Growth Mindset for Kids: The Poster Version Is Wrong, and the Real Version Is Free

Every classroom I taught in had the poster. “Mistakes help me grow.” “I can’t do it YET.” And every classroom I taught in was full of sixteen-year-olds who treated a wrong answer as a small catastrophe, which should tell you something about the poster.

Growth mindset is one of the few ideas from psychology that made it all the way to the school hallway, and on the way it got flattened into a slogan, and the slogan doesn’t work. The idea underneath it does. It just doesn’t live on a wall.

What growth mindset for kids actually means

Carol Dweck’s original idea, from her research at Columbia and Stanford, is simple: children who believe ability is fixed (you’re smart or you’re not) avoid challenges, because a challenge is a chance to find out you’re not, and they fall apart when they fail, because failure is a verdict. Children who believe ability grows with effort seek out challenges, because that’s where growth happens, and they treat failure as information. A growth mindset is the second belief.

The part parents miss is how children come to hold one belief or the other, and Dweck’s most useful study is about exactly that. In 1998 she and Claudia Mueller gave fifth graders a set of puzzles and then praised them one of two ways: some were told they must be smart at this, others were told they must have worked hard. Then everyone got a harder set and did badly. The kids praised for being smart wanted easier puzzles next, enjoyed the task less, gave up faster, and, in a detail I’ve never forgotten, lied about their scores to other kids more often. The kids praised for effort asked for harder puzzles and kept going. One sentence of praise, and the two groups were already living in different worlds.

So: a growth mindset isn’t something you install by telling a child she has one. It’s what a child concludes about herself from how the adults around her respond to what she does, especially to what she does badly.

Does growth mindset work? Read the fine print

The idea has taken a beating in the research since the posters went up. In 2018 Brooke Macnamara’s lab at Case Western ran two meta-analyses covering hundreds of studies and found that the link between a child’s mindset and her grades is weak, and that classroom mindset interventions, the poster-and-lesson kind, have very small effects on achievement on average, with the benefit concentrated in kids who were already struggling or poor. A big national study in 2019 found roughly the same: a short online mindset program helped lower-achieving students a little and everyone else not much.

That sounds like bad news for the idea. It’s bad news for the slogan. The interventions that were tested were mostly a lesson about brains being like muscles, delivered once, in a system that then went right on grading every wrong answer. Of course it didn’t take. You cannot teach a child that mistakes are information while handing her a red-inked test that treats mistakes as a verdict, and I say that as someone who handed out a lot of red ink. The mindset the child adopts is the one the environment actually rewards, and a poster is not an environment.

What I watched

The kids who actually had one were almost never the ones the posters were aimed at. Year after year, the students who surprised me were the ones who struggled academically and kept going anyway, who listened, who tried, who did not quit when the work was hard, and my English language learners most of all, working twice as hard for every sentence with a determination most of the honors kids never had to find. Nobody had taught them a mindset. They had a hard thing in front of them every day and no option but to keep pushing at it, and that built the belief the posters were trying to install. Meanwhile the kids who had been told they were smart their whole lives were the ones who wouldn’t raise a hand unless they were sure.

The rest of my students had all been told, repeatedly, that mistakes help you grow, and they believed it about as much as they believed anything an adult said on a poster. What they’d actually learned, from twelve years of being graded, was that a wrong answer costs you, that the smart kids get it right the first time, and that the safest move with a hard question is not to try. They would not raise a hand unless they were sure. They asked what an assignment was worth before they’d think about it. They were, in Dweck’s terms, textbook fixed mindset, and they’d been marinated in growth-mindset language the entire time. The words didn’t matter. The grades did.

How to actually develop a growth mindset in your child

Since the research says the environment does the work, change the environment, not the vocabulary.

Praise the doing, not the kid. Not “you’re so smart” but “you stuck with that for a long time” or “you tried three ways before that one worked.” Mueller and Dweck’s fifth graders show why: a child praised for being smart has something to lose every time she tries, and a child praised for what she did has something to do again. This is the one change with the most evidence behind it and it costs nothing.

Let her struggle in front of you without fixing it. I’ve written about why struggle first works, and it’s the same mechanism here. A child who is rescued at the first sign of difficulty learns that difficulty is an emergency. A child who’s allowed to sit in it and come out the other side learns it’s weather.

Make failure cheap. Not fun, not celebrated (children can tell when you’re performing), just cheap: no lecture, no disappointment on your face, a quick “huh, what happened there?” and on to the next attempt. The stakes school attaches to being wrong are the whole problem, so lower them at home.

Show your own. Say out loud when you don’t know something and what you’re going to do about it. Let her watch you be bad at something and keep going. Kids believe what they see adults do about a hundred times more than what they see on a wall.

And drop the slogans. If your kid can recite “I can’t do it yet” but won’t try the hard puzzle, the slogan is decoration. The belief is built from evidence, and the evidence is what happens the next time she fails in front of you.

If you homeschool, you’re in the rare position of controlling the whole environment, which means you can actually do this: no red ink, real problems, ownership of her own work. That’s what the Planner and the Student Dashboard that comes with it are built to make ordinary.

One thing

Today, when your kid does something well, describe what she did instead of what she is. “You kept going” instead of “you’re so good at that.” Then notice what she reaches for next.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Growth mindset matters even more for gifted kids, and I wrote about why in signs of a gifted child.

Sources

• Mueller CM, Dweck CS, “Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children’s Motivation and Performance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 1998. Link
• Sisk VF, Burgoyne AP, Sun J, Butler JL, Macnamara BN, “To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses,” Psychological Science 29(4), 2018. Link
• Yeager DS et al., “A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement,” Nature 573, 2019.