Typically, something like this happens:
* When parents say, “you are brilliant,” children hear, “to get praise, I have to be right.”
* When parents say, “You got them all right,” children think, “I better not bring home the math test I got 52% on”.
How Can Parents Cultivate a Culture that Promotes Competency?
The research of Carol Dweck, discussed in the last post, breaks it down to two simple tasks:
1. Encourage growth by nurturing the desire to keep trying.Competency is built by learning new skills and becoming better at the skills one already has.
2. Promote healthy attitudes about failure. Failure can be an opportunity to show our metal—it requires courage, wisdom, persistence and transcendence—all shining virtues. Not only does failure provide information about what does not work, it is also promotes character development.
There are many paths to encouraging competency. Life is a laboratory, and opportunities for teaching attitudes that promote competency occur without warning. Parents can prepare themselves to teach the skills by first by looking objectively at their own attitudes about failure and success. Did you make a bad decision today? Talk about it, and what you learned from it. Did you achieve something that took a lot of work? Talk to your children about how you did it. Is there something going on in your life that hurts your ego? Show your children how you will deal with it in a healthy way. You might even listen to their ideas about how to deal with it effectively.
In addition to using one’s own experiences, parents can draw from the lives of people they know. Dweck’s book on Mindset is replete with stories about people we all know through the media who became successful by persistence and dealing with failure in healthy ways. For example—did you know Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, was cut from the high school basketball team because he did not show adequate skill? His mother used it as an opportunity to teach the importance of “discipline”—developing mastery through focused practice.
Family conflict provides great opportunities to teach attitudes that promote competency. Conflict quickly identifies the thinking style of its participants. After the conflict is over, debrief and give people an opportunity to understand each other’s points of view. Examine your own thinking out loud, and how maybe thinking differently about it might have led to a better outcome.