Parents who praise effort can bolster children’s persistence, self-belief

Toddlers who receive praise of their efforts, such as "you worked hard on that," rather than praise of their personal qualities, such as "you're a good girl," are more likely to prefer challenging tasks and to believe that hard work can improve intelligence and personality, new research at the University of Chicago reveals. The kind of praise focused on effort, called process praise, "sends the message that effort and actions are the sources of success, leading children to believe they can improve their performance through hard work," said Elizabeth Gunderson, assistant professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author on a study conducted while she was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. The findings, published in the paper "Parent Praise to 1-3 Year-Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later," are the first to show the impact of parents' praise in a naturalistic setting. The study, published online in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers from Stanford University as well as the University of Chicago. Short-term laboratory studies have found that process praise results in greater persistence and better performance on challenging tasks. Praise that is focused on the child's characteristics, such as "You're a big boy," sends the message that a child's ability is fixed and results in decreased persistence and performance. In the new study, scholars found that the percentage of process praise parents used when their children were one to three years old significantly predicted whether children welcomed challenges, had strategies for overcoming failure, and thought intelligence and personality were malleable five years later .