Seeing the benefits of failure shapes kids' beliefs about intelligence

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/afps-stb042816.php

Public Release: 28-Apr-2016
Seeing the benefits of failure shapes kids' beliefs about intelligence
Association for Psychological Science

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."

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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.

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