Competency and Motivation - Part 4
Last month we explained that parents can have a great deal of input concerning their children’s emerging competency and motivation. They can guide their children to address small and great challenges, and then step-bystep walk them through the stages of effort that lead to success. But more importantly, not only should parents help their children establish early competencies, they should also help fashion a mindset that will propel children into a lifelong pathway that is motivated toward achievement, a life whose premise is to grow, blossom, and reinvent itself year after year, decade after decade. Carol Dweck, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist and author of Mindset – the New Psychology of Success, calls this disposition toward life a “growth mindset.”
To understand the meaning of “growth mindset” it helps to understand its converse, a “fixed mindset.” With a fixed mindset, children (and often parents) believe that ability and talent are fixed: either a child is endowed with specific skills and talents or he is not. In this mindset, a child, after only a few experiences, makes assumptions about his innate abilities. For example, because he does not understand how to do a particular math problem, or how to write a clear paragraph, or hit a baseball, the child concludes that he “is just not good” in this area. Based upon this outlook, it becomes a child’s habit to make quick judgments about his abilities, and these premature judgments determine whether he will stretch forward toward greater competencies or use a contrived belief about “inability” as an excuse to give up.
Usually it is not in the child’s mindset (unless an adult intervenes) to reason, “It doesn’t matter whether I am presently good at mathematics or writing or baseball, because if I am not “good at it” I will study, practice more, and work harder. Eventually I will get it and I will do it well.” A fixed mindset, however, does not have strategies to face setbacks or failures. Instead the fixed mindset exercises coping mechanisms. The child will find someone or something to blame for his failure, “I am just not smart in math. This material is too hard. My math teachers are not good.”Furthermore, the fixed mindset lets the child shirk his responsibility to learn and consequently limits any achievement. Having a fixed mindset makes effort disagreeable and leaves the child without any strategies to improve and grow. The growth mindset, on the other hand, looks at ability and talent as having expanding potential. It recognizes what research has confirmed: the brain is like a muscle and if exercised properly its capacity and functionality can grow.
The growth mindset doesn’t care whether the child’s early experience at any given activity is successful or not because it knows that talent grows by effort. Through practice, exercise, self-discipline and perseverance, the child will become competent. With a growth mindset, the child develops strategies for facing challenges, dealing with setbacks and failures, finding new and creative pathways to success. The growth mindset enables. It mpowers. In the course of a lifetime, those with a growth mindset are ever-expanding their skills and talents because facing challenges and solving problems has become a way of life. Those with a growth mindset are continually making their own life and the lives of those around them rich and full.
Next month we will examine the attributes of a fixed mindset and explore how to cultivate these traits in our children.
By Charles Debelak
