Praising your children

I recently read an article (http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/) about this very topic that resonate strongly with me. It basically talk about how praising your children as "smart" might not be a good thing.
As for me, I've always felt that children should be encourage to try, learn, fail, and keep trying and learning. I've seen too many instances where children are praised for just showing up or parents/adults let children win to boost their self-esteem. While this may encourage childrens to keep trying, or to learn to try new things, it does not help them deal with failure and hard work. This is not to say that this approach is bad, it just doesn't deal directly with two subjects that all children will confront as they grow and work to be successful in any endeavors. As with most things in life, the struggle is learning/practicing to get better. The hard work, the effort put forth is what allows some to succeed, where more talented peers may fail.

One of the thing I always stress is dealing with things in our control. If something is not in your control, there's nothing you can do about it. For example, in poker, all you can do is to put your money in when you have the best hand, and fold when you don't or when your chance of getting the best hand is slim. That means going all-in pre-flop with AA, if you lose so be it. You did everything you could have done, luck still plays a role. In poker the only thing you can control are what cards you chose to play, and how you play those cards (bet,raise, fold, check, call, etc..), unless you have the absolute best hand possible, even if you are a 90% favorite, the 10% chance that you lose can still happens. While you may not be happy that you lose because of that 10% chance, you should be happy that you put yourself in a situation that allows you to win 90% of the time, because over the long run, you will be successful more often than not.

Back to the children, effort is something they can control, smart (if couched in the context that it is innate, genetic) is something they cannot. If we teach them that they can be "smart" by exerting effort to learn more things, working hard to master different things then we are showing them how they can affect their knowledge. As Thomas Edison once said "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".

The other aspect is failure and how do we deal with it. Everyone fails at some point, some fail more than other, but we will all fail at something. How we deal with it defines us as much as if not more than our successes. Do we fail and give up or do we keep trying until we succeed. (Sometimes we won't succeed but does that mean failure when we try and got the best out of our abilities and it wasn't enough? That's a topic for another day) . Remember "quitters never wins, and winners never quits".

I've probably rambled on so much that the message may be lost, for that I apologized.


btw, no I did not win the Lotto yesterday (the jackpot grew to $390M because of all the hoopla surrounding it).