Praising Children

One of my favorite articles on child rearing is "Praise and intelligence: Why telling kids they are smart makes them act dumb."

I never would have thought this way on my own, but I have made an effort to follow its advice.  At first, I frequently caught myself praising Jackson for an ability or trait, but now it is (almost) natural to praise his effort or action.

For instance:  "Jackson, I liked how you put away your train track." rather than "Jackson, you are so tidy".

I initially read the article over two years ago, but it came to mind again when I was recently listening to a Freakonomics podcast (audio and transcript here) on motivation and the guest, Charles Duhigg, explained the idea of "locus of control".  He describes locus of control as follows:

So, in many ways, the foundation of motivation is what’s known as the “locus of control” in psychology. And everyone either has an internal locus of control, which means that they believe that they control their own fate or an external locus of control, which means that they think things just happen to them and they’re powerless.

Later in the discussion, they continued on to give an example in terms of children, citing the same academic research as the first article.

Like, for instance, there’s been experiments that show that when teachers tell kids that they’re really smart, that they did well on a test because they must be really smart — that actually triggers our external locus of control because most people don’t believe that they have any influence over how smart they are. It’s either something you’re born with or it’s not. Whereas when teachers tell kids, “You did great on this exam, you must have worked really hard” — that reinforces an internal locus of control because we all know, “I choose how hard I work.” And what we’ve found is that self-motivation and motivation in general seems to rely on believing like we’re in control.

While I admire an internal locus of control, I also like to keep in mind the sentiment of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Alright, that's enough philosophizing for this engineer :-).