Praise Efforts, not Individual Qualities, to Make Children Successful

Appreciating and praising children's efforts, rather than their qualities as individuals, can make them capable of taking up challenging tasks later and becoming successful in life.

A team of researchers from the University of Chicago and Stanford University initiated to analyze different types of appreciation parents make like, "You worked really hard", or "You're a very smart girl".

Elizabeth A. Gunderson and colleagues found that toddlers who received the right appreciation for their efforts grew up more positively and showed the strength to encounter challenges five years later, when compared to children who received praising as an individual.

When efforts at challenging tasks receive appreciation from parents, children get the right message that efforts are crucial to become successful in life, thus encouraging them to pursue their goals through hard work, the authors while explaining the occurrence, said.  On the other hand, when children receive praise as an individual, it tends to leave the opposite impact on them.

For the study, researchers monitored a group of 50 families, and video recorded the parents' communications with their toddlers during different stages of growth - at the age of one, two and three.

Watching the video tapes, researchers divided the praises as 'process praise', or praising for good efforts (statements like "you're doing a good job"), and 'person praise' (statements like "You're so smart").

When the children completed 8 years of age, researchers checked whether they preferred easy or challenging tasks and their ability to overcome their setbacks. They found that children become smarter and are ready to take up challenging tasks when they receive process praises during the early stages of their growth.

"Previous studies have looked at this issue among older students," Gunderson said in a news release. "This study suggests that improving the quality of parents' praise in the toddler years may help children develop the belief that people can change and that challenging tasks provide opportunities to learn."

Apart from that, researchers also found boys receiving more process praise than girls, making them think that academic excellence by improving intelligence can be achieved through hard work.

The results of the study have been published in the Journal Child Development.