Last Updated on September 25, 2026 by Lila Sjöberg
You have said it. Every parent has said it. Your child brings home a drawing, a test result, a piece of writing they are proud of, and the words come out before you have thought about them.
“You are so smart.”
It feels like the right thing to say. It feels like love, expressed as confidence. And according to more than forty years of research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, it is quietly doing something you did not intend.
In a landmark series of studies, Dweck gave children a straightforward IQ test and then praised them in one of two ways. Half were told: “You must be really smart at this.” The other half were told: “You must have worked really hard at this.” Then she gave them a choice: a harder test they might learn from, or an easier test they were likely to do well on. The majority of the children praised for being smart chose the easier test. The majority of the children praised for their effort chose the harder one.
This is the finding that changed how educators and psychologists think about praise. It is not intuitive. Telling a child they are smart feels like it should build confidence. What it actually builds, Dweck found, is a fragile relationship with difficulty. A child who has been told they are smart has a reputation to protect. A hard problem is a threat to that reputation. If they try and fail, they will no longer be smart. So they stop trying hard things.
The children praised for effort had no reputation at stake. They had been told that what adults value is the trying, the persistence, the strategies. A hard problem is not a threat to that. It is an opportunity to do the thing they were praised for.
Dweck called these two orientations the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset holds that intelligence is what you are born with, a quantity you either have or do not have. A growth mindset holds that intelligence is something that develops through effort, strategy, and the willingness to fail and try again. Children with fixed mindsets, her research showed, consistently underperformed their potential over time. Children with growth mindsets consistently exceeded it.
The mechanism is specific and worth understanding. Children praised for intelligence, when they later struggled on a difficult task, told researchers they must not be smart after all. They had attached their identity to the outcome. Children praised for effort, when they struggled, said they had not tried hard enough yet. They attributed the difficulty to the process, not to themselves. The same setback produced completely different responses depending on what kind of praise the child had received months earlier.
This research, published in the 1990s and expanded over decades, became one of the most influential findings in educational psychology. Schools around the world built programmes around it. Parents read Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, in enormous numbers. The growth mindset became a global educational movement.
And then Dweck said something that most people who cite her research have never heard.
She said the movement had missed the point.
In interviews given after the growth mindset became mainstream, Dweck described what she called “false growth mindset”: parents and teachers who had understood the research to mean that effort itself deserved praise, regardless of outcome. Children who tried and failed were being told “great effort!” without any engagement with what they could do differently. The praise had become as empty as the intelligence praise it was meant to replace. Dweck was direct about the problem: children need a learning reaction, not just an effort reaction. “What did you try? What can we do next time?” That is the growth mindset. Not “great effort” delivered reflexively.
As a mother and as someone who has spent years reading this research, I find this distinction important and under-discussed. The goal is not to replace “you are so smart” with “you tried so hard.” The goal is to replace both with genuine curiosity about the process. “What was the hardest part? What would you do differently?” These questions communicate something more valuable than either: that you are interested in how your child thinks, not just in how they perform.
There is a practical version of all this that is simpler than it sounds. When your child succeeds at something difficult, notice the difficulty: “That was a hard one. You kept going.” When they fail, stay with the process: “What did you try? What might work next time?” When they are about to give up on something, name the moment: “This is the part where it gets interesting.”
None of this means you cannot tell your child you love them, that you are proud of them, that they have done something wonderful. Of course you can. You should. The research is not saying that warmth is dangerous. It is saying that one specific type of praise, repeated over time, shapes how a child understands their own intelligence in ways that quietly limit what they will attempt.
The word smart is not the enemy. The belief that smart is something you either are or are not. That is the thing worth examining.
Parenting is the longest experiment any of us will ever run. I am still reading the results.
Lila Sjöberg
Sources
- Stanford University Bing Nursery School. Carol Dweck: Praising Intelligence Costs Children’s Self-Esteem and Motivation.
- PACEs Connection. The Stanford Professor Who Pioneered Praising Kids for Effort Says We Have Totally Missed the Point. Quartz, 2016.
- One Dublin. Stanford University’s Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset and Education. 2012.
