Parents’ beliefs about whether failure is a good or a bad thing guide
how their children think about their own intelligence, according to new
research from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The research indicates that it’s parents’ responses to failure, and not
their beliefs about intelligence, that are ultimately absorbed by their
kids.
“Mindsets—children’s belief about whether their intelligence is just
fixed or can grow—can have a large impact on their achievement and
motivation,” explains psychological scientist Kyla Haimovitz of Stanford
University, first author on the study. “Our findings show that parents
can endorse a growth mindset, but they might not pass it on to their
children unless they have a positive and constructive reaction to their
children’s struggles.”
Despite considerable research on mindsets, scientists have found
little evidence to suggest that intelligence mindsets are handed down to
children from their parents and teachers. Haimovitz and psychology
researcher Carol Dweck, a pioneer in mindset research, hypothesized that
parents’ intelligence mindsets might not transfer to their kids because
they aren’t readily observable. What kids might see and be sensitive
to, the researchers speculated, is their how parents feel about failure.
Haimovitz and Dweck surmised that parents convey their views about
whether failure is positive or negative through their responses to their
children’s setbacks. For example, parents who typically show anxiety
and concern when their kids come home with a poor quiz grade may convey
the belief that intelligence is mostly fixed. Parents who focus instead
on learning from the poor grade signal to their kids that intelligence
can be built through learning and improvement.
In one study, the researchers asked 73 parent-child pairs to answer a
series of questions designed to tap into their individual mindsets. The
parents rated their agreement with six statements related to failure
(e.g., “Experiencing failure facilitates learning and growth”) and four
statements related to intelligence (e.g., “You can learn new things but
you can’t really change how intelligent you are”). The children, all
4th- and 5th-grade students, responded to similar statements about
intelligence.
As expected, there was no association between parents’ beliefs about
intelligence and their children’s beliefs about intelligence.
However, parents’ attitudes toward failure were linked with
how their kids thought about intelligence. Parents who tended to view
failure as a negative, harmful event had children who were more likely
to believe that intelligence is fixed. And the more negative parents’
attitudes were, the more likely their children were to see them as being
concerned with performance as opposed to learning.
And the researchers found that parents’ beliefs about failure seemed
to translate into their reactions to failure. Results from two online
studies with a total of almost 300 participants showed that parents who
adopted a more negative stance toward failure were more likely to react
to their child’s hypothetical failing grade with concerns about their
child’s lack of ability. At the same time, these parents were less
likely to show support for the child’s learning and improvement. Their
reactions to the failing grade were not linked, however, with their
beliefs about intelligence.
Most importantly, additional data indicated that children were very much attuned to their parents’ feelings about failure.
“It is important for parents, educators, and coaches to know that the
growth mindset that sits in their heads may not get through to children
unless they use learning-focused practices, like discussing what their
children could learn from a failure and how they might improve in the
future,” says Haimovitz.
According to Haimovitz and Dweck, these findings could be harnessed
to develop interventions that teach parents about the potential upsides
of failure, showing parents how they can respond to their children’s
setbacks in ways that are motivating rather than discouraging.
This is such an important thing to teach kids. For the last two years of high school and the first three years of college, I believed 100% that when I got a bad grade it was because I wasn’t smart enough to learn the subject material. Analyzing failures and trying new learning strategies until you improve is a life skill. One of my top five goals as a future parent is to teach this.
