How Parents Accidentally Teach Class Bias
Kids learn from how we talk about success and failure.
If you’ve read my book Hello, Cruel World!, you know that I am passionate about highlighting what we can do as parents to raise kids who push back against bias rather than perpetuate it. In doing so, we can reduce discrimination and inequality in future generations — yet another illustration of the idea that parenting isn’t just caretaking; it’s a form of activism.
One key element that the research points to is word choice: The language we use with our kids quietly shapes how they see, understand, and judge other people.
Earlier this week, I was excited to discover a fascinating study just published in Developmental Psychology that sheds even more light on how parental conversations shape children’s social beliefs. The findings stopped me in my tracks, because they have important implications for how we talk to our kids about success, effort, and intelligence.
We know from past research that adults consider people with lower socioeconomic status to be less competent than people with higher socioeconomic status. Adults often perceive lower-income people as less intelligent and less capable, among other things. Teachers do the same thing, believing low-SES kids to be below average compared with wealthy students, even when the kids have identical test scores.
In other words, wealth becomes a proxy for ability.
Another tendency many of us share is to explain success and failure in overly simple, black-and-white ways — and to attribute their causes differently depending on a person’s socioeconomic status. When people succeed or fail, adults and kids tend to attribute those outcomes to a single cause, which is frequently how smart the person is or how hard they worked (though sometimes they throw luck in as a factor, too). It’s often an either/or story — successful people are either smart or they are hardworking, and if they fail, they are either not smart or not hardworking. Generally, research suggests, adults view successful low-income people as hardworking, and they view successful wealthy people as smart.
At first glance, this may sound harmless — even flattering. Who doesn’t want to be described as hardworking? But the implications are surprisingly consequential, and less privileged “strivers” often end up at a disadvantage. There’s convincing research suggesting that people tend to privilege and prefer natural talent over effort (kids do this too.) Among other things, when hiring employees, bosses tend to hire “naturals” over more even qualified candidates.
There’s another problem, too: If we characterize the success of lower-income people as being the result of hard work, we can also blame their lack of success on a lack of effort. Suddenly, there’s less of a need to address the structural barriers to success: if less privileged people fail, it’s their own damn fault. And just like that, inequality can start to look fair — even deserved.
In the new study, the researchers — who included the University of Amsterdam’s Eddie Brummelman and NYU’s Andrei Cimpian, names you may recognize from my books — wanted to know whether kids, like adults, view low-income people as being more hardworking than smart. They also wanted to see whether kids aligned with their parents in these beliefs, as that would suggest that parents transmit these ideas — intentionally or not — through everyday conversation. (We know, for instance, that when parents believe boys are smarter than girls, their kids do, too.)
To find out, the researchers invited 251 kids between the ages of 8 and 13, as well as one of their parents, to participate in an experiment. The subjects each read a series of vignettes about hypothetical children who succeeded or failed on school tests. Some of these kids were portrayed as low-income, while others were portrayed as high-income, based on various cues (the size of their houses, how many cars they have, whether they go on expensive vacations, etc). The subjects were then asked how smart and hardworking they thought each child was, and they were also asked why they thought each child succeeded or failed on the test.
The results were striking. The child subjects rated low-SES kids as more hardworking than smart, and they rated high-income kids as more smart than hardworking. When lower-SES kids did well, participants attributed their successes to effort rather than intelligence; when those kids failed, they attributed their failure more to a lack of intelligence than to a lack of effort. Importantly, the children’s stereotypes were similar to those of their parents. When parents showed stronger stereotypes, their children did too.
When I read about these findings, I immediately wondered about their implications for growth mindset. Growth mindset is a research-based approach for fostering motivation that prioritizes tying successes to effort rather than to innate ability. When practicing growth mindset, parents are encouraged not to describe their kids as “smart” or “a natural” but instead to tie kids’ achievements to their efforts. (For more on growth mindset, read this and this.)
So….if effort isn’t always the safest thing to emphasize, what should parents do instead? Thankfully, the authors address this question in the paper. The solution isn’t to stop valuing effort or to abandon growth mindset altogether. Rather, they suggest emphasizing that effort and ability work together — that intelligence isn’t fixed, but something that can grow and develop through effort. We should push against the idea that a successful person must be either hardworking or smart, and we shouldn’t communicate that effort compensates for a lack of ability. Instead, we can help kids understand that people can be both — and that effort can actually build intelligence and ability over time.
Based on this research, we may also want to avoid attributing the successes of privileged people to intelligence (e.g. “they are rich because they are smart,”) and we should be cautious about always praising upwardly mobile people as strivers or go-getters. As I discuss in Hello, Cruel World!, we should also try not to describe entire groups of people as being a certain way (e.g. “rich people are successful," “boys can’t sit still”) because this fosters the idea that people in the same social group all share the same underlying “essence.” Psychologists call this “essentialist thinking,” and it can easily fuel stereotypes.
To be clear, these are difficult distinctions! And if you’ve ever praised someone as hardworking — or described someone else as naturally talented — you are very much not alone. You also haven’t screwed up your kids. Still, in the future, it might behoove us to be aware of the tendency to explain successes and failures differently depending on who we’re talking about. This research is a helpful reminder that the stories we tell about success and failure matter: The explanations we casually offer today can quietly shape the beliefs our kids carry into the future, how fair the world looks to them, and whether or not they choose to fight inequality.
Good article. I have emphasized the relationship of success to where one starts off. But if you overemphasize that you can deprive your kids of their own earned success. As you write, it's a balance among multiple factors.