Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021)
> When a child comes home excited with a great mark, say, “you deserve it! You worked really hard for that mark.
Ok, putting aside it's important to be emotionally warm towards your children and ensure they understand you love them "unconditionally"[1], I do think it's also important to help them to learn retrospect and to work smarter.
"What a great mark you've earned! What do you think was working about your approach?" (then praise and encourage them for whatever they say so long as it's remotely reasonable). I just say this because I feel like the "work hard" mentality actually hasnt served me in life. Once you work for a business no one cares how "hard" you work, if it's not smart first. Smart is the more powerful variable, you can work Smart and not hard and be quite successful. But work hard on stupid things? No one cares and you'll be overlooked and even hated on at times.
[1] - I'm not a parent, but honestly everyone has a limit, and frankly love should not be truly impossible to lose. My love will stop if they butcher my wife, burn down my house, and call me fat.
This is a shallow treatment of a complicated subject. It doesn't seem to acknowledge that the concept of growth mindset has been challenged, somewhat successfully. [1] It does not seem to have a large effect in the aggregate, according to most meta-analyses. Also, the largest positive effect seems to be for students who are struggling (not surprisingly), which means that perhaps it actually has a net negative effect for students who are not struggling. And there are benefits to praising students for ability when they have unique abilities — this can lead them to feel that they want to cultivate those abilities.
1: https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-misinterpreting-the...
I've seen this advice before and I have so many issues with it.
First, it just seems like this kind of "parental optimization" is likely to have such a small effect on long-term outcomes that it's probably a wash overall.
Second, kids don't acquire all their information about themselves from their parents and teachers. By the time they reach early elementary school, kids, especially smart ones, know whether they are trying harder than their peers and whether they're succeeding more than their peers. They know what was easy and what was hard from their own experience, and they have a theory of mind and if an adult tells them something at odds with their experience they could just devalue that adult's credibility.
Third, when it comes time to start thinking about what you want to do for a career, it really pays to choose the things where you can succeed without feeling as if you worked very hard.
Finally "hard work", it self is a vague concept that I think often misleads young people into to thinking that effort is not merely a means to an end, but the end itself. In fact what we really mean by "hard work" is some combination of traits like diligence, conscientiousness, and persistence that lead people to dot all their 'i's and cross all their 't's, and not quit until they've succeeded. In fact, when you become an adult and are out working, nobody cares how hard you worked, only that you succeeded.
There are some good ideas here, but it's a false dichotomy. The key takeaway should be, don't tell children they're fundamentally bad at something. This is different than not praising ability.
Effort is important, but it can be wasted. Low effort high results is more important than raw effort. Effort and ability are equally important.
Now, think about ability itself. This is the recognition of an individual to be able to perform results. However, it confuses the results with the child. Results are what is important, and without them there is no ability. It's wasted ability. So instead of praising ability directly, I'd suggest praising results. Effort + results.
Telling a child they are bad at something is also important. They may need to be told this so they can improve, but this is the crucial bit. They need to have a path open to improve. People change. If you say they cannot enough, and they believe it, they truly cannot.
Teaching growth mindset is probably not an effective intervention [1]. Another casualty of the replication crisis.
As a former student of Sir Thomas Rich's grammar school[1], I am reminded of their grading scheme combining effort [A-E] & attainment tier [1-5]. Often the two marks were linked (A1, B2 etc), but the coveted low-effort:high-attainment grades did show up occasionally. I recall a friend of mine receiving a D1 grade: he essentially belligerently phoned it in for the effort quota, but somehow got the right answers.
Terrible advice. People are different, very different. They are good at different things and bad at different things. The key to success in life is finding the few things you are good at, and building on top of them. Also, finding things you are terribly bad at, and bringing them to a tolerable level.
If you want kids to be successful in life, you need to help them discover their strengths and weaknesses, not teach them to blindly follow the process that is more important that outcome.
Children are people and like any people they can tell when you are having an inauthentic interaction. Just be a normal person to your kids, don’t try to “hack” them.
Secondly, I really enjoyed mathematics at school, but it was always way too easy for me. If my parents had followed this advice I would have never got any praise at all, which would have been extremely demotivating.
Praise your kids for their efforts, and also praise them for their abilities.
I stopped praising hard work some time ago when I really started to look at society around me. I don't want my kid to think that hard work is the key to happiness. Satisfaction is an admirable goal, pride in ones work is an admirable goal, staying up late and working all weekend for an A is not an admirable goal.
Call us cynical but we've started teaching our kids a gamer attitude towards school. There are 'tricks' you can learn to get an A that aren't staying up all night reading every single page in your Physics textbook.
It's worth considering what people mean when they say "hard work." Ever since I read a LessWrong post called "Pain is not the unit of Effort,"[1] I've come to realize that hard work has always implied suffering for me.
If I spend a half-dozen hours dealing with drivers issues on Linux, someone might consider me hard-working. Other people would consider it a massive pain in the ass, and for that reason, they'd probably consider it a lot of hard work. But it doesn't seem that way to me, and it's probably because I find that sort of activity engaging and (relatively) painless.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-no...
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Related: What is the unit of work for software development?
It's not tasks or lines of code or bugs closed - that's the outcome of the work, or the work product.
What is a unit of work? I invite you to come up with your own answer before reading mine.
I think the unit of work for software development is learn and try. Learn something, try it. Learn something, try it. It's a cycle, so its also try something, learn (that it doesn't work), try something else, repeat.
I think this is an important thing to coach junior developers on - I've seen many junior developers try something, and the code still doesn't work, so they revert the thing they tried, without knowing or evaluating whether they got closer to the desired result.
So it's not try something and see if it worked, it's try something and determine the state of the system.
Have we considered not even attempting Skinnerian behavioral modification on children?
The feedback already exists in the outcomes of the child's actions, for example, their grades in school. Why do we need to add additional praise or blame on top of the existing feedback? The scores are what they are, and the child can react to them as they are, interpret them at face value.
Of course children can be guided and/or pushed to improve their performance, but that involves advice and instruction, not praise and blame. If you want to help a child to do better at, say, math, isn't it better to do some math with them rather than doling out praise or blame and then sending them off to their room with no other effort from the parent? How about demonstrating to them that effort leads to improvement?
It sounds just as unfair to me.
If some kid finds a way to get results effortlessly, if it is honest, it should be praised. 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. And hard work is an ability too, not everyone is "wired" for hard work (ex: ADHD).
Praising children for things that aren't true isn't good either IMHO. If your kid doesn't work hard, but does a good job anyway, don't mislead them by praising them for their hard work.
Too much of parenting advice is about doing subtle things to manipulate them to be who you want them to be. Just make yearly goals with your kids and help them accomplish those goals.
I am a parent of two, and I honestly don't understand these kind of posts. When a child comes home excited about some great marks, all we say is "Awesome, good for you" and celebrate the moment. Then at 7pm when the child comes back from play, we sit down for home assignments and whatever needs to be studied next.
EDIT: minor typo
terrible idea to fetishize effort. this leads to self-abuse and things like participatory economics. not to mention inefficiency and, in the extreme, famine.
is the world so well off that results can be deprioritized and take a back seat to energy expenditure? and if that's the case, give me back my incandescent lightbulbs.
Studies like this seem to confirm my hypothesis that humans are truly just like LLMs and parenting is alignment.
From a Greek song:
A part I am of your machine
And my son the spare
He’ll do good work in your employment
He is made of the best materials
I have seen little evidence that there is such thing as natural ability, except in rare cases such as actual geniuses, where the elasticity of the brain cannot adapt to develop that ability.
An important lesson children should be taught as earlu as possible is that effort is useless and wasteful if they fail. I agree with perhaps lowering the bar until they develop the skill, but fundamentally engraining tolerance for failure into a child is one of the worst things you can do to a human psyche. It's nearly impossible to remove that mindset later ok. In every aspect of their life they won't just fail, they'll use their supposed natural inability as an excuse for many other harmful ends!
I am not suggesting making them feel like losers when they fail. What should happen is you tell them: "You failed and it's all your fault, but so long as you learn from your failure and keep trying to succeed, you are on the right path."
Talent, effort, opportunities, genius all mean nothing in the real world without perseverance. The most talentess and clueless fool can succeed beyond anyone else simply by virtue of perseverance and discipline.
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 don't even know how the author put together such a horrible advice but please! If you insist on bringing a human into this world, don't ruin their chances in life over bullshit like this where the only purpose is to make insincere parents feel good about themselves. Do the right thing which is hard and uncomfortable.