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Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

266 点作者 eroo超过 10 年前

26 条评论

ChuckMcM超过 10 年前
I&#x27;ve had mixed thoughts about this over the years. Sadly you only get to raise your kids once, you can&#x27;t try other scenarios and see of there is a better path.<p>Highly verbal kids, and that is generally kids who read a lot, will be told they are smart whether you do it or not. And if you&#x27;re child&#x27;s teachers are telling you how smart they are, and they ask you &quot;Dad, my teacher said I&#x27;m really smart, do you think I&#x27;m really smart?&quot; You&#x27;ll have to decide what the narrative is.<p>That said, it&#x27;s great to reward struggle rather than success and to emphasize that it is through failure that we value succeeding. Everyone I know who shielded their children from failure has struggled later with teaching them how to cope with failure. That isn&#x27;t scientific of course, just parents swapping horror stories, but it has been highly correlated in my experience. Putting those struggles into the proper light is very important.<p>A less obvious but also challenging aspect of this though is that you must teach your children that natural skillsets don&#x27;t determine their worth. You are good at maths but lousy at sports? Makes you no better or worse than someone with the opposite levels of skill. That is much harder as kids are always looking for ways to evaluate themselves relative to their peers. If you endorse that you can find yourself inculcating in them an unhealthy externally generated view of self worth.
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jwmerrill超过 10 年前
&gt; Dr. Carol Dweck... has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth.<p>I&#x27;m sympathetic to Khan&#x27;s overall POV here, but &quot;research says there are basically two kinds of people...&quot; always tickles my skepticism antennae.<p>Claims like this are so often overstated by researchers to punch up an abstract, and then so often simplified further in uncritical 3rd party reports that I wouldn&#x27;t bet a sandwich on the truth of any such claim without seeing the data for myself. C.f. the widely believed and largely unsupported claims about learning styles.<p>Would be nice of Khan to link to the publications so we could decide for ourselves.
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toehead2000超过 10 年前
I think there&#x27;s a flip side to this, too, though. Being told you&#x27;re smart, or good at math, or whatever, can be a motivator. It can encourage you to seek out and develop that talent, and also to persevere when things are difficult. At least for me, personally, when faced with a tough math concept I would think &quot;well Ive been told all my life I&#x27;m good at math and I&#x27;ve been pretty good up until now so I&#x27;m sure I will be able to figure this out.&quot;<p>Giving negative motivation to a kid, saying &quot;you&#x27;re stupid,&quot; is recognized to sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There&#x27;s no reason that &quot;you&#x27;re smart&quot; can&#x27;t work in the same way. I would not be surprised if a lot of this phenomenon of children being negatively motivated from positive feedback ends up having a different explanation than the one posited here.
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jkimmel超过 10 年前
I found this to be very insightful, as I am not familiar with the cited research. It brings to mind my own memories of growing up, and how being told how &quot;smart,&quot; I was could actually act as a hindrance.<p>As the article notes, I was only praised when I got a correct answer, or used a big word without stumbling. In one particular memory, I am afraid of taking a new mathematics placement test in school -- not because of the difficulty, but precisely because I had gotten a perfect score on the last one. There was no room to grow, if I didn&#x27;t get them all right again, would that make me not &quot;smart?&quot;<p>Very simple changes in the language we use with young children could possibly avoid that kind of anxiety in bright youth.
AnimalMuppet超过 10 年前
Here&#x27;s the other side: Kids are often cruel. Kids say demeaning things to other kids. One of the frequent ones is &quot;You&#x27;re stupid&quot;. And some kids are more emotionally fragile than others. I don&#x27;t want my fragile kid to hear &quot;You&#x27;re stupid&quot;, perhaps frequently, without it being countered by affirmation that she is not in fact stupid.<p>But I also don&#x27;t want that to be the equivalent of &quot;participation awards&quot; in Little League. For it to be of any real value, it has to go with teaching her how to actually think.
kiyoto超过 10 年前
I find this campaign&#x2F;propaganda dangerous.<p>I only know of Japan and the US, but as someone who went to one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Japan and universities in the US, I have seen well-educated, smart people with &quot;growth mindsets&quot; struggle later in their lives.<p>1. Regardless of what we say, in many corners of adult life, results are valued over processes. While a superior process has a higher likelihood of yielding a superior result, this is often not the case, and in a perversely Murphy&#x27;s law-esque manner, it turns out to be false at critical junctures of one&#x27;s life. And the deeper the growth mindset is ingrained into you, the more disappointed&#x2F;despaired you find the situation and feel incapacitated and betrayed. Of course, a singular emphasis on results with no consideration for process is equally bad. Most people find their own local optimum between the two extrema, and I don&#x27;t see how a campaign towards one end of the spectrum is all that meaningful or worthy.<p>2. This probably sounds terrible, but not everyone is &quot;smart&quot; as measured by academic performance. Certainly effort is a huge part of the equation, but some minds are better wired for academics than others. And the longer you work at it and hence surround yourself with qualified peers, the more apparent it becomes that not everyone is working equally hard. This realization usually does&#x27;t mesh well with the emphasis on process from one&#x27;s formative education, and many people become jaded&#x2F;hopeless. (And of course, even within academic subjects, there are individual variances). While it is important to try, it is also the responsibility of educators (and adults) to see if the child&#x27;s potential lies somewhere else, or to borrow Mr. Khan&#x27;s words, to see if the child can be tenacious and gritty about something other than academics.
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davidgerard超过 10 年前
My 7yo is really obviously smart and she knows it - top of class in everything. But so are her parents. So we&#x27;re hammering home that smart is <i>not good enough</i> and you have to learn to <i>do</i> things, acquire skills.<p>(Her mum is an excellent role model in this, &#x27;cos she&#x27;s basically competent in a dizzying array of small skills. &quot;If you want to be good at everything like Mummy is, this is how you learn it!&quot;)<p>Basically the hard part is capturing her interest. Anything she&#x27;s interested in, she will absolutely kill. Anything she&#x27;s not interested in, she won&#x27;t bother with. That bit she gets from me ...<p>It also reminds us to set a good example: learn things and do them. Because it doesn&#x27;t matter what you say, it&#x27;s the example you present.<p>That said, I was most calmed by the many, many studies that show that, as long as you don&#x27;t actually neglect the kid, they&#x27;ll probably turn out how they were going to anyway. So helicopter parenting really is completely futile.<p>We&#x27;ve caught her at midnight reading books more than once, so I&#x27;ll call that &quot;huge success&quot; ;-)
edpichler超过 10 年前
&quot;The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset.&quot;<p>Exactly what I feel. Days are becoming too short for such amount of interesting things to do and to learn (Hacker News, Quora, Designer News, Coursera, Khan Academy, TED, Project Guttenberg... the list is long, and it&#x27;s growing...)
brudgers超过 10 年前
The article makes me sad.<p>What makes me sad is the idea that not telling a child she smart is justified so that the child will meet <i>the parent&#x27;s expectations</i>. Telling a smart child they are smart is honest and kind and humane. I believe that in the long run the attitudes toward honesty and humility and empathy are the most important things I instill as a parent.<p>Some things are easy for smart people and not acknowledging that as a factor in my child&#x27;s successes would be dishonest when discussing those successes. It is akin to not acknowledging that a pitcher of cold Kool-Aid is not the product of economic circumstance.<p>Some success is comes from pure good fortune, some comes from just showing up, and some comes from hard work. Talking honestly about when and how each plays a role is my job as a parent. I hope my child develops the ability to distinguish challenge from a checklist of busy work.<p>It&#x27;s not either or. A child can understand that some successes come because the task is easy for them. Others will come from hard work. The can tell the difference between watching an addition video and earning an orange belt.<p>That said, my standard for good parenting is forgiving. Just trying to do a better job than one&#x27;s own parents is hard enough. My parenting advice, for what it&#x27;s worth, is to treat children as antonymous moral agents, fully capable of making intelligent decisions and able to learn from mistakes. Talk with them honestly as such and avoid deceit even when they are small.<p>Because that is when the foundation for their life as a teenager and adult is laid.
yodsanklai超过 10 年前
I don&#x27;t have kids, but I think I would tell them the truth. First, it&#x27;s difficult to define &quot;smart&quot; as it&#x27;s a conjunction of many skills. But even for one given skill, you may be the best in your class or your school, but there are likely millions that are much better than you. No need to worry too much where you lie and try to do the best with what you have.<p>&gt; &quot;Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.&quot;<p>I wonder to which extent this is correct. Sure, it would be nice if it was the case. It&#x27;s a nice myth that anybody can achieve anything with the proper amount of work. I see it all the time in fields such as maths or music. Some people are naturally so much better than others than even a lifetime wouldn&#x27;t be enough to catch up.
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Aerospark超过 10 年前
This is why Salman Khan is one of (if not) the greatest teachers of our generation. When I read this article, I remembered when Khan Academy first started... it was the first attempt to make good education free and easily accessible, exactly the way it should be. Hats off to you sir, thanks for another great lesson I will teach my kids some day :).
QuantumChaos超过 10 年前
While I wish the best for all children, I feel like this kind of discourse has a negative effect on the very intelligent. By downplaying the significance of intelligence, it trivializes the gifts of the truly intelligent, and places an excessive emphasis in the virtue of hard work. I see on HN all the time the claim that hard work beats intelligence. But I have never really worked that hard, I just have an extraordinary ability in mathematics.<p>When I was a child, I was told that I was very smart (which I was) and pressured to fulfill my potential. Other children may be pressured to be hard working and studious. I would rather celebrate people who are naturally gifted, and also people who choose to work hard. What is important is that people&#x27;s actions arise naturally from their own desires, not from external pressure or manipulation.
dalek2point3超过 10 年前
Aaron Schwartz introduced me to Dweck. It has been an integral part of my life ever since: <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;dweck</a>
gaelow超过 10 年前
Regardless of any received training, smart people don&#x27;t usually struggle as much as normal people when they are presented with a new, different kind of problem. That&#x27;s something you cannot learn.<p>Even a kid&#x27;s brain will not &quot;grow&quot; more or less depending on what kind of stimulus he is exposed to. But it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s bad to reward and compliment your kid for struggling and working hard instead of just being naturally good at something. It helps the child to build a character and face problems instead of giving up. The article is right about that.<p>There are also many ways to get a better access to the full capacity of your brain. It&#x27;s not like the movie &quot;Lucy&quot;, but many conditions may prevent you for using it to its full potential: Age, injury or illness, sleep deprivation, stress and exhaustion, lack of nutrients, drug abuse and chemical unbalances, etc. Some of those factors present problems that can be treated or even prevented, and you will (most of the time) function at the same cognitive level as a careless smarter person.<p>Also, the fact that there is no way you can alter your intelligence without altering your DNA doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t use it to discover and apply better problem-solving patterns for a particular discipline, making yourself effectively smarter.
eroo超过 10 年前
I wasn&#x27;t aware of this research. Reflecting on my own schooling experience, however, there is something pleasantly intuitive about it.<p>I&#x27;m always impressed with Salman Khan&#x27;s work.
tokenadult超过 10 年前
A readable popular article about this research, &quot;The Effort Effect,&quot; was published right after Professor Carol Dweck moved her research base from Columbia University to Stanford University.[1] And Dweck has written a full-length popular book, quite readable and helpful for parents, called <i>Mindset: The New Psychology of Success</i>[2] that I recommend to parents all the time.<p>[1] <a href="http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alumni.stanford.edu&#x2F;get&#x2F;page&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;article&#x2F;?articl...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://mindsetonline.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mindsetonline.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/0345472322" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success&#x2F;dp&#x2F;...</a>
BrandonMarc超过 10 年前
One of the first Aaron Swartz essays I read (first of many) was on this very topic. He gives great details about how she experimented with children and games, and how their mindsets manifested themselves, and how she came to her conclusions about fixed vs growth.<p><a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;dweck</a><p>To me, the possibility that anyone can move <i>from</i> fixed <i>to</i> growth is astounding [1] ... that fact itself positively brims with the possibilities it opens up, if only a person can realize they&#x27;re not stuck and they can expand their horizons.<p>Khan&#x27;s description of &quot;interventions&quot; is interesting.<p>[1] I also suspect the converse is equally possible, given the right circumstances ... which is worth keeping in mind, I &#x27;spose.
blazespin超过 10 年前
Great article, lousy title. The point he was making is that smart people are those that appreciate learning more than knowing. The reality is life is very much that - successful people everywhere are those who are always willing to push themselves beyond their comfort zone.
phaet0n超过 10 年前
There is a sort of analogue to this: parents praising their children as beautiful&#x2F;pretty or brave&#x2F;strong. Both vacuously reduce the childs ability to reflect genuinely on their strengths and their source of self-worth. Beauty (or the appreciation of) becomes solely reduced to the physical (and external), and courage reduced to dare-devilism&#x2F;ego-centrism instead of the appreciation of fear and acting to overcome it.
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Swizec超过 10 年前
&gt; Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not; that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure.<p><i>Can</i> intelligence be gained though? I agree that skill can only be gained through effort&#x2F;practice&#x2F;etc. But intelligence ... isn&#x27;t intelligence more like a natural talent than something you can gain?<p>Much like you can&#x27;t just train yourself to have a beautiful singing voice or big boobs or absolute pitch hearing, I don&#x27;t think you can train yourself to be more intelligent. Smarter, yes, intelligenter, not really. It&#x27;s a talent, not a skill.
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spiritplumber超过 10 年前
I kept being told &quot;You&#x27;re smart&#x2F;gifted&quot; when I did something clever, and &quot;You need to try harder&quot; when I didn&#x27;t. Left me with some self esteem issues.
known超过 10 年前
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=433866</a>
riffraff超过 10 年前
so pardon my natural question: was Dweck&#x27;s work replicated?<p>We have believed for decades in the stanford prison experiment, and it was faulty.
ngokevin超过 10 年前
This is common knowledge by now. I didn&#x27;t even have to read the article, just skimmed it. These types of articles really cater to people who were often told they were smart when they were little, or found school to not be difficult.<p>I have even seen non-educated mothers state this fact even while playing poker, &quot;yeah I never tell my son he&#x27;s smart, I congratulate his hard work instead because it changes his mindset&quot;.
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kolev超过 10 年前
So, I should rather lie?
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MisterBastahrd超过 10 年前
If my kid is smart he&#x27;ll figure it out for himself.