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Her secret in one sentence: never tell your child that he or she is smart (identity); instead, praise him or her for working hard (behavior).
Each group took the same math quiz, which was easy. Most students earned a perfect score. In the first group, children were told, “You had a perfect score! You are so smart!” (identity). In the second group, students were told, “You earned a perfect score! You must have tried really hard!” (behavior). Then children in both groups took a more difficult math quiz. The students in the first group, who had been praised as smart, did badly on the harder quiz: they gave up too easily. But the students in the second group, who had been praised for trying hard, did better: they kept working on the
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Professor Dweck believes that if you praise children for being smart, they develop a “mind-set” that they have a certain amount of intelligence and that their IQ is fixed. If they then encounter a problem they can’t solve, they may think, I’m not smart enough to do this, and give up. Professor Dweck recommends that you instead praise children for trying hard. Teach them that intelligence is not a fixed quantity but instead depends on their mind-set. If you try harder, you can become smarter.
But teaching the virtues of Conscientiousness may be different. The students at my daughter’s school were asked to bring a dollar with them one day to buy a special pencil. My daughter’s friend forgot to bring her dollar. So my daughter gave her the dollar that she had brought to school to buy the same pencil, which meant that my daughter came home without the coveted pencil. Should I say to my daughter, “That was a very kind thing you did” or should I say “You are a very kind person”? Does it make any difference? If Professor Dweck’s rule applies in the realm of virtue, then praising the
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That’s how you teach the virtue of hard work. That’s also how you teach empathy: not by asking, “How would you feel if you were in that situation?” but rather by insisting that the adolescent spend a summer alongside someone from a different background, to learn the stories firsthand.
You don’t teach virtue by preaching virtue. You teach virtue by requiring virtuous behavior, so that virtuous behavior becomes a habit.
In the biblical book of Proverbs, which scholars tell us was written more than 2,500 years ago, we read, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”29 In other words, if you compel a child to behave virtuously, then when he is an adult he will continue to behave virtuously.
God has just given the commandments at Mount Sinai, and the text reads V’shinantam l’vanecha: . Those two Hebrew words are usually translated into English as “Teach them diligently to your children,” or something along those lines. But that’s not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew says, “Inscribe them on your children.” The verb shanan, which I am translating as “inscribe,” could also be translated as “incise”—it literally means to cut with a knife.33 “Teach them diligently” is watered down.
“The pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”35
The evidence suggests that such an approach is unlikely to work consistently. A more reliable and effective approach might be to require kids to eat the healthier food, for years, to inculcate healthy habits—and at the same time to educate them in the virtues of healthy eating. But merely hoping that kids will eat foods that are not their first choice is not likely to be effective in a culture where kids believe that their own desires should be paramount.
Honesty is not innate. These virtues have to be taught. If you don’t teach them, who will? You can’t rely on schools to do this job. Not in the United States. Not in this era.
In the early 1990s, researchers in the United States launched an ambitious study of more than 20,000 American kids drawn from every part of the United States: urban and rural, Asian, Black, Latino, and White, affluent and low income, East Coast and West Coast and Midwestern and Southern, and so forth. They gathered data on the teenagers in 1994, when most of these kids were 12 to 14 years old, and then periodically through 2008.1 Researchers who have analyzed these data have found that the children of authoritative parents do better in school, are less likely to get drunk, and are less likely
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Many parents today perceive a tension between “strict” and “loving.” They think you can be either strict or loving but not both.
This is so true. In the foster care system ALL spanking is considered abusive. Also foster parents hands are tied in many other ways too and so children get away with a lot of behaviors and this only makes the children worse. It’s so sad to see this in foster care when the foster parents many times love the children more than the kid’s parents love the children.
I answer these parents by pointing out that the research provides no support for this notion. Indeed, the research flatly contradicts it. But rather than harp on the scholarly studies, I ask the parents to consider whether this same notion would make sense in any other context.
Suppose you are hiring a new employee, and you have to choose between Sonya and Vanessa. Sonya’s previous employers tell you that she always shows up for work on time, never cheats or steals, never uses company time for personal chores. Vanessa’s previous employers tell you that Vanessa often shows up an hour or two late for work, she has stolen office property and then lied about it, and she often visits Instagram on a company computer when she is supposed to be working. Would you say, “I’m sure Vanessa has gotten rid of all her bad impulses, so now is the time to hire her”? Would you say, “I
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virtue begets virtue, and vice begets vice.
This notion of “rebound” is based not in evidence but in the popular culture of the early 21st century: not a reliable source of information.
Recent evidence suggests that being popular in the United States at age 13 today may actually be a major risk factor for bad outcomes in early adulthood.
Whether you live in Utah or California or Florida or New York: Do what’s best for your child. Don’t be too concerned about what other kids or other parents might say.
It is never acceptable for your child to be disrespectful to you.
Part of the task of the parent is, and always has been, educating desire: teaching your child to desire and enjoy things that are higher and better than cotton candy. Video games, Instagram, and text messages are the cotton candy of American popular culture today.
One final misconception: I’m worried that if I follow your advice, my child won’t love me anymore. Read your job description. Your job as a parent is to raise your child to be the best person she or he can be. Your reward comes from knowing that you have done your job well.
the first job of the American parent has to be to teach humility.
Why humility? Because humility has become the most un-American of virtues.
Those parents think that humility means trying to convince yourself that you’re stupid when you know that you are smart. That’s not humility. That’s psychosis: a detachment from reality. The fact that the psychosis might be pursued with good intentions does not make it any less psychotic.
Humility simply means being as interested in other people as you are in yourself. It means that when you meet new people, you try to learn something about them before going off on a spiel about how incredible your current project is. Humility means really listening when someone else is talking, instead of just preparing your own speechlet in your head before you’ve really heard what the other person is saying. Humility means making a sustained effort to get other people to share their views before trying to inundate them with yours.
I recently took another photo at an American public school of a flowery poster with the words “Dream until your dreams come true.” That’s bad advice. That advice cultivates a self-righteous sense of entitlement. Better advice might be, Work until your dreams come true.
Work in pursuit of your dreams, but realize that life is what happens while you are making other plans. Tomorrow may never come or may be unrecognizably different.1
the culture of self-esteem leads to a culture of resentment.
many parents confuse self-esteem with courage, just as some parents tend to confuse humility with timidity and cowardice.
If I am in the culture of humility, then I rejoice at the success of others, and I am happy with my portion. The culture of humility leads to gratitude, appreciation, and contentment. The key to lasting happiness is contentment.
But as you mature into adulthood—and certainly when you become a parent—you realize that the world is, and should be, bigger than you. It’s not about you. And once you realize and accept that, gratefully, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
By exempting your child from all chores, as many affluent American families now do, you are sending the message, “Your time is too valuable to be spent on menial tasks,” which easily morphs into the unintended message “You are too important to do menial tasks.” And that unintended message puffs up the bloated self-esteem that now characterizes many American kids. I see it often.
“For an American girl to be ‘cool’ nowadays means dressing in a provocative and inappropriate way, disrespecting your parents, and staying out late at night. None of which my girls were allowed to do.”
The world doesn’t revolve around you. You are a member of this family with obligations to this family, and those obligations are paramount.
Enjoy the time you spend with your child.
As a practicing physician, I can tell you that many of my colleagues never did the hard work of figuring out, in childhood or adolescence, the answers to the really important questions: Who am I? What do I really want? What would make me happy? Those are not trivial questions. The great American psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow observed that many adults never answer those questions.2 I have seen some such adults among my own physician colleagues. This man may be regarded as a successful surgeon; he may earn $600,000 a year; but he’s miserable. He’s unhappy because he is working 80 hours a week
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Robert Grant, sixth headmaster at Shore, was fond of making one particular remark to the parents of students newly enrolled at the school. He liked to say, “I hope your child will be severely disappointed during his time at this school.” The parents were often confused. Why would the headmaster wish for my child to be severely disappointed? Grant would explain that if a student does not experience real disappointment at school, then he will be unprepared for disappointment when it comes in real life.
One of the most difficult obligations of responsible parenthood is telling your son or your daughter that their dream isn’t going to come true, that they need to find another dream. Parents unsure of their own authority, whose top priority is pleasing their child, will never speak these difficult truths. But if you don’t, who will?
But this question—achievement versus happiness—is based on false premises. There is no point in pushing your kid harder to achieve if he or she has no goal or sense of purpose that gives some context to that achievement. Likewise, there isn’t much point in letting your kids relax and do whatever they desire if you have not first educated their desire.
Once children have a sense of meaning, they can pursue achievement with confidence because they know why that achievement is worth pursuing. Once desire has been educated, young people can enjoy free time more deeply and more fully, whether reading a book, listening to music, or taking a walk through the woods. Or, a fishing trip in Alaska.
Most American parents do not prepare their child in any serious way for disappointment, for failure, for heartbreak. Bill and Janet did prepare their four sons, I believe. And that made all the difference.
“OK, preparation for life. So what’s the purpose of life?” Dr. Wright responded without hesitation: 1. Meaningful work 2. A person to love 3. A cause to embrace
By age 10, an American child is more likely to look to peers than to parents for guidance about what really matters in life. But children are not competent to guide other children.
Raising your child to know and care about virtue and character is not a special extra credit assignment reserved for the superior parent. It is mandatory for all parents. And when you are given a mandatory assignment, you must do your best, regardless of your own short-comings.
