PRAISE THEIR EFFORTS

According to a Columbia University survey, 85 percent of American parents feel it is important to tell their kids they are smart.

It seems honorable, but is praising your children for their intelligence really the smart thing to do in the long run?

Research has shown that praising children for their effort will help them become more successful than praising them for their intelligence.

When Carol Dweck, the woman who pioneered the research on the effects of praise, was a professor at Columbia, she and her team studied the effects of praise on 400 New York fifth-graders. Children would be taken out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles that were easy enough for all the children to do at least somewhat well. After the first round, the researchers would tell each student their score and then give them a single line of praise.  Randomly divided into groups, some students were told after receiving their score, “You must be smart at this,” and to the other students: “You must have worked really hard,” the first group being praised for their intelligence and the latter for their effort.

For the second round, the students were given a choice
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