On topic-
I remember prizing a few possessions as a kid, things I’d waited long and hard to get. Money being less available then, my parents had no choice but to wait until they could afford it.
I wanted my kids to have a sense of value, not just “buy me that”. As we can afford to buy the kids things whenever we want to, it does take some discipline to teach them the value of a purchase.

Scenario: My 4yo wanted a bike. Being a physical activity, we really wanted her to have one. Her birtday is just after Christmas, so it was a long wait to make it a present.
We instead came up with a “bicycle chart” – we drew a big picture of a bike, and 50 squares underneath it. Everynight, we talked about the very good things she’d done that day, and rewarded her with squares. Not expected tasks (like getting dressed) but special actions. She coloured in/stamped/pasted/etc how ever many squares she’d been rewarded.
When the chart was full, we took it to the bike shop and she chose a bike. We were very proud of her for earning the bike, and she was very proud of herself.

I especially liked your last point, Trent, about the rewarding the effort versus the outcome. Author Po Bronson has a really good book called “nurture shock” that has a chapter on this topic. Great reading for parents.

Emily

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/

But if you want a teenager who will push themselves, and work hard, and produce good results – of the meaningful kind, it helps to treat a young child differently.

Similar to the “10,000-hour Rule” from Malcom Gladwell’s book, “Outliers,” proposing that the key to success in any field is to spend 10,000 hours practicing the specific tasks of that field. He points to The Beatles playing 1200 gigs during 4 years in Germany before returning to England and becoming stars, and Bill Gates getting on a school computer at 13 to begin years and years of practice at programming.

It’s not about ignoring results or performance. It’s about praising the results or the performance as the outcome of effort, and not as the outcome of inherent intelligence or talent or gifts.

Gifts may give you a head-start, but only consistent long-term effort and growth will lead to lasting success. Praising gifts actually discourages effort and growth, and can shutdown a person’s potential, whether they’re a kid or an adult.

Focusing on the result wasn’t the problem. Praising in a way that sent kids the message that their good results had come from an inherent quality (intelligence) that they were just born with (and was therefore out of their control or capacity to change) was detrimental to their future success, leading them to become risk-averse in order to maintain the perception of their gift; while praising them for their hard work encouraged them to seek out challenges and opportunities to work harder, try again, persist, and grow.

It was a ten-year study of NY fifth-graders done by psychologist Carol Dweck’s team at Columbia, which concluded that praising kids for intelligence or other “gifts” or “talents” was detrimental to them, as they tended to then avoid challenges and be crushed by failures, while kids who were praised for their efforts and the work they had done tended to seek out greater challenges and see failures as proof that they needed to try harder, instead of proof that they weren’t smart after all.

See “The Inverse Power of Praise” which appears in New York Magazine and then in the book “NutureShock” (both by Po Bronson with Ashley Merryman).

That study and other work along the same lines concluded that for praise to be effective (that is, to encourage further growth, future good behavior, future good results) it needs to be specific, tied to the effort or process that brought about the result, not just to the result itself, and it has to be sincere and not overdone or overly-frequent.

The experiment that Kai was referring to actually went like this:

Fifth graders were individually given a non-verbal IQ test, using puzzles that were easy enough that the students were expected to do well. The students would finish the puzzles easily, and then the research assistant would tell them their IQ score and give them one line of praise, either saying that the student “must be smart at this”, or saying that the student “must have worked really hard.”

When it was time for a 2nd test, the students were given a choice of 2 tests. They were told they they could take a more difficult test that they’d learn a lot from attempting, or a test that was as easy as the first. The majority of kids praised for intelligence chose the easy test, while 90% of kids praised for effort chose the harder test.

In a later round, they weren’t given a choice. All the kids were given a test that was actually 2 grade-levels ahead and that they were all expected to do poorly on (but they weren’t told anything about it). Kids praised for effort in the first round tended to assume that they got poor results this time because they hadn’t focused hard enough, while kids praised for intelligence in the first round tended to see their poor result this time as evidence that they weren’t actually smart after all.

Then they were all given a final test geared to be as easy as the first. Kids praised for effort in the first round improved their score by 30% this time on this similar test, while kids praised for intelligence in the first round did about 20% worse than they’d done before.

They’ve repeated the experiments and found that the effects held true across socioeconomic classes, were most pronounced in the brightest girls, and even affected preschoolers.

But if I reward my 15 year old for “effort” when he has plenty of education to understand what a flower is versus what a weed is . . . I’m gonna be rewarding someone who doesn’t get the results that he needs to complete very important pieces of his life’s work. Here’s a small fact: Employers don’t pay for “hard work.” They pay for results. The better the result, the better the pay. Which is why engineers make more money than people working in a fast food joint. Business owners need results in order to put food on their family’s table, not “hard work.”

And stop watching so much television. It rots your brain. Every time you change the channel, a kitten dies.

FWIW, I am more of a reader than a Tv watcher. But I do both, and I am getting a tad tired of your constant harping on TV.

I am not going to touch on the delayed gratification stuff, this post doesn’t make a lot of sense. I did spot a lonely sentence fragment somewhere…

PROTIP: integrate proofreading and editing into the “project planning” for blog posts. I think those are important steps, you know.

Or, in other words: “Hey Trent, check this out!”