Children build a growth mindset, the belief that ability grows with effort, mostly from the words they hear every day, and especially from how they are praised.
What is a growth mindset?
Carol Dweck’s research asks one question: what do people believe intelligence is? Some children hold a “fixed” view: ability is something you have or don’t, and performance shows which. Others hold a “growth” view: ability is a starting point that changes with work. Her studies found the two groups react very differently to failure. The first group avoids challenges, because every mistake feels like proof they aren’t smart. The second group takes challenges on, because a mistake just shows them what to work on.
Growth mindset praise: what to say
The most practical finding is about praise. In a well-known 1998 series of studies, Claudia Mueller and Dweck praised children after a puzzle either for being smart or for working hard. The “smart” group went on to choose easier puzzles, enjoy them less and lie more about their scores. The “effort” group chose harder puzzles and kept improving. A single sentence, repeated across a childhood, teaches a child what ability is.
Here are examples of growth mindset praise: “You worked hard on that.” “You found a good way to do it.” “You kept going when it got hard.” “Your practice is paying off.” The praise to use less often is “You’re so smart,” because it teaches that ability is fixed.
The effects reach further than a lab session. Elizabeth Gunderson and colleagues recorded parents’ natural praise when their children were one to three years old, then followed up years later: the toddlers who heard more process praise - you worked so hard, you found a good way to do it - held stronger growth beliefs at age seven or eight. And David Yeager’s 2019 national experiment showed that even a one-hour online growth-mindset module reliably improved grades among lower-achieving teenagers. The belief is teachable at every age, and cheaply.
Why repetition matters
All of these findings share one method: repeating the same message. No parent gives one talk about how the brain learns and stops there. The belief is built from hundreds of small sentences, after the spelling test, at piano practice and in the car, each one saying that ability can grow. Children learn to talk about themselves the way they hear people talk about them most often. Adults do too.
A growth mindset for parents
So a growth mindset comes from hearing the right sentences enough times. “You figured that out” does this for a seven-year-old. For a parent, a phrase like “I am always in a growth mindset,” shown on your screen through the workday with SOMOTE, does the same. The words a family hears most shape what its members believe, and that includes the words you hear yourself.