Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021)

Praising children for hard work rather than "for just being smart" is about their own personal wellbeing. Kids who get called smart in their early years have trouble facing real and difficult problems later in life, because they suddenly feel "wait, I'm not really smart" and other such pathological feelings. It's about encouraging problem solving, not just blindly working hard, and teaching that problem solving is a continually evolving process and not some innate thing that you either have or don't have.

It's true that the real world doesn't recognize hard work in a consistent way, but I think this is more about personal development and wellbeing rather than implying hard work will make you successful, for some definition of successful.

I write this simply to say that there is plenty of time to praise kids, and plenty of time to coach them. You don’t need to do both, at once, all the time. Ride the highs, survive the lows; the in-between times are there to teach and learn.

Edited to add: and have fun

I once had a conversation with somebody who lost their bid for a networking job to some 18-year old kid who "probably just plays a lot of video games." They never saw the 1000 hours the kid had spent the last two years fighting for better network latency. They didn't know the kid could quote two dozen different RFCs and could give you the strengths and weaknesses of 6 different routing protocols.

Which candidate was "smarter"? I have no idea. I know which one had spent more hours preparing for the job. Even if their competition thought they were just playing around all hours of the day and night.

The idea of avoiding rewarding ability is that we know it leads to smart kids who never learn how to put forth large amounts of effort, since often times up until college school is so bloody easy, they can skate by w/o developing good study habits.

And like either most of "growing up" the transition from one to the other is hard.

We want our kids to "work hard" because we know that to get places they will need to be able to do that. "Working hard" is a skill they need to learn.

But as adults, in the real world, "hard work" counts for nothing. The world rewards results, not the hours. Working effectively rewards more than working long. It's hard to explain to an employee that despite the fact they work "harder" than their colleagues, they get paid less because they deliver less. "Hard work" counts for very little.

Transitioning from hard work, to effective work, can be confusing for a young adult. That doesn't mean teaching children that hard work doesn't matter. It's precisely because they -can- work hard that it's possible to work smart.

You clearly have no experience in multinational corporations, this quality is enough, with a bit of luck (ie don't get fired by chance in some broad firing rounds, your direct manager is not psycho, your whole location is closed etc.) to get quite far.

Corps need people who are willing to wade through bureaucracy, cumbersome rules and processes, chase people across globe and tick checklists. Hard work can get all that done, no real brilliance needed. Also there are tons of stupid things that are required by various regulations and laws for example.

I mean of course within limits. You are not going to move 10 levels higher to c-suite just by working hard for 2 decades, but having non-trivial career jumps is not unheard of.

Praise sometimes hides lack of real interest so I give feedback

There are many different functions the concept of the "growth mindset" serve. Unfortunately, we do not differentiate between them, which as you pointed out can make quite challenging to even discuss.

For example, the OpEd by Hattie you linked is also a fairly undeveloped exploration of what we are really getting at when we discuss the growth mindset. On one hand, for example, it is a way to help children cope with psychological struggle. On the other hand, it is a paradigm by which we live and fit into societal hierarchical structures.

I would argue that although having a fixed mindset might be a "tool" to use so that you don't "try too hard and hurt yourself" (which is more or less what Hattie argues), it is a terrible general paradigm to live by as it is fundamentally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are born "dumb" and unable to read, that will always be the case. Obviously this is not how brains work. The reasonable conclusion here is that the growth-mindset is the closer model to reality and the fixed-mindset is a tool to help handle "moments in time".

We're not saying to praise hard work that wasn't. We're saying to give more kudos for good outcomes from effort than good outcomes from natural talent.

The reasons to do this:

- Eventually things always get hard enough that you can't carry the day on talent alone. If you haven't learned to persevere in things that don't come naturally by then, you're going to have a bad time.

- If your self-image is tied too much to ability, then every new task is a potential to fall down and "lose" what others consider special about you without much opportunity for gain; a lot of bright people avoid things that could be tests of their ability because of this fragile self-image.

There's no simple word trick that can accomplish this alone, but framing rewards around effort is one thing (along with seeking appropriate challenge, etc) that can help.

And if you've got a kid who's really talented, it's still likely to be problematic. My oldest is accelerated 4-6 years in math (depending on your baseline) and still breezes through everything with very low effort. But the few times that he's encountered something that's hard for him, he's folded and shown avoidant behavior very quickly compared to peers. He has not needed to build the skills, and characteristics of self-image, needed to try hard at difficult things and it shows.

Kind of yes, kind of no. If you paint my house, I kind of assume you can do the bulk work, but I care more about the transitions. Did you do the hard work of taking the time to remove outlet covers and mask outlets? Or did you work quickly and paint most of the outlets, make the covers hard to remove and leave the wall under the covers unpainted?

Either way, the house is painted, but the quality of the job and the likelyhood of referal is quite different.

Really hit the nail on the head. I've been struggling to put this into words. I'd add that this really has to do with our notions of justice. When we see people not working, seeming to get away with something, it hurts to see another person try really hard and fail.

There's really this cult of work for work's sake. I'd argue that hard work is inherently bad.

One of my kids basically sailed through his first 12 years of schooling on pure ability and zero effort. He's now learning the hard way that innate talent only gets you so far. His brother doesn't have the same innate academic ability, but is a natural grinder. He's finding the later years of schooling are easy to adapt to because he can pick things he's good at and knows how to put in the effort.

In terms of praise, we over-index on effort because it's a cross-cutting concern. This is especially true at younger ages where kids can't choose what they're studying. So if they get a C in French but maxed out all the effort criteria, I'm more than happy with that - and it's something for them to keep in mind when they're picking subjects later down the line.

Efficiency or effectiveness of a solution is what elicits external satisfaction. Others appreciate you for your efforts when it benefits them greatly.

I think both sides are necessary! Some people naturally favor one vs. the other, too, and respond better to one of these two types of feedback.

I suspect many of these people would also misjudge hard work, for example when people self-teach out of interest, well that's just them having fun. The many hours sports star spent on the playground were just playing.

The idea in some mind is you have to take the hard way (no short cuts!). I can just feel how smug people are when they say this. So the idea of someone not grinding fills them with blind rage.

Integration of these is also a unit of work.

In my mind, it’s also a requirement to be tested, either via true unit testing (generally), or if logical, offloading to the compiler to statically provide coverage.

This doesn’t cover aligning work with the problem statement, or design. But that’s art.

(Edit: I’m describing a function in paragraph 1, and a pure function is especially easy to digest as the ideal candidate for a UOW).

> Results are what matter in the end, and I think clever shortcuts are as praiseworthy as hard work. Later in life, people don't get paid for effort

I generally don’t agree with this. Result is all that matters but count many times you can get it with clever shortcuts, most time efforts do pay off and get you what you want. Praising clever shortcuts can encourage cheating that what I fear the most. Once that gets into your mind, hard to get out

Teaching a child that failure is not an option is tantamount to psychological abuse. I shudder to imagine how petrified a child would be to take any steps toward anything at all with a deep fear of failure embedded.

I suppose everything you've ever done, ride a bike never fell (failed), played sports your team never lost (failed), played an instrument never had a bad performance? (failed) Basically any skill or achievement whatsoever requires a very deep and foundational tolerance for repeated, frequent failure in order to achieve. Not sure how that isn't obvious...

Something as simple as undoing the participation trophy culture we've created would go a long way. There is a lot of utility in developing a healthy attitude toward failure. The problem is the pendulum swung way too hard from "win or come back on your shield" to "everyone is a winner in their own special way". Reinforcing either of these will lead to developmental problems. Though, IMO, at least the first one partially reinforces perseverance even in the face of failure.

> Praising a child is making them associate a good emotion with the thing they are praised for. Don't let that thing be failure. Even worse, don't let them believe they are fundamentally flawed and handicapped when that isn't true. When they see other kids work hard and succeed, the conclusion is effort is enough because they are incapable anyways.

I can add some more here: you can try very hard and fail. Failing is important because it builds grit. Grit builds the necessary framework to succeed even against odds stacked against you. If you simply make things easier, or reward someone for trying, it releases the happy chemicals that make it acceptable to not try harder. Part of the benefit of programs like ROTC, some sports, etc is that it can take someone who is an amorphous blob of suck and turn them into something they can be proud of. There's a lot to be said about that. Maybe there's some sort of relationship between the reduction in PE programs and the increase in this sort of "accepting failure" behavior.

You do not need to shark attack your child when they do poorly. However, you also should not praise them for being mediocre. Reinforce perseverance, as you suggest. It's your job to give your child the necessary framework to persist through struggle. Otherwise, as we have seen with many "adults", you end up with members of society who are fundamentally incapable of doing anything without constant praise. Casualties of the helicopter parenting generation.