WTF Is Going On Here?

Most parents have said it. They mean it. There is research behind it. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing we should be telling children. "Praise effort, not intelligence" has become one of the most famous ideas in modern parenting and education. Here's why:

Children read the room quickly, and the adult's words are part of the room.

That is the interesting part. What reached parents was shorter: praise the effort. Dweck herself has since said that this went wrong. Effort praise, cut off from learning or progress, became a consolation prize for children who weren't making progress.

But there are two ways to read what happened in that room. The adult has a script: a test of self-control. The child has a question.

Children who had just experienced an adult keeping promises waited about four times longer than children who had experienced an adult breaking them. When researchers later counted family background and home environment, the link between waiting and later success shrank by two thirds.

So WTF is going on here?

Both experiments took the same road, from finding to sentence to technique, and the things adults commonly want from them are almost opposites.

One says push on. The other says hold back. And both are usually presented as lessons about how children should operate if they want better outcomes later.

But that is not what the experiments actually give us. They give us children responding to conditions. The behaviour is visible. The reason for the behaviour is not. A child who keeps going might be learning. They might also be digging themselves deeper into the wrong approach. A child who waits might be showing self-control. They might also have good reason to believe the second marshmallow is coming. A child who eats it might be impatient. Or they might have learned something about the person making the promise.

Children, especially young ones, adapt quickly to what is in front of them.

Context changes the meaning. And it disappears the second a finding becomes a technique.

It makes sense that parents act on this. A parent hears that praising effort can help a child develop a more flexible view of intelligence and thinks: "Sounds good!" So they praise the effort. A parent hears that children who delay gratification tend to do better later and thinks: "Great!" So they teach the child to wait.

Both parents are trying to do something sensible. Both are trying to help the child move toward a better future. But now look at how this breaks.

The parent is following a script, they're in a story about where this is going. Stories are useful, but the child is trying to read what is happening now. I saw it constantly in schools.

For over a decade, I worked with children from kindergarten through Grade 12. I was the person schools called when nothing else was working, in over a hundred schools and many more classrooms. Many of the children I was sent to had long histories of assessments, meetings, diagnoses, recommendations and carefully designed plans. Each plan had been built on industry standard practices, by a whole team of adults.

I never once received a file that documented what a child had done well, or what they were working toward. The files only ever recorded problems — what was wrong, what needed fixing. Read enough of them and the child isn't in there at all.

My boss knew the plans were serious, and she also knew something wasn't working.

I wasn't a doctor, and I had no explicit standard of operation to follow. She trusted me to find out what was actually happening. She backed me every time.

I ignored the file as far as I could. Medical needs mattered, and they were always communicated clearly. The rest was other people's conclusions, other people's structures and recommendations, reached outside of the classroom, on a different day, before I had even met the child. Stories about a child, written before anyone had seen them in this room. I did not want to start from any of it. That was a method, and I applied it the same way to every case.

I wanted to know how this child could operate at school. My solution to their problems was to figure out their solutions to their problems. I didn't need to convince them that school was fun, or useful, or important. I just involved myself. They might come over. They might not. Sometimes I would be across the room doing something with another child and the child we were supposedly trying to help would come running up.

This was the moment I was looking for. This was the moment where what I say can meaningfully affect what happens next. That is what the effort and marshmallow studies were about.

I was not telling them what their success meant to me or anyone else. They had brought me the evidence. They had read the room and worked something out, and I was interested in what they had read.

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Because what a parent wants to develop, whether it is effort or patience, is connected to three things: what the child did, how they thought about it, and the setting they did it in. Effort praise, waiting, any of it — these are highly context-dependent. They work for the right child, at the right moment, applied to what is actually happening. A question as simple as "How?" brings all three into the open. It makes the success theirs, and that is something they can take forward. Asking about what went wrong can be just as insightful.

Most people stop at a surface understanding of their issues. The research can be enlightening. A strategy can be useful. A technique can work.

But the child is still the place where it happens. That is where the context is. The same behaviour can be useful in one moment and completely wrong in another. The same strategy can work beautifully for one child and poorly for another. And something that worked yesterday can stop working tomorrow. None of this suggests the strategy was wrong. Just the time and place.

I often found the most powerful position to be "not knowing." Life has a strange way of showing you, and when it does, the research becomes useful again. However well you think you know your child, there is always something you couldn't have known until they actually did it.

Growing up is not collecting the right behaviours.

We say "grow up!" to a five-year-old who won't own what they did. We say it to a fifteen-year-old. Somewhere, someone is saying it to an eighty-five-year-old. Same two words, same story about what a person should have figured out by now.

The mature person is not the one who has perfected every desirable quality. It is the person who can notice what the moment requires. That is what gets lost when we become more interested in outcomes than process.