NurtureShock (2 page)

The resulting errant assumptions about child development have distorted parenting habits, school programs, and social policies.
They affect how we think about kids, and thus how we interpret child behavior and communicate with the young. The intent of
this book is not to be alarmist, but to teach us to think differently—more deeply and clearly—about children. Small corrections
in our thinking today could alter the character of society long-term, one future-citizen at a time.

The topics covered in this book are wide-ranging, devoted to equal parts brain fiber and moral fiber. They relate to children
of every age from tots to teens. It could not be further from a paint-by-numbers approach. Specifically, we have chapters
devoted to confidence, sleep, lying, racial attitudes, intelligence, sibling conflict, teen rebellion, self-control, aggression,
gratitude, and the acquisition of language. The prose throughout is our mutual collaboration.

Along the way, we will push you to rethink many sacred cows—too many to fully list here, but some highlights include the following:
self-esteem, Noam Chomsky, Driver’s Ed, the idea that children are naturally blind to racial constructs, emotional intelligence,
warning kids not to tattle, educational cartoons, the early identification of the gifted, the notion that television is making
kids fat, and the presumption that it’s necessarily a good sign if a child can say “no” to peer pressure.

We chose these topics because the research surprised us—it directly challenged the conventional point of view on how kids
grow up.

However, once we parsed through the science and reviewed the evidence, the new thinking about children felt self-evident and
logical, even obvious. It did not feel like we had to raise children “by the book.” It felt entirely natural, a restoration
of common sense. The old assumptions we once had seemed to be nothing but a projection of wishful thinking. Once we overcame
the initial shock, we found ourselves plugged into children in a whole new way.

Sure, he’s special. But new research suggests if you tell him that, you’ll ruin him. It’s a neurobiological fact.

W
hat do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York
City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a
photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo
of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.”
Thomas is one of them, and he likes belonging.

Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come
in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed.
The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the
top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence
when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t
be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately,
concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally
good at and things he wasn’t.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When
Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive
penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather
than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because
you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a
lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine
school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in
the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived
competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they
overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According
to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that
they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like
100 percent.
Everyone
does it, habitually. “You’re so smart, Kiddo,” just seems to roll off the tongue.

“Early and often,” bragged one mom, of how often she praised. Another dad throws praise around “every chance I get.” I heard
that kids are going to school with affirming handwritten notes in their lunchboxes and—when they come home—there are star
charts on the refrigerator. Boys are earning baseball cards for clearing their plates after dinner, and girls are winning
manicures for doing their homework. These kids are saturated with messages that they’re doing great—that they
are
great, innately so. They have what it takes.

The presumption is that if a child believes he’s smart (having been told so, repeatedly), he won’t be intimidated by new academic
challenges. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents
short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York City public school system—strongly suggests
it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually
be causing it.

Though Dr. Carol Dweck recently joined the faculty at Stanford, most of her life has been spent in New York; she was raised
in Brooklyn, went to college at Barnard, and taught at Columbia for decades. This reluctant new Californian just got her first
driver’s license—at age sixty. Other Stanford faculty have joked that she’ll soon be sporting bright colors in her couture,
but so far Dweck sticks to New York black—black suede boots, black skirt, trim black jacket. All of which matches her hair
and her big black eyebrows—one of which is raised up, perpetually, as if in disbelief. Tiny as a bird, she uses her hands
in elaborate gestures, almost as if she’s holding her idea in front of her, physically rotating it in three-dimensional space.
Her speech pattern, though, is not at the impatient pace of most New Yorkers. She talks as if she’s reading a children’s lullaby,
with gently punched-up moments of drama.

For the last ten years, Dweck and her team at Columbia have studied the effect of praise on students in twenty New York schools.
Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly. Prior to these experiments,
praise for intelligence had been shown to boost children’s confidence. But Dweck suspected this would backfire the first moment
kids experienced failure or difficulty.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child
out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would
do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line
of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their
intelligence
. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their
effort
: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one
line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than
the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s
team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the
harder
set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the
easy
test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that
this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done. They’d
chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of
their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start,
responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on
this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked,
unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence
that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests
that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved
on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by
about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort
gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success.
Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount
the importance of effort.
I am smart
, the kids’ reasoning goes;
I don’t need to put out effort
. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic
class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers
weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweck’s
research on praise, and she flatly wasn’t interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85
percent who think praising her children’s intelligence is important.

Jill explains that her family lives in a very competitive community—a competition well under way by the time babies are a
year and a half old and being interviewed for day care. “Children who don’t have a firm belief in themselves get pushed around—not
just in the playground, but the classroom as well.” So Jill wants to arm her children with a strong belief in their innate
abilities. She praises them liberally. “I don’t care what the experts say,” Jill says defiantly. “I’m living it.”