A child who is constantly admired for a particular skill frequently becomes less interested in trying out new things. One of the costs of such an attitude is that children begin to play it safe and in the process lose their willingness to experiment and challenge themselves. … Seduced by the praise they have received for their … skills, they shy away from exploring other interests. This constriction of thinking and activity works against one of the main tasks of childhood and adolescence—exploring a range of interests and abilities in order to find those that are a good fit. Sometimes we follow our strengths and sometimes we follow our interests. They are not always the same. [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, p. 143]
Given a new task, children praised for being smart tend to choose the easier alternative. In a meta-analysis of 150 praise studies, other scholars concluded that praise makes children averse to risk and decreases their sense of autonomy. These scholars found consistent correlations between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” And this finding begins to bring us back to college students angrily demanding that professors raise their grades: Researchers are discovering that the more children are praised, the more important it becomes for them to maintain their image. Their goal becomes to protect themselves, not to outshine others through superior achievement. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 130]
[I]t’s very easy, as we try to express our pride and approval, to reinforce that message of You are valuable to me because you are smart.
In our current system of education, both gifted and good students are taught to rise to expectations. This may seem like sound educational practice, but not only does it train them to avoid failure at all costs (even when failure is the very best way forward into new ways of thinking and doing), but it traps them in an anxiety-inducing cycle in which one poor grade, one bad test … seems like the end of the world. …
[T]he gifted and the good often hit their wilderness … at the point when they have to come face-to-face with the motivation for their goodness and achievement.
And that motivation, often, is: They’re terrified.
They are afraid that they will fail. They are afraid that, when they fail, everyone will realize that they’re not actually all that smart. They are afraid that they are not worthy of love. That is the peril of the gifted and the good. [Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education, W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, pp. 74-75]
Like my daughter, I was also a gifted child who did not like challenges. I suspect it was related to the fact that everyone always bragged to me about how smart I was, based on how quickly and easily I solved ordinary problems, instead of pointing out to me how interesting the various subjects were. So I got the idea that my self-esteem rested on always getting everything correct instead of learning the fun of exploring new things. When things were not immediately clear to me it threatened my self-concept as a smart kid. [Moira, parent] quoted by [Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education, W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, p. 77]
A lazy child, unless his laziness is a direct attack on his parents and teachers, is almost always an ambitious child who is afraid of defeat. Success is a word that everyone understands differently, and it can be astonishing to find out what it is that a child regards as a defeat. There are many people who think themselves defeated unless they are ahead of everyone else. Even if they are successful, they consider it a defeat if someone else has done better still. A lazy child never experiences any true feelings of defeat because he never faces a real test. He avoids problems and postpones the decision on whether to compete with others. Everybody else is fairly sure that if he were less lazy, he could overcome his difficulties. He takes refuge in that blissful daydream, “If only I tried, I could accomplish anything.” Whenever he fails, he can diminish the importance of his failure and keep his self-esteem by saying to himself, “It is only laziness, not lack of ability.”
Sometimes teachers will say to a lazy pupil, “If you worked harder, you could be the brightest pupil in class.” If he can gain such a reputation by doing nothing, why should he risk it by working? Perhaps if he stopped being lazy, his reputation for hidden brilliance would come to an end. He would be judged on actual accomplishment, not on what he might have achieved. Another personal advantage for the lazy child is that if he does the least bit of work, he is praised for it. Everyone hopes he is at last starting to mend his ways, and is eager to encourage further improvement, even though the same piece of work from an industrious child would not even have been noticed. In this way, the lazy child lives on the expectations of other people. [Alfred Adler, What Life Could Mean To You, 1931, Hazelden Foundation, 1998, pp. 138-139]
Among ways to restore pride … is losing interest in all situations or people who in some way hurt this pride. Many people relinquish their interests in sports, politics, intellectual pursuits, etc. because their impatient need to excel, or to do a perfect job, is not satisfied. The situation then may become so unbearable for them that they give up. They do not know what has happened; they merely become uninterested, and may instead turn to an activity which is actually beneath their potentialities. … Such changes in attitudes also are relevant to the learning process. [Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, 1951, W. W. Norton and Co., 1991, p. 104]
[E]ffort becomes what Carol Omelich and I have called a “double-edged sword,” that is, trying hard is valued by students because teachers reward it, yet trying hard is also feared by students given its potential threat to their worth should they fail.
Self-worth theory contends that the protection of a sense of ability is the student’s highest priority—higher sometimes even than good grades—so that students may actually handicap themselves by not studying in order to have an excuse for failing that does not reflect poorly on their ability. [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 16]
What is the purpose of praise? As with the use of rewards more generally, the real point often turns out to be a matter of benefiting the giver rather than the recipient. If we praise people, they are more likely to do what we want, which is not only advantageous to us in itself but also confers on us a sense of power. People whom we praise may come to like us better, too—another significant inducement. … Clearly, it is worth reconsidering the use of praise if it turns out to be something we need to say more than something they need to hear. [Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 97]
The desire for approval is very nearly universal in young children. … We have an enormous responsibility not to exploit it for our own ends.
Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It gets them to conform to our wishes irrespective of what those wishes are. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave. [Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 104]
Extreme depreciations of the child morally and intellectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are treated as achievements. [John Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” 1902, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, p. 346]
In schools … we find that tests are given to determine how smart someone is or, more precisely, how much smartness someone has. … But this seems to me a strange conception … I do not know anyone who has smartness. The people I know sometimes do smart things (as far as I can judge) and sometimes do dumb things—depending on what circumstances they are in, how much they know about a situation, and how interested they are. Smartness, so it seems to me, is a specific performance, done in a particular set of circumstances. It is not something you are or have in measurable quantities. In fact, the assumption that smartness is something you have has led to such nonsensical terms as over- and underachievers. As I understand it, an over-achiever is someone who doesn’t have much smartness but does a lot of smart things. An underachiever is someone who has a lot of smartness but does a lot of dumb things. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, p. 175]
There was one more finding in our study that was striking and depressing at the same time. … [W]e gave students a page to write out their thoughts, but we also left a space for them to write the scores they had received on the problems.
Would you believe that almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores? And always in one direction. In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful—especially if you’re talented—so they lied them away.
What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart. [Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2006, Ballantine / Penguin Random House, 2016, p. 73]
When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they’re special. Even superior.
When we asked them, “When do you feel smart?” so many of them talked about times they felt like a special person, someone who was different from and better than other people.
The problem is when special begins to mean better than others. A more valuable human being. A superior person. An entitled person. [Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2006, Ballantine / Penguin Random House, 2016, p. 29-30]
We agree that just telling a kid “you’re so smart” is not such a good idea, in part because no one is smart in every skill area. … However, we all want our kids to think they’re intelligent, and if they struggle in school, we want to reassure them even more. It’s not so great for kids to think that they aren’t so smart or, worse, to think that they’re stupid, which is the case for a lot of kids … Also, studies have shown that for Black students, many of whom have never been told that they’re smart, simply telling them they are is one of the most powerful ways to improve their academic performance. So when Bill works with kids who doubt their ability, he doesn’t lay on praise about their brilliance—for one, they probably wouldn’t believe it. But he does tell them a greater truth: that they are “smart enough” to do something useful and important in this world. …
When Ned gets kids who cling to the idea that they’re stupid, he will say, “I’d like you to be open to the idea that you are really quite capable. It may not seem that way to you now. And you don’t have to change your mind. I’d just ask that you keep an open mind because that’s certainly the way that I see you. …
“You’re smart enough to do what you want to do as an adult. … [Y]ou’re smart enough to learn skills that will allow you to make a living and to make a positive contribution to this world. From my point of view, that’s the most important thing.”
We also believe that it’s important for kids—and especially teenagers—to be aware of their strengths, including the things they’re naturally good at. For many kids, being told that they have talent in a specific area or that there’s something they can do a lot better than most kids their age is enormously motivating—and gives them the confidence to stretch themselves. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, Viking / Penguin Random House, 2021, pp. 112-113]
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