Giving an "A" for effort… The Praise Malaise, part 2 In the last Daily Dose, I started to show you some new evidence that today's self-esteem-based parenting is actually ruining kids instead of spurring them to new heights of achievement and personal success. As though the correlation between the rise of this philosophy of parenting and increasing rates of childhood depression, addiction, medication, and obesity over the past 30 years weren't enough evidence… But I digress -- back to how all the praise we're heaping on kids (telling them they're smart, special, or gifted) is wrecking them. According to the 5-page New York magazine expose` that I'm using as source material for this series, 85% of American parents think it's important to tell their kids that they are "smart." However, a new study straight from the Big Apple's public school system shows that this simple adjective may actually hinder kids' academic performance. For the last decade, a team of Columbia psychologists studied praise's effects on kids in a dozen or more New York public schools. Their marquis research focused on 400 fifth-grade students. These kids were first challenged with a relatively simple puzzle - one that all of them (no matter how intelligent) could perform fairly well on. Researchers gave each student a score based on how completely they'd solved the puzzle. After this, they were randomly divided into 2 groups for study. One of the groups was praised on how SMART they were in completing the puzzle, the other on how much EFFORT they put into solving the puzzle. Now here's the interesting part… Both groups of kids were then given a choice of which puzzle to try next. They were all told the same thing prior to choosing: That one of the puzzles was hard, but that they'd learn a lot by trying it - the other easy, like the first puzzle. And guess what? Fully 90% of the "effort" praise group chose to tackle the harder puzzle, while the bulk of the "smart" kids opted for the simple test! This means that praising kids for their gifts (smart, pretty, special, etc.) instead of their perseverance teaches them NOT to risk undertaking any activity that might undermine the self-esteem they've developed through natural, effortless success - what their parents and teachers have emphasized with their praise. Does this sound like good parenting to you? But wait, there's more… After offering these kids a choice of whether to try a hard or simple puzzle, the Columbia researchers then challenged both groups with a puzzle they'd ALL FAIL. The purpose of this was to set up round 4 of the test - in which they all were given a puzzle that was just as simple as in the first round (the round in which everyone performed well). And here's the real kicker in all this: After a forced round of failure, the "effort" group still scored an average of 30% better on this last simple puzzle than they had on the first one - which was identical in difficulty. The "smart" group performed 20% worse! Bottom line: Kids who are programmed by their parents and teachers to believe that they are "smart" reason (quite intelligently, I might add) that they shouldn't HAVE to expend effort to complete a challenge. They become convinced that if they can't do it easily, it's either impossible or beyond their intelligence, and they give up. That's a textbook recipe for underachievement - a malaise that afflicts a huge number of "smart" kids, as any guidance counselor, psychologist, or teacher can tell you… Now, let me be clear here. I'm not saying that praising kids is bad for them. I'm simply saying - as I have many times before - that the way most modern parents do it (telling kids they're smart or pretty instead of industrious and hard-working) is setting them up for LOW self-esteem when they fail at anything… Which leads to more failure, and a greater chance of all kinds of problems in life. | 
