Our little one started to learn to ride a “real” bike this week. Goodbye tricycle! With this has come some failure – like when she tries to keep herself steady once we let go of the back of the bike. It has also meant a few new scrapes and bruises.
I recently read an interesting post by fellow blogger and parenting educator Kelly Bourne about providing encouragement vs. praise. That post, along with seeing Z experience failure with her first attempts at riding solo made me wonder what type of wording I should be using when our budding cyclist fails.
Turns out that well known researcher Carol Dweck (the guru about praise and growth mindset) and colleague Kyla Haimovitz recently published a paper with findings that demonstrated how parents’ views about failures can impact children’s views about intelligence.
Here’s the Main Dish:
- Children’s intelligence mindsets (i.e., their beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or that it can grow) have a strong impact of their motivation and learning. What wasn’t known is how parent beliefs can impact their child’s mindset.
- The researcher thought that parents’ intelligence mindsets might not be passed on to their children because they are not readily seen. What children might see and be sensitive to is their how parents feel about failure.
- By comparing the reactions of 73 parent-child pairs to a series of questions they found that parents’ attitudes toward failure were linked with how their children’s attitudes about intelligence. Parents who viewed failure as a negative, harmful event had children who were more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed (a bad thing) and knew their parents were concerned about performance (vs. learning).
- Several subsequent studies with additional participants confirmed that “parents who see failure as debilitating focus on their children’s performance and ability rather than on their children’s learning”. As a result their children tended to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than something that can be improved.
What Does This Mean for You:
Next time your child experiences a failure consider the following:
- Discuss what your child could learn from the failure and how they might improve in the future. Focus on what they can learn from the experience! For example, “What might you do next time to help you stay balanced on the bike? What do you think might help?”
- Continue to offer praise about your child’s efforts even when they experience failure, For example, “I can tell you were really concentrating! I’d love to see you try again and remember to try and keep the handles straight”.
- When your child fails at something, try your best not to display anxiety, disappointment or that your feeling worried.
All of this will help your child to develop that gut reaction to want to try again, especially if at first they don’t succeed.