Cultivating a Growth Mindset
Written by Kaylee Leone | April 29th, 2024Several weeks after my now nine-year-old son was born, I read an article that cemented my whole trajectory as a parent and changed my professional approach. The article was titled “Why Some Kids Try Harder and Some Kids Give Up”, and was written by Tracy Cutchclow, an author and editor moonlighting as a Huffington Post contributor whose specialty seemed to center around all things parenting.
Looking back, I’m sure I was drawn to the article’s title as my mind was fixated on all of the baby books and articles telling me all the dos and don’ts of parenting. Surely I was expecting somewhat of a straightforward answer to the article’s title— perhaps too much baby talk or not enough restful sleep at night must be the answer, right? Not so much.
The article posited a simple idea: the way that we praise and encourage our children shapes their overall mindset, and is a major factor in how they might persevere through difficult tasks. This premise was based on decades of research from a Stanford psychology professor, Carol Dweck, who concluded that children fall into one of two categories. Dweck calls one group a “fixed mindset” and the other a “growth mindset”. Kids who fall into the fixed mindset believe that their successes are a result of their innate talent or intelligence. In contrast, kids who fall into the growth mindset believe that their successes are a result of their hard work and determination.
Fascinated and curious, I took a deeper look into Dweck’s work. Throughout her research, Dweck gathered groups of children to study the effects that certain kinds of praise can have on a child’s mindset. For instance, in one study Dweck split a group of fifth graders into two groups. When working to complete problems on a test, Dweck praised the first group for their intelligence by saying things such as “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this”. The second group was praised for their effort, with phrases like “Wow, that’s a good score. You must have tried really hard to find the right answer”. When faced with more difficult problems to work on, the group that was praised for their effort tended to opt for the harder questions as they felt that they could learn more. This group was also more likely to continue to feel motivated when faced with additional challenges and retained their confidence as the problems that they faced got harder. When faced with the choice to challenge themselves with harder problems, the group that was praised for their intelligence chose to not increase the difficulty level of the problems that they were tasked with solving, knowing that there was a higher chance for success if they continued with easier questions. This group of kids also lost confidence in themselves more quickly and were much more likely to inflate their test scores when asked to recount them later on.
Another captivating study that I came across detailed Dweck’s repeated analysis of the long-term effects of praise on children throughout their formative years. Several times a year for several years, Dweck and her research team visited dozens of families and recorded them in their normal routines for ninety minutes at a time. All of the children in this particular study were fourteen months old at the start of the study. The researchers took note of how many times the parents of these young children praised their child for their efforts as well as how many times the parents praised children for their character traits. Five years later, Dweck and her researchers revisited each of the families that participated in the first round of the study and surveyed the children on their attitudes towards challenges and learning. The children whose parents tended to praise them because of their intelligence tended not to seek to be challenged as they were fearful that they wouldn’t appear smart if they failed. These children also sometimes felt down when they would not be easily able to pick up a new skill. The children whose parents praised them for their efforts were eager to challenge themselves and were less likely to give up on tasks when faced with failure.
The more I read, the more I ruminated on just how important Dweck’s work was. Not only did I understand how much of a positive impact encouraging my son for his efforts could have on his entire outlook on life, but I also came to learn that these concepts of praise could also be applied to the students that I supported in my profession. At the time, I was working for a massive education company that provided financial aid and student support services for tens of thousands of students throughout the country. Many of my communications with these students were regarding difficult and complex topics such as the affordability of college, tax filing errors, and student loan payments. I came to see that if I offered a little encouragement throughout the way, my students—and oftentimes even their parents—wouldn’t be as dispirited by the paperwork required to complete their admission and financial aid documents. Simple reassurances like “Your hard work paid off, your financial aid application was flawless”, or “We’re nearly finished, your diligence has made all the difference” really helped to remind my students that these intimidating tasks weren’t as scary as they might have seemed at first glance.
As I progressed through my career and my caseloads began to include graduate and doctoral programs, I was often able to tell which students had a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. Confident and curious students who worked to complete the yearly heap of aid and scholarship paperwork faced the task early, oftentimes within days of forms becoming available. These students didn’t hesitate to reach out to me with their questions and often sought out additional avenues to help them finance their educations. Inversely there were many students who despite being familiar with the same yearly forms would approach the task with a sense of doom and gloom, oftentimes very close to—or even after—the deadlines for aid applications would close. These students were difficult to get in contact with, repeatedly not responding to my phone calls and emails trying to assist them with the forms that required completion.
The students that I believed to have a fixed mindset, those students who struggled to tackle their aid paperwork, required a bit more TLC than those curious and proactive students of mine. Other than proactively reaching out to these students as early in the school year as possible, I didn’t know how best to help these students of mine. I thought to myself “If a fixed mindset leads students to avoid challenges, how will I ever get these students to approach the struggle that this paperwork proves to be each and every year?”. So seven or eight years after first reading Tracy Cutchclow’s article on Carol Dweck’s work, I again found myself in a deep dive into Dweck’s work, and rereading “Why Some Kids Try Harder and Some Kids Give Up”.
I was once again amazed and inspired by Carol Dweck’s research. Dweck’s study of high schoolers and college students demonstrated that children who were raised with a fixed mindset were able to increase academic resilience, raise grade point averages, and feel more confident in tackling college-related challenges if they were taught that the brain is like a muscle and that intelligence is not fixed. With this in mind, I encouraged my more hesitant students to rise to the challenge in front of them, even should they stumble along the way, so that they can come out the other side with new insights that will help them to be even more prepared for the next round of paperwork. Slowly but surely, I saw many of these students come out of their shells to chip away at the stack of paperwork that they had previously been flustered with completing. I was surprised to realize that these worrisome students were often more likely to be proactive in reaching out to me the next year when their form reminders went out rather than waiting until the last minute as they had done in prior years.
I’ve since kept Carol Dweck’s work in the forefront of my mind, whether it be communicating to my son, with students and their families about financial aid, or while coaching elementary kids in soccer. I truly believe that cultivating a growth mindset in children is one of the easiest ways that we can help children realize their full potential.
By keeping Carol Dweck's work in mind and applying it in various areas of our lives, we can make a difference in the lives of those around us. Whether it be communicating with our children or in our professional spheres, we can all play a role in fostering a growth mindset in the next generation. I truly believe that cultivating a growth mindset in children is one of the most powerful ways that we can help children achieve their full potential.
To read Tracy Cutchclow’s “Why Some Kids Try Harder and Some Kids Give Up” article or to check out Carol Dweck’s work, follow the links below.
1. Cutchlow, Tracy. “Why Some Kids Try Harder and Some Kids Give Up.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/why-some-kids-try-harder-and-some-kids-give-up_b_5826816.
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