The Secret to Parenting Smart Children (Part 2)

    The second and no less interesting part of the article. The influence of attitudes on work and personal life, recommendations for the upbringing of “right” children, as well as my additions and best comments to the first part on Habré and LiveJournal .

    In the fight against flaws
    The belief in the constancy of intelligence also reduces the desire of people to admit mistakes or fight and get rid of their shortcomings at school, at work and in personal relationships. A study published in 1999 examined 168 students who had just enrolled at the University of Hong Kong, where teaching and learning is in English. My three colleagues and I found that students with a focus on excellence who did not pass the entrance exam in English were much more inclined to take a corrective English course than poorly knowledgeable students with a goal of constancy. Students who understand intelligence as something unchanged were obviously reluctant to acknowledge their shortcomings and therefore missed the opportunity to correct them.

    Consistency can likewise impede communication and promotion in the workplace, forcing managers and workers to ignore or disapprove of advice and constructive criticism. A study by psychologists Peter Eslyn and Don Vandewall from Southern Methodological University and Gary Lefem from the University of Toronto shows that managers with a persistent attitude are less likely to seek or approve feedback from their employees than superiors with a focus on improvement. Presumably, managers with a focus on improvement see themselves as “incomplete” and understand that they need to receive feedback in order to become better, and bosses with a goal of constancy see criticism as exposing their lack of competence. Considering that other people are also unable to change, such superiors less often teach their subordinates. But after Eslyn, Vandewall, and Lefem explained to managers the value and fundamentals of a commitment to improvement, they more willingly taught their employees and gave them advice.

    Attitudes can also affect the quality and duration of personal relationships, as they affect the desire and unwillingness of people to cope with difficulties. People with a tendency to constancy are less likely than with a tendency to improve, reveal problems in their relationships and try to fix them. This is evidenced by the results of a study conducted in 2006 by me together with the psychologist Lara Kammrat from Wilfrid Lourie University in Ontario. After all, if you think that a person’s personality traits are more or less unchanged, correcting relationships seems pretty much pointless. People who believe that people are changing and growing, on the contrary, are sure that resistance to the problems of relations will lead to the resolution of these problems.

    How to praise
    How do we cultivate a cultivation attitude in our children? One way is to tell them about the achievements that have resulted from hard work. For example, conversations about geniuses-mathematicians born with a special mentality develop in children an attitude toward constancy, but the description of the great mathematicians who fell in love with mathematics and achieved amazing results develops an attitude toward perfection. People also educate attitudes through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should develop a child without ceasing to tell him how talented and smart he is, our studies indicate that this strategy is wrong.

    I and a Colombian psychologist Claudia Muller conducted a study in 1998 among several hundred fifth graders, asking them questions from the non-verbal IQ test. After the first 10 tasks that most children did well, we praised them. We praised some for their abilities “Wow ... this is a really cool result. You think well. ” We praised the others for their efforts: “Wow ... this is a really cool result. You must have tried a lot! ”

    We found that praise of the intellect caused an attitude of constancy more often than approving pat on the shoulder for the efforts made. Those who were praised for their quick wits, for example, were afraid of a difficult task — they wanted it easier — much more often than those who were praised for their efforts. (Most of those encouraged for work asked for complex tasks, by solving which, they could learn new things). When we gave everyone complex challenges, the students extolled for intellect became discouraged, doubting their capabilities. And their grades, even for simple tasks that they were given after difficult ones, were weaker in comparison with their previous results of solving the same problems. On the contrary, students praised for their zeal did not lose confidence in the face of complex issues, and their results in solving simple problems improved markedly after solving complex ones.

    Creating Your Own Attitude
    In addition to cultivating an advancement attitude with praise for diligence, parents and teachers can help children by explicitly instructing the brain to be a learning machine. Blackwell, Tresnievsky and I recently held a seminar for 91 students whose math grades worsened in their first year in high school. 48 students attended only classes in the subject, and the rest also went to classes, in which they learned about the installation for improvement and its application to school activities.

    In the classroom installation excellence students read and discussed an article titled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that grows stronger with frequent use, and that training makes brain neurons grow into new connections. After such instructions, many students began to see in themselves the trainers of their brain. Bullies and bored sat quietly and recorded. One particularly violent boy looked up during the discussion and said: "Do you mean that I will not necessarily be a dumbass?"

    During the semester, math grades in children who studied only the subject continued to deteriorate, and in those who had completed the training, the installation for improvement began to return to their previous level. Despite the fact that teachers were not aware of the difference between the two groups, they reported noticeable changes in motivation in 27% of students attending additional classes, and only 9% of students in the control group. One teacher wrote: “Your classes have already yielded results. L. [our violent boy], who never made an effort and often did not submit the task on time, went to bed one time late in order to complete the task ahead of schedule and to give me a check so that I could check it and give me the opportunity to improve. He got 4+ (although he usually studied in threes and deuces). ”

    Other researchers repeated our results. Psychologists Katerina Goode in Columbia and Joshua Aronson and Michael Inzlicht at the University of New York reported in 2003 that the improvement program helped improve math and English grades in seventh graders. In a 2002 study, Aronson, Goode (then a student at the University of Texas at Austin) and their colleagues found that college students began to enjoy school more, they appreciated it more and received better grades after completing a graduate school.

    We placed this course in an interactive program called Brainology, which will be widely available in mid-2008. Six of its modules tell students about the brain - what it does and how to make it work better. In a virtual laboratory of the brain, users can click on areas of the brain to receive a description of their functions, or on nerve endings, observing the formation of connections in the learning process. Users can also recommend virtual students tasks in order to learn how to cope with school difficulties; users also keep an online practice diary. [missing paragraph about reviews about Brainology]

    Teaching children such knowledge is not only a trick in order to make them learn. People really differ in intelligence, talent and ability. Nevertheless, research leads to the conclusion that great achievements, and even what we call a genius, are usually the result of many years of passion and selfless work, and not a natural consequence of the gift. Mozart, Edison, Darwin and Cézan were not just born talented; they nurtured him with intense and prolonged labor. Likewise, hard work and discipline help much more in school than IQ.

    Such lessons apply to almost all human endeavors. For example, many young athletes value talent more than hard work and because of this they become untrained. Also, people do not achieve much at work without constant praise and enthusiasm to maintain their motivation. If we cultivate a focus on improvement at home and in schools, we will give our children the tools to succeed in their goals and become them as the best workers and citizens.

    PS. Personally, I really liked this article, I, like many others, recognized Jonathan in myself, but I urge caution in the concept of "installation for improvement." The education of this attitude may well lead to excesses; the child will not be happy in life. In the end, the task of education is not to teach children to earn twice as much money, but to teach them to realize their desires, their inner potential, and more often to get high from the realization of their ideas and desires - the strongest and most positive of our internal drugs.

    From comments: A

    joke on the topic: A
    Russian mother chastises a nagging son: “Vanya, are you a fool? Why are you doing this? "
    Jewish mother (the situation is the same):" Osia, you are a smart boy! Why are you doing like this?"

    The main thing is not to force the child to try. “I try” is a very destructive statement. It can put a person in the “diligence” scenario. Only usually does this effort end with nothing. Since the final result is not laid down in the script itself (for example, “I will do it”), but only the process of achievement. So you can try all my life)

    very many students are faced with the difficulty of passing exams at the university, especially those who spent no more than half an hour on homework and never read the theory and took it in the classes “4” and “5”. After entering a higher education institution, and often settling in a dormitory as well.) These students at first understand the same school curriculum, do not try to learn something new ... and out of boredom they learn the world that opened up to them in freedom from parental control and the company of many new friends. On exams, such students can be very very bad ...

    "I believe that even genius can be surpassed by hard work" © one courageous person.

    like us, Jonathans, a lot, ah!

    I had several such periods right, at first everything turns out, then you think that you are so smart at first, and after that you stop developing until you start to feel sick from yourself. Innate qualities give a head start, but if you don’t move, you will be overtaken.

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