How Not to Talk to Your Kids Article by Po Bronson (from New York magazine—February 2007)
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 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.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms.
The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal
IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the
children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers
told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly
divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told,
“You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You
must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children
were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an
effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice
was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told
the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice,
Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised
for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised
for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took
the cop-out.