The Nitty Gritty of Growth Mindset

It's trendy. It's important. But what does it mean and how do we nurture it?

Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.

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And now, onto this week’s parenting question.

Dear Is My Kid the Asshole,

My 5-year-old refuses to work at things she isn’t immediately good at. I keep telling her that she’ll improve, but she says she doesn’t want to improve, she just wants to be great already. As you can imagine, she gives up a lot, and I am very frustrated and worried. Help!

Fondly,

I Quit

Dear I Quit,

Although what your daughter is experiencing is related to perfectionism — which I addressed in an earlier newsletter — at its root, it’s not really about perfectionism. It’s more about mindset.

At first, I was hesitant to cover growth mindset here, because I assumed every parent has been repeatedly hit over the head with the concept and is sick of hearing about it. (And also, because I talk at length about it in my book.) But when I asked my Instagram followers, they overwhelmingly disagreed. They want to learn more about growth mindset.

So here goes. First, let me start by explaining the other kind of mindset, the one that many of us know well because we were probably raised by parents who fostered it: Fixed mindset. When people have a fixed mindset, they believe that ability and intelligence are just that: Fixed. They think people are essentially born smart or not so smart, that people are naturally good at things or they’re not. When we think of ourselves as not very good at math, or very good at art, we are thinking in a fixed mindset. Likewise, when we tell our kids You’re so smart or You’re so good at ballet or You’re a natural on the soccer field, we are fostering a fixed mindset in our kids. We’re painting ability and smarts as black and white — as things you essentially either have or you don’t. (By the way, if you’re skeptical that intelligence is malleable, in my book I discuss evidence to suggest that it can be.)

The problem with having a fixed mindset is that it backfires when people encounter challenges or failures. Let’s say you’ve told your kid that she’s great at math, and then she gets a D on a math test. If she has a fixed mindset, she’s going to begin to doubt the ability you told her she had. Maybe, she starts to think, I’m actually bad at math. And if I’m bad at math, then what’s the point in trying?