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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you should ever say that someone is naturally good, "a natural" or anything like that. Instead kids should be praised for effort, for trying and having a growth mindset.

If we only comment on how inherently good they are they might get lazy as whenever they get bad grades excuses like "I wasn't trying" works. It doesn't matter if the parents continue being surprised of the bad grades, the answer can also be "I was just lazy".

This is exactly what happened to me and I'm still trying to reprogram myself.

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The name for this topic is fixed vs growth mindset:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth

You'll see that and related phrases as buzzwords sometimes.

> This article may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies.

Psychologists can't replicate Carol Dweck's 'Growth Mindset' claims: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset

> The findings of Dweck’s key study have never been replicated in a published paper, which is noteworthy in so high-profile a work. One scientist told BuzzFeed News that his attempt to reproduce the findings has so far failed. An investigation found several small but revealing errors in the study that may require a correction.

It is likely another hypothesized model from the social psychology field that doesn't actually exist, in the same category as Stereotype Threat and Power Posing.

I don't know why this was downvoted. Dweck's claims are the subject of enormous scepticism in the psychology community. Her data is a bit too neat, her effect sizes are consistently stronger than we'd expect, there's a complete lack of replication. It's not being rejected out of hand, but there are a lot of red flags.

On a personal level, I just find life better since my mindset has shifted from static to growth. I used to consider myself only good at logic and programming, and I would not even attempt anything remotely artistic, literary or athletic. I would rationalize this as being part of my identity, and it would conveniently allow me to avoid confronting failure or getting out of my comfort zone. Changing this view of myself has been liberating honestly.

Thanks for the article. It appears that the field is rife with issues, but I imagine it's a difficult topic and a young field. Another bogus model from the article is positive psychology.

I don't know why these terms are thrown out like they're useless, as they pretty much explain most people's way of thinking. If you give up you have a fixed mindset, where you simply think you weren't born to be good enough to know something. Whereas a growth mindset will try to break down the problem into smaller chunks and try to figure them out first, and grow their knowledge.

It often just takes mentioning these concepts to someone for them to have an epiphany and get on the growth mind track.

I'm my own sample but when I was growing up and got C's and lower my parents' consistent message was that I had certain 'gifts' but it required me to put in the effort in order to reap the benefits of those gifts.

I'm not sure they meant it this way but now that I'm older I realize that those 'gifts' could simply have been a healthy brain, free of any obvious learning disability, chronic fatigue or ADHD-like symptoms. And lo and behold, when I did in fact put in the effort I'd get Bs and As.

As a parent I use that approach with my son and, so far, it seems to be working.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid because it's fairly evident. For example, if you have two kids and get them both instruments for Christmas and a day later one is playing little songs and the other can hardly make noise, it's hard to come up with any other explanation than "your sister just picked it up more quickly than you did".

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