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Best parenting advice I ever got was to praise children for hard work, and avoid calling them “smart.” Intelligence becomes a stand in for some measure of goodness or social fitness that after a while it’s hard to know what we’re talking about anymore. Further, it’s seen as innate whereas hard work is something anyone can do. Being “smart” implies there’s a set of “un-smart” kids that don’t have the same fitness or goodness, and since it’s innate, they’ll always be that way in an ungifted underclass. Cue the icky connections to racism and eugenics...

Usually as a parent, seeing your kid as “smart” corresponds to noticing affinity for a kind of interest or task. You’ll help their confidence more to encourage that affinity and notice the hard won accomplishments than just saying they have some magical innate thing called “intelligence”.

8 comments

If you've spent any amount of time in education (or you have any faith in the data), then it is patently obvious that there is indeed a set of "un-smart" kids. We can quibble about how big that group is, but they definitely exist. It's not their fault, they just got a bad set of numbers in the polygenetic lottery or were subjected to environmental stresses that caused lasting damage. Pretending that they're smart is a brutal act of cruelty that only serves to perpetuate inequality.

Some people aren't smart. Some people aren't tall. Some people aren't athletic. Some people aren't beautiful. It is incumbent on us to build a society that affords everyone security, respect and opportunity, regardless of whether they're smart or tall or athletic or beautiful.

Still not convinced? Imagine a society where we just pretended that there was no such thing as physical disability. Paraplegics are just as capable of walking as anyone else if only they get the right training. We shouldn't give paraplegics wheelchairs, we should lend them $150,000 to spend three years at walking school. The blind don't need canes and dogs, they just need extra seeing practice. How barbaric, how inhumane, how very familiar.

I received the label of very high IQ-er early on. Yet, I don’t believe that I’m all that smart. I just spend a lot of time in my head thinking about shit. Oh, and I enjoy solving puzzles.

On the other hand, many of my friends are average IQ-ers, and a few are even below average IQ-ers. Yet, I consider some of them to be very smart, and in some ways smarter than high IQ-ers, especially in niche areas (comedy, expression, intuition, communication, trained skills). They just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shit like I do, and they hate puzzles.

Those areas you mentioned are all skills, where intelligence helps, but practice is far more important. And if your situation is like mine, then those friends probably spend way more time than you practicing those skills.

Instead of analyzing a joke / expression / reaction to death, weighting the subtle differences between synonyms, they probably tried a bunch of times and saw what stuck.

Don't confuse intelligence with experience.

ps. It took me about an hour to write this comment and it isn't any better for it. I probably could've written a dozen in the same time and become much better at expressing my thoughts instead.

Yeah, but an education system is optimising to what it is measuring, can we be sure that it's measuring the correct metrics?

I rather hope you don't teach kids or anyone else, armed as you would likely be with a set of non-evidential assumptions about their mental development including that of drawing a spurious, simplistic and dangerous parallel between physical disability and mental 'disabilities' as you apply it to the non-clinically-referable population.

What would you prefer? That I ignore the overwhelming burden of research on cognitive development? That I pretend that everyone has equal potential for cognitive development, regardless of genetics and environment? That I pretend that we know how to compensate fully for those early disadvantages?

No reasonable person would tell a stunted, sickly and uncoordinated teenager that they could make the NFL combine if only they tried hard enough. It would be an act of cruelty to persuade them of that rather than guiding them towards a more realistic ambition.

We have to accept the very simple reality that while everyone is born with equal rights and equal value as a human being, not everyone is born with equal potential and there is only so much that we as a society can do to ameliorate those differences. We must encourage everyone to achieve their full potential, but we must also recognise that not everyone has the same potential. We must build a society that is fair, decent and humane in spite of that fact.

A great number of non-clinically-referable people have to work extremely hard just to achieve elementary-level literacy and numeracy. Some simply don't have the concentration, memory and cognitive ability required to successfully complete a secondary or post-secondary education. The answer is not to bury our heads in the sand, but to create meaningful opportunities and social support for the millions of people who, through no fault of their own, are currently being shafted by the pointy end of meritocracy.

"You can achieve anything you set your mind to" is a hair's breadth away from "if you fail, it's because you didn't try hard enough". That's an unconscionably callous ideology to base an education system or a society upon.

> a set of non-evidential assumptions about their mental development

I think if you look at the best evidence we have (IQ), it does support the general idea that there are a set of "un-smart" kids. But that depends on the definition of smart. If you're a teacher of a subject in which IQ is a predictor then why not treat individuals differently?

> Being “smart” implies there’s a set of “un-smart” kids that don’t have the same fitness or goodness

You don't like the implications of this, but is it true?

I'd never play soccer as good as Messi, even if I'd practice every day in my life for many hours. Do you think that everyone has the same innate ability to play soccer?

You can replace the example with any sport/music/whatever you like.

Do you think that intelligence is special and everybody has the same intelligence level?

You’re right, as an adult I’m not suddenly going to become a piano virtuoso.

Innateness here is a pretty complicated topic. Hard work at an early age probably has a huge part of molding skills we associate with so-called “intelligence”.

Was Mozart a genius? Or was he working really hard at being a musician from an early age, and thus just very skilled? Would Mozart succeed if we suddenly had to train him to be a Java programmer? Where does the narrow “skill” end and the broader “general intelligence” begin?

I would argue skill is measurable and meaningful, but “intelligence” less so

Mozart was a genius.

Ryo Fukui started playing the piano at 22 (accordion at 18), he did alright for himself.

Mozart’s dad was a great student and his mother’s father was highly educated too. So my guess is, he’d be able to handle Java.

It’s actually easy (in principle) to measure the programming facet of intelligence: CS programs do this with weed-out classes.

These people are outliers. The problem with outliers is that they're so far out of the normal range that it's often difficult/impossible to use outliers' experiences to answer "what causes deviations within the normal range?" Were they gifted from birth? Did they have unique developmental opportunities? Did a radioactive spider bite them just so? We can analyze their lives and experiences, but we often place far too much stock in the facts of that analysis without properly assessing those facts' significance.

Using Mozart & co. as [counter]examples in a discussion about innate potential/intelligence/development is about as useful as using lottery winners to derive recommended savings levels for the general population, or using lightning strike victims to derive recommendations for public safety.

Not at all. They're great tools for understanding how intelligence is multidimensional. There are also math geniuses who are very untalented at music. That tells us something.

> but "intelligence" less so

I don't think there's any problem measuring intelligence, where we've traditionally run into issues is where we start to make policy or social decisions using this data without understanding it's subtleties.

I think Jordan B Peterson has a good classroom video segment[1] on this problem.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM

Less so because its many up if many complex factors. But if there are conditions that negatively affect memory, attention/focus, writing and reading skills, pattern recognition and more to various degree, it's quite likely the opposite is true and that people Excel at all of these to various degree. Now, in the same way not everyone who's super strong is going to apply it to competitive weight lifting, not everyone who's a genius will do anything meaningful with it but that's a separate topic.

I think the point is that if you want to optimize your child, you should reward them for making the most of what they have, rather than rewarding them for something that profoundly have no control over.

Just talk to your kids, teach them what you can, explain the things that you can't teach, and tell them the truth about the things you can't explain (i.e. that you can't explain them)

It exists, but I see those as edge cases. Compared to when someone is asking "am I smart enough", they are really asking if they can move from where they are now, to just a bit higher, the answer is usually "yes". At that level, innateness is irrelevant to those who succeed, and a self-fulfilling prophecy (at least in part) for those who don't.

Even more generally: talk in terms of what they do, not what they are.

For example: you did something bad vs. you are bad.

This applies to adults as well. Talking in terms of what people are gets the ego involved and people resist or become neurotic. Correcting mistakes or behaviour is much easier than identity.

> Being “smart” implies there’s a set of “un-smart” kids

On the flip side, trusting in my intelligence let me persist on problems even when others said they were lost causes. If everyone is equally smart and all that matters is hard work, it doesn’t make much sense to work on different problems from others. (Or on problems others deem to be unworthy.) This leads to a monoculture.

At the end of the day, if you have a smart kid, praise them when they’re clever. If you have an empathetic child, encourage them to explore that. Humans are different.

If I understand you, you are arguing that parents should praise their kids for smartness because it helps kids to understand that they are smarter?

But there is not point doing that, if they are smarter they will figure it theirselves. At the same time if parents are praising them for smartness it would lead smartness to become a part of self-esteem and therefore their psychological well being will be tied with their success to be smart. It is bad, really bad. You cannot just make some more effort and become smarter, smartness is out of control of a person, and if self-esteem based on smartness then...

It is like praising girl for her beauty. Beauty is not completely under her control, and if she grow to not so beautiful woman, than she would have psychological problems through all her life.

From the other side, to work hard or not to work hard is completely under control of a person. And if self-esteem of a person based on working hard it is very good. When she feels bad she make more work to fix her self-esteem, and the fixing of self-esteem hopefelly leads to more success in the real life for her. Isn't it great?

> you are arguing that parents should praise their kids for smartness because it helps kids to understand that they are smarter?

I’m arguing for truthfulness. If your kid is smart, don’t shy from saying so. If they excel in other ways, point those out. Helping us to understand our strengths and weaknesses is a gift parents can give.

> if self-esteem of a person based on working hard it is very good

Not necessarily. It can lead to being a grunt. That’s fine if that makes one happy. But many innovations have been sprung from a combination of intelligence and laziness.

There is subtle difference between praising and telling kid that he/she is smart. Smartness should be unconditional idea for a person. I believe that 3-9 years old is the best period when parent should tell repeatedly to his kid that he/she is smart, pretty, brave and so on. But unconditionally, for child didn't come to an idea that he/she is good only if he/she is smart, pretty and brave. If he/she does, then she would be unable to say something stupid, behave cowardly, or look not so pretty without believing that she is bad. This means also that parent must never tell to his child that he is stupid, coward, ugly and in any other sense have traits that are not socially desireable. Unconditionally.

All books written by psychologists to parents would tell you that. At least all I've read do.

> But many innovations have been sprung from a combination of intelligence and laziness.

If your child would grow to be completely not lazy person, then either you are genius of practical psychology and education, or your child have some inherent traits that make him not lazy and your efforts made little or no difference. The second is more probable. Moreover I do not believe that smart kid can grow non lazy. If he did he is not smart enough to see how he can cut corners.

I know about innovations, and I did some in the past. I wrote programs for automation but you now, I had never seen success because I was a way too lazy to make this programs usable for someone except of me. My programs die when I change job. I was a way too little motivated to do more than just to write the program. And yes, I never believed that I can work hard for more than a few months. I'm "too smart" for a hard work, if I work hard it means for some deep neural net in my head that I'm not smart enough. I got this idea in the school, where I did nothing and known math better than anyone else, because I had read all math textbooks two years ago just for fun. It was supported by my knowledge that my IQ reach 142 and it is very high. I got this idea and I cannot get rid of it even now, when life keeps proving me that the idea is deadly wrong. And yes, I fear to be stupid, this fear sometimes works even if I managed to stop my impulse to make a stupid thing before anyone noticed.

It is just anecdote, but I'm almost got my bachelor degree in psychology, I'm working with psychotherapist around my problems, and I believe that self-esteem should be based on manageable things, on something that is under control of a person. Smartness is not under control of a person, you can behave on impulse without thinking, you can be tricked by circumstances or other people, you can do a lot of stupid things, while trying to be smart. Moreover there are circumstances when to do something now is more important than to do something smart. So smartness is not a good base for a self-esteem.

But what's wrong with basing one's self-esteem on being smart, if someone is smart?

Because intelligence is an individual trait that is totally not under control of a person. It will not work this way for a long even if person is smart. Especially if she is smart: she will see that to believe that "smart means good" is stupid (what means to be smart? to have good grades? to create a successful startup? to speak smart things? to hear others praise your smartness). So person will risk to start obsessing about smart behaviour, overcontrolling impulses, think twice before opening your mouth, a mistake is a fail that damages self-esteem, and so on... It can be good when you manage to find some unexpected creative and smart idea, but it is fun even without self-esteem: insight in any case is rewarded by brains. But creativity is an ability to generate a whole lot of ideas, stupid and smart, what would you do if your brain stopped to generate any idea in a fear to generate a stupid one?

To be smart is to find non obvious idea, but to find a good idea you need to think a lot, and no rewards while you are thinking. Frustration is the common state of good thinker, and frustration itself seems from inside as inability to solve problem, as a lack of intelligence. You are working hard, but the only visible result is inability of your intelligence to solve the problem. You can fight with fatigue for some time, but if a hard work is not rewarded by you brains as a prove that you are a good boy, then this time can be too short to actually solve the problem.

You should belive that you are smart unconditionally. And if sometimes you are start to doubt it, it should not be a big deal for you. Our society force people to believe that smart is good and stupid is bad, so we are subjects of a narrative that "if you are stupid, then you are bad boy. Go to your room!". There is no need for parents to make special efforts to make this narrative more powerful in your head.

I'm pretty sure this parenting advice was based on a psychological experiment that failed to replicate.

It saddens me that that seems to be true for damned near all of psychology. :(

You may be right about some particular study, but in general, there is a lot of research around growth mindset, and I have not heard about failures to replicate (though I cannot vouch that they haven't happened): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-grow....

Just Google "psychology replication crisis". Pretty sure it will hit on a lot of this.

Last I heard, which could be outdated, is most of the popular experiments have failed to replicate to a good measure. Odds are, if you just heard of an experiment, it hasn't replicated. Worse, many of the studies were propping each other up. So that when one failed to replicate, it brought the others into question.

There’s clarity that the original study was way overblown and the effect size is, on average, really small.

I don’t know whether this parenting advice was actually borne of that research, but it smells like it. But also, the advice is at worst harmless, if not obvious.

This is why I like kids to try sports that use precise measures of performance, where one can compete with oneself. I also think sports and games that encourage teamwork is very important. But by having the performance exactly measured, in most cases "hard work" will pay off. When the kids see the correlation between "hard work" and results, they can apply it to other areas such as studying. Then there are "gifted" children that are very early in their maturity and will excel at everything, and will have a very easy ride until their growth curve flatten out, but will have a very hard time when the others catch up.

One link about such things if anyone cares to read further.

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

> Being “smart” implies there’s a set of “un-smart” kids that don’t have the same fitness or goodness, and since it’s innate, they’ll always be that way in an ungifted underclass.

Which is true. You're against teaching your children the truth?