically two kinds of people..." always tickles my skepticism antennae.

Claims like this are so often overstated by researchers to punch up an
abstract, and then so often simplified further in uncritical 3rd party reports
that I wouldn't bet a sandwich on the truth of any such claim without seeing
the data for myself. C.f. the widely believed and largely unsupported claims
about learning styles.

Would be nice of Khan to link to the publications so we could decide for
ourselves.

~~~
zgotsch
Mueller, C., & Dweck, C. (1998). Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine
Children's Motivation and Performance. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 75(1), 33-52, is a big one
([http://web.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-
bin/drupalm/syst...](http://web.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-
bin/drupalm/system/files/Intelligence%20Praise%20Can%20Undermine%20Motivation%20and%20Performance.pdf)).

------
toehead2000
I think there's a flip side to this, too, though. Being told you're smart, or
good at math, or whatever, can be a motivator. It can encourage you to seek
out and develop that talent, and also to persevere when things are difficult.
At least for me, personally, when faced with a tough math concept I would
think "well Ive been told all my life I'm good at math and I've been pretty
good up until now so I'm sure I will be able to figure this out."

Giving negative motivation to a kid, saying "you're stupid," is recognized to
sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's no reason that "you're smart"
can't work in the same way. I would not be surprised if a lot of this
phenomenon of children being negatively motivated from positive feedback ends
up having a different explanation than the one posited here.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Kids are exactly what you expect them to be. Never mind what you say; its how
you treat them. As a youth leader for 20 years, we've had tremendous
performance out of our youth group. Why? Because that's the expectation of the
leaders and the older kids in the group. The young ones desperately want to
live up to that.

So as long as its age appropriate and reachable, give your kids goals to live
up to. If that means telling them they're smart, then tell them that.

------
jkimmel
I found this to be very insightful, as I am not familiar with the cited
research. It brings to mind my own memories of growing up, and how being told
how "smart," I was could actually act as a hindrance.

As the article notes, I was only praised when I got a correct answer, or used
a big word without stumbling. In one particular memory, I am afraid of taking
a new mathematics placement test in school -- not because of the difficulty,
but precisely because I had gotten a perfect score on the last one. There was
no room to grow, if I didn't get them all right again, would that make me not
"smart?"

Very simple changes in the language we use with young children could possibly
avoid that kind of anxiety in bright youth.

------
AnimalMuppet
Here's the other side: Kids are often cruel. Kids say demeaning things to
other kids. One of the frequent ones is "You're stupid". And some kids are
more emotionally fragile than others. I don't want my fragile kid to hear
"You're stupid", perhaps frequently, without it being countered by affirmation
that she is not in fact stupid.

But I also don't want that to be the equivalent of "participation awards" in
Little League. For it to be of any real value, it has to go with teaching her
how to actually think.

------
kiyoto
I find this campaign/propaganda dangerous.

I only know of Japan and the US, but as someone who went to one of the most
prestigious secondary schools in Japan and universities in the US, I have seen
well-educated, smart people with "growth mindsets" struggle later in their
lives.

1\. Regardless of what we say, in many corners of adult life, results are
valued over processes. While a superior process has a higher likelihood of
yielding a superior result, this is often not the case, and in a perversely
Murphy's law-esque manner, it turns out to be false at critical junctures of
one's life. And the deeper the growth mindset is ingrained into you, the more
disappointed/despaired you find the situation and feel incapacitated and
betrayed. Of course, a singular emphasis on results with no consideration for
process is equally bad. Most people find their own local optimum between the
two extrema, and I don't see how a campaign towards one end of the spectrum is
all that meaningful or worthy.

2\. This probably sounds terrible, but not everyone is "smart" as measured by
academic performance. Certainly effort is a huge part of the equation, but
some minds are better wired for academics than others. And the longer you work
at it and hence surround yourself with qualified peers, the more apparent it
becomes that not everyone is working equally hard. This realization usually
does't mesh well with the emphasis on process from one's formative education,
and many people become jaded/hopeless. (And of course, even within academic
subjects, there are individual variances). While it is important to try, it is
also the responsibility of educators (and adults) to see if the child's
potential lies somewhere else, or to borrow Mr. Khan's words, to see if the
child can be tenacious and gritty about something other than academics.

~~~
wnissen
Dangerous? Everyone, even people who aren't smart, can try hard and get
better. The point of the article is not that struggle, per se, is to be valued
above the result, but rather that when people are trying at their limits, they
are learning.

School is so artificial; everyone is solving the same problems to which the
teacher already knows the answers. It's better to be "smart" than to work
hard, in that situation. When you leave school, if you're doing it right,
you'll be thrust into a situation where no one knows the answer and you're
responsible for finding it. Doesn't matter how smart you are, everyone from
the greatest minds on down finds themselves in a situation where they have a
challenging task at hand.

~~~
kiyoto
>Everyone, even people who aren't smart, can try hard and get better.

Yes, I agree. What I tried to convey is the importance of balance between hard
work and a degree of fatalism.

You can't solve a lot of things with hard work, but many American elites I
know are wired to think otherwise - until they start to fail classes in
college or can't advance anywhere near as fast at their jobs. When life hits
you hard, accepting things as-is and not trying to work even harder might
prove to bring a happier outcome.

>School is so artificial; everyone is solving the same problems to which the
teacher already knows the answers.

That actually wasn't my experience. I had a lot of fun in junior high, high
school and college, and while there was an element of sycophancy, my education
was largely intellectually honest, challenging and rewarding. I would say it
was at the first job out of school where I learned the important skill of
"just doing it because your superior told you to" to earn credibility and
trust.

~~~
cpprototypes
I think I partially agree, but would rephrase it as this: It's important to
pick your battles. Promoting only innate talent can lead to lazy adults with
unfulfilled potential. However, promoting only hard work can lead to depressed
adults who keep wondering why more hard work isn't working.

The key is balance and part of growing up is recognizing where hard work
should be focused on. Parents can help their kids with this by observing what
they're good at. And it can also help teach an important life lesson which is
knowing when to cut your losses and move on.

But this discussion ignores the third component of success which is
opportunity (luck). Hard work and talent are useless without the chance to do
something with it. It's important to teach this as well since without knowing
this, you could have adults who are hard working and know what to focus on,
but just wait for opportunity to come to them. Opportunity is a dice roll and
you have to keep going out there and rolling that dice until you get a good
one. And I think knowing this teaches humility as well which is important for
social cohesion. Some people just get a lot of bad rolls and society should
help in such circumstances.

~~~
kiyoto
Thanks for the great summary. I totally agree with the whole opportunity
thing.

------
davidgerard
My 7yo is really obviously smart and she knows it - top of class in
everything. But so are her parents. So we're hammering home that smart is _not
good enough_ and you have to learn to _do_ things, acquire skills.

(Her mum is an excellent role model in this, 'cos she's basically competent in
a dizzying array of small skills. "If you want to be good at everything like
Mummy is, this is how you learn it!")

Basically the hard part is capturing her interest. Anything she's interested
in, she will absolutely kill. Anything she's not interested in, she won't
bother with. That bit she gets from me ...

It also reminds us to set a good example: learn things and do them. Because it
doesn't matter what you say, it's the example you present.

That said, I was most calmed by the many, many studies that show that, as long
as you don't actually neglect the kid, they'll probably turn out how they were
going to anyway. So helicopter parenting really is completely futile.

We've caught her at midnight reading books more than once, so I'll call that
"huge success" ;-)

------
edpichler
"The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset."

Exactly what I feel. Days are becoming too short for such amount of
interesting things to do and to learn (Hacker News, Quora, Designer News,
Coursera, Khan Academy, TED, Project Guttenberg... the list is long, and it's
growing...)

------
brudgers
The article makes me sad.

What makes me sad is the idea that not telling a child she smart is justified
so that the child will meet _the parent 's expectations_. Telling a smart
child they are smart is honest and kind and humane. I believe that in the long
run the attitudes toward honesty and humility and empathy are the most
important things I instill as a parent.

Some things are easy for smart people and not acknowledging that as a factor
in my child's successes would be dishonest when discussing those successes. It
is akin to not acknowledging that a pitcher of cold Kool-Aid is not the
product of economic circumstance.

Some success is comes from pure good fortune, some comes from just showing up,
and some comes from hard work. Talking honestly about when and how each plays
a role is my job as a parent. I hope my child develops the ability to
distinguish challenge from a checklist of busy work.

It's not either or. A child can understand that some successes come because
the task is easy for them. Others will come from hard work. The can tell the
difference between watching an addition video and earning an orange belt.

That said, my standard for good parenting is forgiving. Just trying to do a
better job than one's own parents is hard enough. My parenting advice, for
what it's worth, is to treat children as antonymous moral agents, fully
capable of making intelligent decisions and able to learn from mistakes. Talk
with them honestly as such and avoid deceit even when they are small.

Because that is when the foundation for their life as a teenager and adult is
laid.

------
yodsanklai
I don't have kids, but I think I would tell them the truth. First, it's
difficult to define "smart" as it's a conjunction of many skills. But even for
one given skill, you may be the best in your class or your school, but there
are likely millions that are much better than you. No need to worry too much
where you lie and try to do the best with what you have.

> "Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that
> the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural
> connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks
> rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is
> that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our
> intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail."

I wonder to which extent this is correct. Sure, it would be nice if it was the
case. It's a nice myth that anybody can achieve anything with the proper
amount of work. I see it all the time in fields such as maths or music. Some
people are naturally so much better than others than even a lifetime wouldn't
be enough to catch up.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I'm 33, started learning to play piano about two years ago. I don't always
practice consistently, but I'm still improving over time. I can play a few
short piece well enough to put a smile on my face. Importantly, I've noticed
how learning to play piano has improved my understanding of music, improved my
pattern recognition, and hand-eye coordination. While I might not have
aspirations to ever become a _really_ good piano player, taking on something
I'm not naturally good at has been a boon for me.

So, yes - I agree it's a myth that anyone can achieve anything with enough
work, but that shouldn't necessarily stop you from trying. Taking on a task
you aren't naturally good at can be extremely satisfying and enable mind-brain
expansion in ways I didn't realise possible.

My four year old daughter has had both a violin and a harp in her hands since
she was three. My plan is to be able to hack at the keyboard well enough to
play the occasional tune with her. That would be beautiful. It's been really
interesting to observe how my motivations have changed since having a child.

------
Aerospark
This is why Salman Khan is one of (if not) the greatest teachers of our
generation. When I read this article, I remembered when Khan Academy first
started... it was the first attempt to make good education free and easily
accessible, exactly the way it should be. Hats off to you sir, thanks for
another great lesson I will teach my kids some day :).

------
QuantumChaos
While I wish the best for all children, I feel like this kind of discourse has
a negative effect on the very intelligent. By downplaying the significance of
intelligence, it trivializes the gifts of the truly intelligent, and places an
excessive emphasis in the virtue of hard work. I see on HN all the time the
claim that hard work beats intelligence. But I have never really worked that
hard, I just have an extraordinary ability in mathematics.

When I was a child, I was told that I was very smart (which I was) and
pressured to fulfill my potential. Other children may be pressured to be hard
working and studious. I would rather celebrate people who are naturally
gifted, and also people who choose to work hard. What is important is that
people's actions arise naturally from their own desires, not from external
pressure or manipulation.

------
dalek2point3
Aaron Schwartz introduced me to Dweck. It has been an integral part of my life
ever since:
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck)

------
gaelow
Regardless of any received training, smart people don't usually struggle as
much as normal people when they are presented with a new, different kind of
problem. That's something you cannot learn.

Even a kid's brain will not "grow" more or less depending on what kind of
stimulus he is exposed to. But it doesn't mean it's bad to reward and
compliment your kid for struggling and working hard instead of just being
naturally good at something. It helps the child to build a character and face
problems instead of giving up. The article is right about that.

There are also many ways to get a better access to the full capacity of your
brain. It's not like the movie "Lucy", but many conditions may prevent you for
using it to its full potential: Age, injury or illness, sleep deprivation,
stress and exhaustion, lack of nutrients, drug abuse and chemical unbalances,
etc. Some of those factors present problems that can be treated or even
prevented, and you will (most of the time) function at the same cognitive
level as a careless smarter person.

Also, the fact that there is no way you can alter your intelligence without
altering your DNA doesn't mean you can't use it to discover and apply better
problem-solving patterns for a particular discipline, making yourself
effectively smarter.

------
eroo
I wasn't aware of this research. Reflecting on my own schooling experience,
however, there is something pleasantly intuitive about it.

I'm always impressed with Salman Khan's work.

------
tokenadult
A readable popular article about this research, "The Effort Effect," was
published right after Professor Carol Dweck moved her research base from
Columbia University to Stanford University.[1] And Dweck has written a full-
length popular book, quite readable and helpful for parents, called _Mindset:
The New Psychology of Success_ [2] that I recommend to parents all the time.

[1]
[http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...](http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124)

[2] [http://mindsetonline.com/](http://mindsetonline.com/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-
Success/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-
Success/dp/0345472322)

------
BrandonMarc
One of the first Aaron Swartz essays I read (first of many) was on this very
topic. He gives great details about how she experimented with children and
games, and how their mindsets manifested themselves, and how she came to her
conclusions about fixed vs growth.

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck)

To me, the possibility that anyone can move _from_ fixed _to_ growth is
astounding [1] ... that fact itself positively brims with the possibilities it
opens up, if only a person can realize they're not stuck and they can expand
their horizons.

Khan's description of "interventions" is interesting.

[1] I also suspect the converse is equally possible, given the right
circumstances ... which is worth keeping in mind, I 'spose.

------
blazespin
Great article, lousy title. The point he was making is that smart people are
those that appreciate learning more than knowing. The reality is life is very
much that - successful people everywhere are those who are always willing to
push themselves beyond their comfort zone.

------
phaet0n
There is a sort of analogue to this: parents praising their children as
beautiful/pretty or brave/strong. Both vacuously reduce the childs ability to
reflect genuinely on their strengths and their source of self-worth. Beauty
(or the appreciation of) becomes solely reduced to the physical (and
external), and courage reduced to dare-devilism/ego-centrism instead of the
appreciation of fear and acting to overcome it.

~~~
mkempe
In a related fashion, it's irritating to observe random strangers who exclaim
"you are so cute!" to our daughter, e.g. in stores or coffee shops, but then
don't have anything to say when she starts talking about her latest interest
in biology or astronomy. They think they're giving a compliment, and they
ignore the actual substance of the person in front of them.

I wish they would hear the child, engage in conversation that builds on what
they say, not what they look like or how they're dressed. And stop that
"you're so cute" thing, as it undermines the development of a healthy sense of
self-esteem.

------
Swizec
> Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not; that
> intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly
> believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort,
> struggle and failure.

 _Can_ intelligence be gained though? I agree that skill can only be gained
through effort/practice/etc. But intelligence ... isn't intelligence more like
a natural talent than something you can gain?

Much like you can't just train yourself to have a beautiful singing voice or
big boobs or absolute pitch hearing, I don't think you can train yourself to
be more intelligent. Smarter, yes, intelligenter, not really. It's a talent,
not a skill.

~~~
pdonis
Saying that your _potential_ intelligence is fixed by genes (which is all the
data on a genetic component to intelligence shows) is not at all the same as
saying that you are at your potential and will never change. Whatever your
potential is, you're only going to reach it by effort, struggle, and failure.

~~~
Swizec
Interesting, I always thought that's what intelligence _was_ \- the raw
processing power achievable by your brain. And smartness was correlated with
that, bit mostly dependent on socioeconomic factors.

Everything else you say is just the difference between talent and skill, which
is why I used different terms for those in my post. Intelligence is the
talent, smartness is the skill. But judging by the downvotes that might just
be my idiolect.

~~~
pdonis
_> the raw processing power achievable by your brain_

But "achievable" is not the same as "achieved". To actually achieve the full
raw processing power that your brain is _capable_ of achieving, you have to
work at it--not just in terms of developing skills, but in terms of realizing
the processing power. Your brain is not like a computer with a fixed amount of
CPU and memory that you just have to load with software. If you don't exercise
it, it doesn't develop; exercising it doesn't just make you more skilful at
using the processing power you have, it actually increases the processing
power. Yes, there's a limit imposed by your genetic makeup as to how much
exercise can increase the processing power; but no child is going to be
anywhere near that limit, simply because the child is still growing and
developing. (I would argue that most adults aren't really at the limit either,
any more than most adults are at the limit for any capability. Few people have
the genetic makeup to run a 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds; but how many
people can run a 100-meter dash in the shortest possible time for their
genetic makeup, whatever that time is?)

In other words, while there is a concept of "raw processing power achievable",
I don't think it's a very useful concept by itself, because people can't help
jumping from "the maximum raw processing power you can ever achieve is
genetically fixed" to "the actual processing power you have right now is
genetically fixed", and the latter is not only false, it's pernicious, because
it creates the worst possible mindset.

------
spiritplumber
I kept being told "You're smart/gifted" when I did something clever, and "You
need to try harder" when I didn't. Left me with some self esteem issues.

------
known
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866)

------
riffraff
so pardon my natural question: was Dweck's work replicated?

We have believed for decades in the stanford prison experiment, and it was
faulty.

------
ngokevin
This is common knowledge by now. I didn't even have to read the article, just
skimmed it. These types of articles really cater to people who were often told
they were smart when they were little, or found school to not be difficult.

I have even seen non-educated mothers state this fact even while playing
poker, "yeah I never tell my son he's smart, I congratulate his hard work
instead because it changes his mindset".

~~~
hkmurakami
I've seen it a few times in pop-science books (like Gladwell), so that's
probably where we're getting it from (and seeing Gladwell passages be cited
elsewhere online)

------
kolev
So, I should rather lie?

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
No, you'd rather focus on what he _does_ that what he _is_.

~~~
kolev
Yes, he _does_ think intelligently and he _is_ a smart boy. If he was dumb,
whatever I do, he'll stay that regardless. If he's smart, he'll find the way
whatever I do anyway. I hope you get my point. I think way too many parents
waste their time going in circles and overthinking _what they should do_ \-
follow my simple logic and life will be blissful for everyone. Don't worry too
much - there's little you can do anyway! Plus, even if I told him that he's
average, everybody else (including his teacher) tell him that he's not. Well,
I'm not telling him that he's a genius and I try to explain the difference
between stupid (the majority of the people), smart (10%), and geniuses (<1%).
At least he's smart enough to get his! :)

------
MisterBastahrd
If my kid is smart he'll figure it out for himself.

