MINDSET
by Jacqueline Kluger, Ph.D.
Is it possible to feel good about failing?
Something that Brooklyn parents are all too familiar with is the pressure put on children, from a young age, by our schools. In particular, the process of applying to middle and high schools can be overwhelmingly stressful for many children who, in other cities or suburban neighborhoods, would not have to engage in anything like this until they are juniors or seniors in high school. No matter how hard parents and teachers try to give children the impression that “it doesn’t matter,” the system is set up to say otherwise.
I joined Interactive Discovery after spending two years conducting psychoeducational assessments. Many of my students attended public elementary or middle school in our city. I heard from parents again and again that one of their goals for our therapeutic assessment process was that their child would walk away feeling the she has strengths and has the potential to be a successful learner even if some things in school were hard. Parents often told me that their child was feeling intense pressure to be a perfect student, even though they had worked hard to avoid sending that message at home. Students felt particularly anxious about having good grades so that they could get into a good middle or high school. The blow of being rejected from a choice school was devastating, and our fourteen-year-olds were hardly more equipped to handle the upset than our eleven-year-olds.
Unfortunately, without overhauling our city’s entire school selection framework (though this could be in the works, as our specialized high schools come under fire for racial and economic segregation), it is hard to protect our students from this emotionally taxing process. Although a healthy level of stress is useful for children’s development, I have seen too many students feel crushed under the intense pressure of our city’s competitive schooling atmosphere. The same can be said for children attending one of our city’s many rigorous private schools, where students are often expected to maintain a certain level of academic performance and are surrounded by many high-performing peers.
Whenever I meet a family with a child who is experiencing a lot of academic pressure or who is scared to fail (where fail often means any grade below an A), I share a great resource meant to help parents teach their children, directly and indirectly, how to approach their own performance with an open mind and to feel positively about taking risks that may not end with success. This research, by Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, explains how children think about their own cognitive development.
Dr. Dweck’s research on mindset, which is outlined nicely in her book (aptly titled Mindset) and TED talk (The Power of Believing that You Can Improve), found that students with a growth mindset are more likely to take academic risks and readily approach difficult tasks than those who hold a fixed mindset. In short, children and adults with a growth mindset understand the brain as a muscle - the more you flex it, the larger it grows. This is a near-perfect analogy for how brains develop. Think about the baby taking her first steps. She has to try dozens of times, with many falls, before she becomes a skilled walker. Each step helps her brain create new pathways and strengthen the existing pathways that form the mind-body connection that allows for fluid movement. It’s rare to see a baby give up or become frustrated by those early developmental milestones. Why, then, do third graders so often feel that they could never possibly conquer fractions? Often, after just a few years of competitive schooling, where so much emphasis is placed on performance and product, children begin to feel that the only important piece of the puzzle is what they have to show at the end (i.e., the report card). It is much harder for children, even in early elementary school, to appreciate the process of learning. From an early age, children learn that failure is a negative outcome to trying. This makes it hard for them to learn those school subjects that will, inevitable, present a true challenge.
Dr. Dweck’s research thankfully also included useful tips for how to help children develop (or redevelop) a growth mindset. The most important tool that I like to give parents is the power of praise, specifically effort-based praise. When children are praised for doing hard work, trying their best, and tackling a real challenge, they are more likely to approach difficult tasks in the future. On the contrary, when students are consistently praised only for their product or their smarts, they begin to envision their brains as static, or unchanging, vessels. Their goal, then, becomes to show how smart they are and avoid any risk that could lead them to lose this “smart” title. I always encourage parents to incorporate three things into their interactions with their children. First, begin praising them for all their hard work and ignore the product. Second, model their own self-talk that emphasizes the value of hard work and confronting challenges with an open mind. Finally, use non-academic endeavors to teach children directly about brain plasticity, or how our minds grow when we learn how to do challenging tasks. If your child loves video games, for example, you can ask them how long it took them to master a challenging level and how it felt when they failed. The same can be said for rock-climbing, learning a new instrument, or mastering the monkey bars.
Many school have already begun implementing strategies to help students build a growth mindset. Helping students approach failure positively and find their strengths is also a common goal in therapy with children. Parents can support a growth mindset at home by using the three strategies I mentioned above. Most importantly, remember that our children learn best by observing our behavior. Your first step, therefore, might be to work on your own growth mindset and start observing how you approach the failures and setbacks in your own day-to-day life.
