Graceful Parenting in Austin

This title isn’t mine, it’s a friend of a friend’s who sent me the link to an article in The New York TImes explaining why it is bad to praise your kids too much. There are times when it is pretty obvious I’m making a parenting mistake, but now when I think I’m doing it right, I’m making another mistake?

The experts are funny and they don’t all agree and they change their minds and sometimes I just decide to disagree, but I read the article to see what they had to say and I think they might be right…

Psychologist Carol Dweck has been studying the effect of praise on students in New York City public schools and the results have been surprising. Students who were praised for being smart tended to avoid challenges, fearing that failure would be embarrassing and prove that they weren’t smart after all. Students in the same situation, who were praised for effort instead, took on challenges and responded to failure by working harder instead of giving up.

One study with low performing math students was especially interesting. Students were split into two groups. The control group was taught a module on study skills and the other was taught study skills and how intelligence is not innate. They learned that the brain is a muscle and giving it a harder workout makes you smarter because the brain grows when neurons are challenged.

With that single variable between the two groups, the students who learned that the brain was a muscle improved their study habits and their math grades. Dweck explains that “emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. 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.”

Science or no science, this just feels true to me. I remember being a student in Computer Science at the University of Texas, one of a few women in large classes of Asian and Indian men and feeling that I was definitely NOT smart enough for this. Which says a lot about my stereotypes about gender and race, but that is another post. One day, I decided that I didn’t really know if I was smart enough or not, so I would not have an opinion about that, just try really hard and see what happened. And it worked. The more effort I put in, the more my brain got used to the workout and the better I did in my classes.

Back to the article, research by Dr. Robert Cloninger with trained rats and mice in mazes has shown that when rewards are given every time, the rats and mice learn to give up quickly when the rewards aren’t there. But, if rewards are given intermittently, the rats and mice learn to be persistent. This behavior is related to a circuit in the brain that intervenes when there isn’t an immediate reward and tells the rest of the brain to keep going, because a reward will come later. This circuit is more active in some people, but less so in others. So, when praising kids every time they do something well, they may actually be weakening this circuit.

Then the author of the article, Po Bronson, says maybe HE is addicted to praising his child. Praising him was how he expressed his unconditional love and praising helped relieve his own anxieties about the high expectations he had of his child.

Well, let’s stop here. This can’t have anything to do with MY kid, because Noel REALLY IS smart and DESERVES all the praise we give her all day long to try to encourage her to take on challenges which she avoids because she doesn’t want to be embarrassed and it has nothing to do with our anxiety about finding the right magnet or private school for junior high that will challenge her for sure since she is so innately smart. Oh,,hmmmm….well, wait a second…

The good news is that we don’t have stop praising our kids all together. The idea is to avoid general praise for innate qualities like “You are so smart” and instead praise for specific behaviors, emphasizing effort, like “I like how you kept working on your homework, even though it was difficult.” This kind of praise encourages the behaviors that they have control over and doesn’t setup the trap where they must not be smart after all if they fail.

Blue Eyes and I talked with Noel about how the brain is a muscle at breakfast today. She gets that idea. We’ll have to practice with the different kinds of praise. And we’ll find the right school, finding the balance in encouraging her to take on challenges without creating an artificially difficult environment. I’m not sure I have the innate ability to pull all this off, but I’ll make an effort and see what happens.