The following is an excerpt regarding the power and peril of praise, a compelling article from New York Magazine....
What do we make of a boy like Thomas? Thomas (his middle name) is a
fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West
84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short
to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber).
Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a
photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from
the Anderson School. They are "the smart kids." Thomas's one of them, and he
likes belonging.
Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he's smart. Not just from
his parents but also from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious
child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was
statistically confirmed.
The school is reserved for the top one percent of all
applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn't just score in the top one
percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.
But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he's smart
hasn't always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork.
In fact, Thomas's father noticed just the opposite. "
Thomas didn't want to try
things he wouldn't be successful at," his father says. "Some things came very
quickly to him, but when they didn't, he gave up almost immediately, concluding,
'I'm not good at this.' " With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing
the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn't.
For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn't very good at spelling, so he
simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at
fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to
learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn't even try for weeks.
By then, his
teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play
catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas's father tried to
reason with him. "Look, just because you're smart doesn't mean you don't have to
put out some effort." Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of
cajoling from his father.
Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack
confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?
Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it's been noted that a large percentage
of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests)
severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted
with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and
expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they
overrate how much help they need from a parent.
When parents praise their children's intelligence, they believe they are
providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by
Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it's important to tell
their kids that they're smart.
In and around the New York area, according to my
own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent.
Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the
shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.
But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York
public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving
kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might
actually be causing it.
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she's
now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York
schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints
the picture most clearly.
Having artificially induced a round of failure
in series of tests, Dweck's researchers then gave
all the
fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy
as the previous round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly
improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who'd been told they
were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was
surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "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 but 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.
Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern
parenting. Out of our children's lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a
notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the
things we can't say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you,
we believe in you.
In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out
the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the
intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our
expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me.
Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling
my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion
about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with
the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction
himself.
But what if he makes the wrong conclusion? Can I really leave this up to him,
at his age?
I'm still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school:
"What happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?"
"It gets bigger, like a muscle," he responded, having aced this one before.
Love without
discipline is false; discipline without love force.
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Tim
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