by William Taboas, M.A. 

Hot off the press, and just following recent Father’s Day celebrations – I just finished reading a peer-reviewed article published in the Psychological Science journal June 2016 issue, titled “What Predicts Children’s Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets? Not Their Parent’s Views of Intelligence but Their Parent’s Views of Failure”. The title immediately caught my eye; here at the Albert Ellis Institute, we have published many blogs, sold books, and conducted studies examining our irrational beliefs around failure, perfectionism, motivation, and goal-oriented behavior. We tend to adopt most of our beliefs at an early age; there is something science has to say about how we communicate these beliefs, philosophies, and attitudes to our children. Drs. Kyla Haimowitz and Carol Dweck at Stanford University aimed to study how parental views of intelligence and failure contribute to a child’s perception that they have a fixed amount of intelligence they cannot change (i.e., a fixed mind-set; which is associated with doubt, decreased effort, and decreased achievement striving) or contribute to a child perceiving intelligence as malleable (i.e., growth mind-set, which is associated with hard work, good strategies, and instruction).

In the first out of four studies, they compared parents with a failure-is-debilitating mind-set to those with failure-is-enhancing mind-set, and results show that the first group had children who were more likely to think that parents emphasized performance and grades rather than their learning and improvement, and thus were more likely to believe that intelligence was fixed. The second study examined how children get these impressions from their parents, and the researchers found that parents with a failure-is-debilitating mind-set were more likely to endorse performance-oriented reactions to their children’s hypothetical failure (pitying their children, doubting their ability, comforting for not having enough ability) than to parents who endorse learning-oriented reactions (discussing with their children what they can learn and improve from failure). The third study examined how visible parental mind-sets are to children, and results show that children recognize and discern their parent’s beliefs about failure more so than beliefs about intelligence. The fourth study aimed to determine if parental failure mind-sets have a causal effect on their own reactions to their children’s failures, and results indicate that when parents read hypothetical failure scenarios, parents previously exposed to a failure-is-enhancing questionnaires would endorse more learning-oriented reactions (in contrast to performance-oriented) than those to parents exposed to failure-is-debilitating questionnaires.

What is compelling about the article and the results from the conducted studies is that it reports on empirical evidence that children can learn and internalize beliefs espoused by parental figure and  that children can discern more visible beliefs (in the case above, reactions to failure mind-sets) over less visible beliefs (intelligence mind-sets). And most in line with cognitive-behavioral or belief-behavior models, that there is a causal link between beliefs and reactions. What I found illuminating about the study is how growth, learning, and failure-is-enhancing mind-sets reinforce the notion that we are not our behavior since our behavior, and our abilities are not necessarily fixed (or maybe some less so than others). The findings are also a resounding reminder that we are not defined by our failures since failures can be both resolved practically by finding more efficient methods (e.g., problem solving), and also using cognitive-emotive strategies, by changing our attitudes toward failure.

Reference:

Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). What predicts children’s fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets? Not their parents’ views of intelligence but their parents’ views of failure. Psychological Science, 0956797616639727.

William Taboas, M.A.