"I read with interest a recent piece in New York Magazine titled "How Not to Talk to Your Kids" by Po Bronson, describing the work of Stanford professor Carol Dweck. Much of Dweck's work deals with the impact of different types of praise.
Contrary to popular belief and practice, she discovered that praising children for being smart often has a deleterious impact on educational achievement. Praising them for effort, by contrast, has a positive effect. Children who are praised from an early age for their native intelligence often become obsessed with protecting their image as "smart." They tend to give up easily when they are intellectually challenged or do not grasp things immediately. They also come to devalue effort and to view working hard as a contradiction to their image of as "smart kids."
Ultimately, too much praise for their native intelligence can even cause them to underestimate their own abilities. Because they downplay the importance of effort, they may conclude that their failure to understand anything immediately proves that the earlier praise was unjustified."
Click on the link below for the full article:
http://jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/rosenblum_smart_kid.php3
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