My cuz pointed me to New York Magazine, who featured this article, called How Not to Talk to Your Kids. This essay details Professor Carol Dweck’s report, which essentially shows that kids can be taught that intelligence can be developed, like a muscle. This is a significant essay which raises very subtle, but very important distinctions in how we praise our children.
Here’s a noteworthy section:
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“Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.”
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1 response so far ↓
Whitney // Mar 13, 2007 at 10:06 am
This is an interesting article. I of course would want kids examined for such things like LD since many gifted kids also have ADHD and underlying learning inperfections. But moreover, smart kids, for whom everything seems to come easily, need to know as much as anyone else, that it’s okay to fail. These kids can become perfectionists, and don’t get that learning requires trial and error.
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