“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.” -Niels Bohr

Carol Dweck has devoted her career to studying how our beliefs about intelligence influence the way we learn. In general, she finds that people subscribe to one of two different theories of mental ability. The first theory is known as the fixed mindset – it holds that intelligence is a fixed quantity, and that each of us is allotted a certain amount of smarts we cannot change. The second theory is known as the growth mindset. It’s more optimistic, holding that our intelligence and talents can be developed through hard work and practice. “Do people with this mindset believe than anyone can be anything?” Dweck asks. “No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”

You can probably guess which mindset is more useful for learning. As Dweck and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated, children with a fixed mindset tend to wilt in the face of challenges. For them, struggle and failure are a clear sign they aren’t smart enough for the task; they should quit before things get embarrassing. Those with a growth mindset, in contrast, respond to difficulty by working harder. Their faith in growth becomes a self-fulling prophecy; they get smarter because they believe they can.

The question, of course, is how to instill a growth mindset in our children. While Dweck is perhaps best known for her research on praise – it’s better to compliment a child for her effort than for her intelligence, as telling a kid she’s smart can lead to a fixed mindset – it remains unclear how children develop their own theories about intelligence. What makes this mystery even more puzzling is that, according to multiple studies, the mindset of parents’ is surprisingly disconnected from the mindsets of their children. In other words, believing in the plasticity of intelligence is no guarantee that our kids will feel the same way.

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However, in an important new paper, Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck reveal the real influence behind the mindsets of our children. It turns out that the crucial variable is not what we think about intelligence – it’s how we react to failure.

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This study helps clarify the forces that shape our children. What matters most is not what we say after a triumph or achievement – it’s how we deal with their disappointments. Do we pity our kids when they struggle? (Sympathy is a natural reaction; it also sends the wrong message.) Do we steer them away from potential defeats? Or do we remind them that failure is an inescapable part of life, a state that cannot be avoided, only endured. Most worthy things are hard.

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