Stanford professor warns parents against one particular word when talking to their children

When children achieve something good or do well on a test, most parents shower them with praise. However, praising a child in certain ways can do more harm than good. According to a Stanford University professor, parents and grandparents should stop saying "You are smart" when children perform well on tests and achieve big things, as it might make them averse to failure. The child might feel they can never fail or do something wrong, notes YourTango. 

"The idea is that when we praise kids for being smart, those kids think: 'Oh good, I'm smart.' And then later, when those kids mess up, which they will, they think: 'Oh no, I'm not smart after all. People will think I'm not smart after all,'" James Hamblin, a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, said, per The Atlantic. "And that's the worst. That's a risk to avoid, they learn. 'Smart' kids stand to become especially averse to making mistakes, which are critical to learning and succeeding."

Moreover, researchers felt that such kids might not want to do things they find challenging compared to kids who are not labeled "smart." They might make fewer mistakes, but they also do not challenge themselves to try new things. The same might create problems for them in adulthood as they could grow averse to risks.

Jo Boaler, a professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford, explained that such a mindset might be very damaging, especially for high-achieving girls, when they carry that into adulthood. "Because it's girls who are told by society that they probably won't be as good as boys at math and science," she explained, per PopSugar. Boaler added, "That means girls are only more likely to avoid challenging themselves in science and math and that aversion to making mistakes leads to less learning and progress. The more that certain disciplines cling to ideas of giftedness, the fewer female PhDs there are in those fields." Instead of saying, "You are smart," parents should be encouraged to use more situation-specific phrases, per the researchers.

They might want to use "You did such a good job!" or "You worked hard, and it paid off!" per YourTango. These phrases encourage a child without creating a fixed mindset. Boaler explained that calling someone a "math person" might actually be as harmful as calling someone "smart." Labeling a child as a "math person" or "not a math person" can also be quite restricting to their growth and their will to learn. The professor went so far as to say that parents should have "sympathy" for kids who do well on their tests because those kids did not get the opportunity to learn from their mistakes like others.

Boaler pointed out, "When we give kids the message that mistakes are good, that successful people make mistakes, it can change their entire trajectory." The professor also emphasized the relationship between students' achievements, their belief in themselves, and their relationship with math through her research. For her study, she selected students who believed that they were not "math people" and engaged them in a range of activities to teach math. She also dispelled the belief that one has to be fast to be good at math. She concluded that nobody is born with a good math brain and that making mistakes is the "best" time for brain growth.