Medicalxpress shares information that suggests that parents attitude towards failure may affect their child’s mindset. Children were more likely to have a fixed mindset if their parents had negative attitudes towards family.
In one study, the researchers asked 73 parent-child pairs to answer a series of questions designed to tap into their individual mindsets. The parents rated their agreement with six statements related to failure (e.g., “Experiencing failure facilitates learning and growth”) and four statements related to intelligence (e.g., “You can learn new things but you can’t really change how intelligent you are”). The children, all 4th– and 5th-grade students, responded to similar statements about intelligence.
As expected, there was no association between parents’ beliefs about intelligence and their children’s beliefs about intelligence.
However, parents’ attitudes toward failure were linked with how their kids thought about intelligence. Parents who tended to view failure as a negative, harmful event had children who were more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed. And the more negative parents’ attitudes were, the more likely their children were to see them as being concerned with performance as opposed to learning.
And the researchers found that parents’ beliefs about failure seemed to translate into their reactions to failure. Results from two online studies with a total of almost 300 participants showed that parents who adopted a more negative stance toward failure were more likely to react to their child’s hypothetical failing grade with concerns about their child’s lack of ability. At the same time, these parents were less likely to show support for the child’s learning and improvement. Their reactions to the failing grade were not linked, however, with their beliefs aboutintelligence.
Most importantly, additional data indicated that children were very much attuned to their parents’ feelings about failure.
“It is important for parents, educators, and coaches to know that the growth mindset that sits in their heads may not get through to children unless they use learning-focused practices, like discussing what their children could learn from a failure and how they might improve in the future,” says Haimovitz.
Read the full story at Seeing the benefits of failure shapes kids’ beliefs about intelligence
