If you are interested in this topic, please check out a previous post on defining the growth mindset. This theory comes from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. This post focuses on practical steps you can take to help your child grow his or her growth mindset.
A review:
What is a growth mindset? A growth mindset is the belief that our skills and abilities change over time with practice as we try new tasks. So, we may not be good at drawing when we start, but our skills can improve with practice. The growth mindset philosophy suggests that by continuing to practice a task, we get good at it. How? By believing that your skills will improve with practice. By putting hard work into a skill, we improve and then excel.
1. Tell Stories of the Growth Mindset in Action
If you are a teacher, tell success stories of persistence. For example, tell about a student who thought they couldn’t learn a certain subject. How did they persist to succeed? If you are a parent, tell a story of your own success through hard work. For example, tell a story of when an academic task was difficult for you, and how you stuck with it to improve.
2. Encourage The “Big Oops”
If you are going to make a mistake, make it messy and juicy. Wait. What?? My generation (and likely yours too) prized excellence and perfectionism. That perspective can be counterproductive in the case of the growth mindset.
In fact, the growth mindset encourages an entirely different perspective. Instead of shrinking from failure, embrace mistakes. After all, we all make mistakes. In fact, by making mistakes we often learn our best lessons. Talk about your mistakes and what you learned. Encourage your child that failure (and trying again) makes our brains even stronger.
3. Use Specific Praise
Instead of:
“Nice job, that was easy for you!”
Try:
“That was a long and hard worksheet. You stuck to it and finished the whole thing. How wonderful!”
Instead of:
“I was never good at math either!”
Try:
“I can tell you are working hard on this. Let’s work together to finish this assignment.”
4. Model Positive Self Talk
Children are often confronted with difficult tasks at school. Learning positive self talk to walk them through this process can help make this easier. Practice modeling self talk that is both kind and encouraging.
For example, instead of:
“This is too hard!”
Try:
“This task feels difficult, but I’m learning how to do it.”
Or:
“This is hard, but I can keep trying”
How To Develop A Growth Mindset: A Summary
The most important way to help your child with their own growth mindset is to have one yourself. That means telling stories of the growth mindset in action that you’ve seen in your own life. That also means telling stories of failure (or the big oops) and what you’ve learned from them. These stories can be events that happened in the past, but also things that happened that day (or week).
Also, consider your praise. First, replace things like “that was easy” or “good job” with more specific language. I have found while the idea of this is pretty simple, being consistent with this is difficult. Even so, this little effort can lead to big change. When I use this strategy in my clinic, I notice a big difference in my clients.
Also, modeling proactive self talk can be something you do in real time. For example, as you learn new tasks, discuss your own persistence. Try using language like “this is difficult, but I’m going to get better at this.” By modeling this, you provide a low-pressure scenario for your child to see this skill in action.
The Change Starts With You
The best way to help the children in our lives move towards the growth mindset is to be a good example. We need to believe in the growth mindset and practice it ourselves. Although the idea of this is simple, putting this into practice can be the biggest challenge of all.
I hope this article provided useful tips to help your child move more towards the growth mindset. Remember this process takes time and patience. Check in next week for more specific examples of language to use to encourage the growth mindset. After all, sometimes the most actionable way to make a change can be to have a script. See you then!