Praising a child: intelligence or effort?

“You’re really smart!”

“You’re naturally gifted at maths.”

“You’re so good at this, it’s in your blood!”

These sentences usually come from a good place. When a child succeeds, we want to show them how proud we are.

Yet the way we praise a child can shape how they face difficulty, mistakes and failure.

So should we stop telling our child they are smart?

Not exactly. The better question is: what do we want to teach them through our compliments?

The problem with “you’re smart”

Telling a child “you’re smart” is obviously not bad in itself. The problem appears when intelligence or talent becomes the main explanation for their success.

A child can gradually come to link:

• success = I’m smart;

and therefore, the other way round:

• failure = maybe I’m not that smart after all.

The work of Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller showed, among other things, that children praised for their intelligence can afterwards be drawn to easier tasks and be more vulnerable in the face of difficulty than children whose working process was praised.

This can create a paradox. A child who has always been considered “very smart” may find it very hard to accept not succeeding straight away.

Why? Because a mistake is no longer just a difficulty to solve. It can become a threat to their image of themselves.

“You’re smart” or “you found a good strategy”?

Imagine two children who have just solved a hard problem.

To the first: “Well done, you’re really smart!”

To the second: “You tried several methods before finding the one that worked.”

Both children are praised. But the second receives far more useful information. They understand what they did to succeed. And they can use that information again next time.

That is the whole difference between praising a trait of the child and praising their learning process.

We can gradually replace:

• “You’re smart” with “You found a good strategy.”
• “You’re naturally gifted” with “You’ve made a lot of progress.”
• “You’re good at maths” with “You kept going even though the problem was hard.”
• “You got it right first time!” with “You thought it through before answering.”
• “You’re a genius” with “What helped you find the solution?”

Compliments are still welcome, as long as they are precise.

So should we always praise effort?

Beware of another oversimplification. Automatically saying “well done for trying so hard” every time is not a magic fix.

A child can put in a lot of effort with a poor strategy. They can also succeed without any particular effort. And a mechanical compliment ends up losing its value.

Recent research and reviews point to a more nuanced approach: it is more useful to focus on specific parts of the process — strategy, perseverance, concentration, progress, or the way a difficulty was overcome — rather than simply handing out praise for effort.

The better reflex is to help the child understand what allowed them to make progress.

What if my child fails?

Failure is probably where this difference becomes most interesting.

A child used to hearing “You’re very smart” may read a difficulty as proof that they are not as smart as they thought.

A child used to thinking about their strategies is more likely to ask: “What could I try differently?”

This nuance matters, because the goal of school is not to raise children who always succeed. It is to raise children who can keep learning when they don’t succeed yet.

The right question to ask your child

After a success, rather than immediately looking for the perfect compliment, you can simply ask a question:

“What helped you get there?”

And after a difficulty:

“What could you try differently?”

These questions shift the focus. We no longer ask only: “Did you succeed?” We start to take an interest in: “How did you learn?”

Valuing the child without reducing them to their results

There is, however, another trap. By trying so hard to value effort, we can end up turning every piece of learning into a performance review.

A child does not need their parents to comment on every piece of homework, every drawing or every result. They also need to know they are appreciated regardless of their school performance.

Self-confidence should not depend on a 18/20, a sporting victory or a particular ease with maths.

A child should be able to hear: “I’m proud of what you did” — but also, simply: “I’m happy to be with you.”

The two messages do not serve the same purpose.

What we really want to develop

Beyond intelligence and effort, we want to develop something broader in a child:

• curiosity;
• perseverance;
• independence;
• the ability to investigate;
• the ability to change strategy;
• acceptance of mistakes;
• the confidence needed to face a difficulty;
• and above all, the joy of understanding.

A child can be very smart and not know how to persevere. A child can work enormously hard without learning effectively. What matters is what they learn from their own learning process.

To remember

Next time your child achieves something, try not to stop at the result.

Instead of “You’re really smart!”, sometimes try:

• “I saw how you kept searching until you found it.”
• “You changed method when the first one wasn’t working.”
• Or simply: “What helped you succeed?”

These sentences are less impressive, but they give the child a better understanding of how they learn.

And this ability to understand how to learn may well matter more, in the long run, than having been considered “smart” from the start.