Kohn goes a long way further. Don't praise your children just for "working" hard either -- that's just encouraging them to seek your external validation.

Instead, help nurture your children's own curiosity, interest, and experience in the things that they do.

Stop treating them like lab rats to be conditioned with praise, because we know exactly what happens when that praise inevitably ceases.

Thanks for the link.

''Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,''

This is arguably good advice regarding 5th graders. For adult software engineers, however, go ahead and praise them for being smart, since worrying about software failure and avoiding software risks is great.

I read the Grit book and it talked about having high expectations. I had never heard of this Pygmalion effect before. Thank you for sharing. Here is the article I just found on it

https://www.wisdomtimes.com/blog/the-pygmalion-effect-at-hom...

If you can suggest a better one, I would be grateful.