Thanks for sharing this. I have a bright five year-old and, having read articles like this one, my partner and I try praise effort as much as we can.
Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".
It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?
Just my two cents - as long as the grade is what's being praised, the kid won't be fooled- its attainment that's being rewarded, not effort. Find a way to teach them that achievement is hollow (and not true achievement) unless they really worked for it.
My parents were relentless in assessing my effort, not the grade I got - the grade itself was treated as an irrelevance (of course it wasn't to them, but the pretence was enough to fool me). Yes yes you got full marks - but the questions teacher said you needed a calculator to do, can you do them by hand? It's great you're keeping up with classwork - but if you flick ahead a few pages in the textbook you'll find extension exercises, have you done them too?
At the time, I did not appreciate this approach - I could outperform any of my friends and not receive the praise I felt was due me. In fact at 18 I got the highest grades in the UK - and still my parents expressed disappointment because they knew I was capable of higher (I got 100% in one subject, but a second was also attainable with more effort). I'm not saying this was a perfect strategy - it did go a little too far the other way and make me feel I wasn't capable of anything truly impressive.
However this article made me realise how important this was. By moving the emphasis away from the grades, you can define standards that are relevant for you; that genuinely do represent an achievement because they require great effort. For me that meant aiming for things other people said couldn't be done. I did an entire maths A-level from self-study alongside my other qualifications; I switched course at Uni and taught myself the entire first year Cambridge engineering course over the summer, so I could join in second year. However smart you are, there are always goals that require effort, as well as achievement, and you do someone a disservice if you encourage them to settle for less.
I can't speak for your child of course, but I can give you a little story. My wife and I went to the same schools since kindergarden (not same class) to university, so the topics and difficulty were about the same. She always had fantastic grades (90%+) and she got the encouragement that parents usually do ("You're so smart!", "Ohhh yes, she is very smart, she had a 100% on X"). I on the other hand, was an above average but didn't care much so my grades were just a bit better than average (70-80%) but something my father said always stuck with me "I don't want/need you to be a genius, just work hard." That's about what I remember of my parents parenting technique: "Just work hard".
Now, I'm 29, and never excelled at school, dropped out of University after one year, travel across Europe working as a programmer in many interesting projects and can say I live a normal balanced life. I don't dwell much on problems, and accept that things change and I can change.
My wife on the other hand, she has very low self esteem mostly because she believes that what she does is what she is. She can't change it. If she forgets about something she says she is dumb. If she breaks a glass, she says she is clumsy, and has a very hard time believing these things can change. She is stuck at a miserable job because she is too afraid to move and fail at the new one (even though she had better offers). She can't really separate what she 'is' from what she can become. For her, mostly due to the way her parents praised as a child, she came to believe we are born a certain way and can't really change.
Long story to mostly tell you (though, I'm not a parent yet so I can't say I know what the hell I'm talking about) that as long as you can teach your kid that what we become is product of what we do, and not who we are born, she will probably be ok. Try to find thing you can point to hard work. She does her homework? Nice, then tell her next time she gets a good grade "Good thing you did all you homework, see how it payed up". She may still think it was easy, but she her subconscious will link hard work and results.
This reminds me very much of the Carol Dweck's theory on the Fixed and Growth Mindset[1].
I too, was raised on a Fixed Mindset; "You're not good at math/physics/chemistry? That's ok, I'm sure you have other skills.". This caused me some level of discomfort in trying new things (which are necessary for any sort of growth) because at some point I could just reach 'the end of the road' and the limit of 'talent'. This has often caused me to avoid new and challenging things altogether.
Since a year or so I've been trying to adapt the Growth Mindset by interrupting my thought process when I feel this discomfort and (often literally) say to myself that it is not the outcome that matters, but the chance to improve your skills and extend your abilities. Failure is not about you and it should just be a trigger to try harder; the road does not end. I still fall in the same traps I used to, but I've said Yes to more (challenging) things this year than any other year and I haven't 'failed' nearly as much as I thought I would, nor did the failures have the impact I feared them to have. Growth really is a marvelous (and endless) thing.
You don't need to change your feedback, you need to change what she's doing. Get her into some more challenging stuff, stat.
I sailed through my cow-town high school and then got my ass handed to me in the first semester of a competitive engineering program. Academic probation, failed classes, and all the low self-esteem that came with it.
Yes, I eventually figured out how to succeed by working hard, but it would've been better to have known this going in. Plus I had the capacity to learn a lot more as a child than I actually did.
Plus I had the capacity to learn a lot more as a child than I actually did.
I feel like this is true of the majority of people. I, for one, know that when I was doing math in grade school I usually grasped the concept on the day it was introduced, yet was forced to repetitively solve quiz-like problems for weeks afterwards. This only served to make me absolutely hate the idea of math. And I don't believe my ability to understand the concepts was far beyond most of the others in my class. In my classes at least, the pace of instruction was always slowed to the level of the slowest students. I consider it a tragedy that most of my fellow students and I could've been hammering through calculus by eighth grade and instead were barely scratching the surface of algebra.
My story was similar though not nearly as dramatic as your parents'.
I would suggest shifting your parenting focus away from school. If she's truly smart, she is going to be top of her class without any effort for at least another 6-8 years. So, what I would suggest is to first try and cultivate an ethic of going above and beyond, and always doing work you "can take pride in" (when the work is too easy, without established values it can get very hard to keep caring and avoid turning in B- after B-) and second turning her on to more outside of school. When I was a little kid this manifest as a voracious appetite for books and Legos, which fed my imagination and logical thinking. Magic (the card game) was my replacement for chess.
Different kids will be interested in different things, but in general they are hungry to learn, so if school is easy you just have to find that extra interest outside of school and they will go crazy. Science, especially life sciences, geology, and such are usually solid choices because a sharp child is going to be inquisitive about the world around them.
I would have loved for someone to point the numerous events going on for kids all over the world, like NASA summer schools and the like. Your kid is probably a bit young, but if you keep your eyes open, you can find the good stuff in time. As others said, focus away from school sounds good. The nice thing about these activities is that you meet other kids like you (giving you a better frame of reference and tons of awesome friends) and that it's the topic that counts, not how you perform in comparison to the rest of the student body.
This is exactly the reason I have been drawn to HN. Being around people that are smarter than you is great motivation to increase your own knowledge. I only wish I could've been exposed to groups of similarly well-read and knowledgable people at an earlier age.
This is also the reason why good universities seem so attractive to a special kind of people -- they gather people with similar traits to theirs, and makes them focus on their common goal, that is, advancing their knowledge.
Nowadays, there are some really excellent textbooks, so that with enough effort, everyone can learn CS or Math himself, and with some funds also Physics, Chemistry etc. Unfortunately you cannot talk and share ideas with books.
I might respond to that as follows, which has the benefit of both encouraging effort, and being what is most likely the truth:
"It may not seem like a lot of effort now, but that is because you have worked so hard on so many similar tasks in the past; long practice makes for easy work."
Instead of trying to find a way to praise her schoolwork, you could acknowledge that so far she's been finding it really easy, and instead she could take all the extra time she has to explore difficult problems that she finds really interesting.
> We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".
Yeah, in my case that was confusing up until it became insulting, probably somewhere around 7 or 8. Into the teens and adulthood, it might end up encouraging someone to reducing their efforts until they just squeak by, depends on the personality. I'd focus more on figuring out what she actually finds hard or easy, boring or interesting.
Positive reinforcement isn't bad, per se, but that particular statement acts like everything should be hard, which can be just as damaging, albeit in different ways, than acting like everything is easy.
(By the way, if you haven't already, read up on Asperger's syndrome now. A lot of gifted kids have it and go undiagnosed into adulthood. Some end up fine, some end up junkies, almost all have a very confused adolescence and even more confused parents. If your daughter shows any signs, now is the time to start paying attention and trying to compensate. Notably, it can totally screw with how reward works. A lot of us place essentially no value on verbal praise, we require tangible rewards.)
Look up "positive reinforcement", it's a critical piece of context for the discussion at hand. The point is to make sure it's actually reinforcing the desired behavior without undesirable side effects.
But that's my point. You want to reinforce desired behavior, which in this case is effort. If you do something without effort, then what is there to warrant praise?
Whether the task would have required effort by some other hypothetical person isn't really relevant to the point. It would be appropriate to praise me for completing a marathon, but not Haile Gebrselassie.
I think the disconnect here is that you're starting from the premise that effort is the only thing that should be praised.
To start with, that fails to account for things like moral and ethical choices that don't require significant effort, but should still be praised when the correct choice is made.
More seriously, it distorts self-esteem and worldview. Results become unimportant, it is effort alone that matters. A child raised in such an environment will get its ass kicked in the real world where nobody cares about effort, only results.
Effort must be encouraged as a means to an end, not the end itself.
Well, moral and ethical choices aren't really the topic of the article, development of skills is, so that seems like a separate subject.
However, it doesn't seem to me that praising someone for not stealing every day is a good idea either. You should not steal because it's wrong, not because you get praised for it.
I don't know how you interpret the Dweck research as implying that results are unimportant. Why would you expend effort trying to accomplish something that is unimportant? Besides, the research shows that results improve when you encourage a growth mindset, regardless of your philosophical feelings about this.
Sorry, I was wrong. The disconnect is that you're not having anything like the conversation I'm having. I'm not interpreting any particular research done by any particular person, I'm speaking with regard to a particular action and child based on real-world personal experience and general informal psychological education.
Comment threads frequently run far away from the specifics of the originally linked article. You're imbuing the conversation with a context that isn't entirely there.
Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".
It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?