Why You Need To Ditch Calling Your Boy/Girl Smart?
The truth about why hearing your parents call you smart is harmful to you!
As a teenager with more reasons to study hard, I went to a school that needed an entrance exam that appeared tough at first sight but was not too difficult if you studied a little. It was called a branch of “Sampad” which was the short form for The National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents in Persian. A haven for genius, ideally, but dreams never prove true, do they? This is the story behind my past: My arguments for why no one has the right to call my niece intelligent!
As usual, Manifesto
If we divide all people based on their social/economic status into two groups of individuals with Professional (such as lawyers) and Semi-Professional (such as Uber drivers) occupations, we see a significant variation in how these people describe things such as values and expectations.
If you question a truck driver, for example, he or she will most likely insist on outward qualities such as obedience, courtesy, and order. If you ask the same question to a Harvard professor, you will encounter characteristics such as curiosity, pleasure, and cognitive and social maturity. This is one aspect that may influence how these varied parents bond with their children, which usually leads to higher educational objectives.
According to studies conducted between 2002 and 2008, these “Upper-Class” kids are more likely to be involved with alcohol or drugs (such as amphetamine), and the rate of depression among them is extremely high. Furthermore, there was a correlation between drugs and depression and anxiety, leading the researchers to conclude that these students utilized the drugs to treat their depression, resulting in greater and worse drug addiction in the future. (Luthar, Sunia, Columbia University)
Does Welfare Lead to Depression?
You might wonder why these kids with such strong welfare flourish in the midst of all this chaos. If we merely look at the question from one angle, we can see that these parents have larger expectations for their children’s achievement. Berk (2009, Stanford) argues that these parents place a higher value on their children’s academic performance than on their personalities, which causes the students to struggle academically and emotionally.
Adam Guettel
Adam Guettel was born into a musical family; his grandfather, musical legend Richard Rodgers, was a composer extraordinaire. His mother was often boasting about her son’s talent. She asserted that Adam will achieve greater success.
Stanford’s Dr. Carol Dweck tests the hypothesis that labelling pupils Smart reduces their overall IQ. She divides a group of brilliant children with high IQs into two groups, then praises one group with terms emphasizing their talents (Adam Guettel group) and the other group with phrases emphasizing their hard effort. For the process of the experiment, you should read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
The Stanford Study(!)
In phase one, everyone started out on par, but in phase two of the experiment, the Adam Guettel group just became low intelligent and refused to take any additional tests, therefore his or her intellect was not assessed. They simply didn’t want to do anything that may reveal their weaknesses and cast doubt on their abilities.
The other group, however, grew more motivated to take additional examinations. They took pleasure in it and sought to outdo themselves.
All grades dropped when both groups had to take the next test, which was more difficult than the one before. Students in the Adam Guettel group believed they had lost their intelligence and talent because, in a system where better marks indicate more talent, lower grades can only be seen as stupidity.
On the contrary, the group that worked hard learned that they needed to strive harder the next time, and as time went on, they improved on increasingly more difficult exams. What did the intelligent students do? Generally declining and occasionally constant.
The scholars then urged the pupils to record their ratings and display their accomplishments to their classmates in an effort to tease them even more. The findings were intriguing: more than 50% of the Adam Guettel group wrote fictitious grades rather than their own.
This section of the research brought up a personal experience for me. Years ago, a brilliant student from our school cheated on a test that was given to students from every school in Iran and obtained 100 on all of the questions, which was unprecedented in Iran’s history of higher education. This person had no trouble getting into any university he desired but was publicly shamed for his mistake.
Conclusion
Finally, Dweck comes to the conclusion that the Adam Guettel group’s IQs declined because they felt stupid and unworthy as a result of the examinations, which were essentially IQ assessments for the pupils.
I advise you to keep these facts in mind the next time you want to label someone as brilliant or stupid based on their academic performance, especially if you are close to them.
P.S.: When I failed a crucial exam, I initially believed I was as dim-witted as a monkey. However, later, I learned that a number of so-called economists were yelling that the Federal Reserve was killing Main Street (people) in favor of Wall Street. (:
This section of the book Mindset was somewhat familiar to me:
References
For Those Who Give Thought
- Berk, L. (2017). Development Through the Lifespan (7th ed.). Pearson.
- Luthar, S. S., & Latendresse, S. J. (2005). Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(1), 49–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00333.x
- Luthar, S.S., and Becker, B.E. (2002), Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth. Child Development, 73: 1593–1610. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00492
- Luthar, S., & Goldstein, A. (2008). Substance use and related behaviors among suburban late adolescents: The importance of perceived parent containment. Development and Psychopathology, 20(2), 591–614. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579408000291
- Luthar, S. S., & Sexton, C. C. (2004). The high price of affluence. Advances in Child Development and Behavior Volume 32, 125–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2407(04)80006-5
