Hey {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
Have you ever caught yourself mid-sentence, about to tell a kid they're clever, and swapped it for "you worked so hard on that"?
I have. Most parents I know have. And I've just become a father, so the rules I used to read about as research now arrive addressed to me.
That shift has a source, and tracing it back tells you a lot about how a lab finding becomes a rule for living.
In 1998, Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck ran six experiments with ten- and eleven-year-olds (Mueller and Dweck, 1998). Children told they were clever picked easier puzzles afterward, gave up sooner when they struggled, enjoyed it less and scored lower than children told they had worked hard. Dweck turned the finding into her 2006 book Mindset and the idea went global (Dweck, 2006). Teachers painted it on classroom walls. Parenting books turned it into a rule: praise effort, never ability. For fifteen years that rule sat near the center of respectable parenting.
Then researchers went back to check the foundations.
Sisk and colleagues (2018) pooled 273 separate results covering 365,915 students. A growth mindset explained about 1 percent of the differences in student performance. Put another way, if you knew a child's mindset and nothing else, you would know almost nothing about their grades. The same team then pooled 43 experiments that taught children a growth mindset and measured their marks afterward. The average gain was tiny. Take a child who sits exactly in the middle of their year group. After the lesson, they would sit at roughly the 53rd percentile instead of the 50th. You can detect that across 57,000 students. You would never spot it at parents' evening.
Li and Bates (2019) then redid the original praise experiments with 624 children in China. The first attempt found one borderline result on a medium-difficulty test and nothing on any of the eight motivation measures Mueller and Dweck had used. In the next two studies, the comparison group received an equally engaging activity, so the only difference was the mindset message itself. Every effect disappeared. One result pointed the wrong way: children who believed ability could grow coped slightly worse with hard material. Over a school term, what children believed about ability had no bearing on their grades.
Then came the audit. Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) reviewed every intervention study they could find, 63 covering 97,672 students, and graded each one on the quality of its design. Across all 63, the average benefit was close to zero, and it vanished once they allowed for the fact that studies finding nothing tend to stay in the drawer. In the 13 studies that could show the lesson had changed children's thinking at all, there was no reliable effect on grades. In the six best-designed studies, the effect was as good as zero. My favorite finding: researchers who stood to make money from growth mindset reported bigger effects than those who didn't.
Now for the fair part: I'm asking you to trust my reading of papers you'll probably never open. The strongest evidence on the other side comes from Yeager and colleagues (2019), who tested a free online module under an hour long on more than 12,000 American 14- and 15-year-olds and published the results in Nature. They wrote down what they would test before seeing the data, which stops researchers from fishing for results afterward. Lower-achieving students gained about a tenth of a grade point on average, the difference between a 2.0 and a 2.1, and more of them signed up for advanced maths. The gains appeared in schools where classmates' prevailing attitude already matched the message. The authors argue that for something this cheap, even a small effect is worth having, and they have a point. A school that spends an hour on it loses nothing. The accurate summary runs to one line: a small effect, for some students, in some schools. Nobody put that on a poster.
So where does this leave you, the parent who swapped "clever" for "hard-working" and still worried it wasn't enough?
Off the hook, mostly. Me included. The lever the books handed you barely connects to anything. Your child's temperament, ability, environment and plain luck carry most of the load, and none of those respond to word choice at the dinner table. The guilt rests on an effect as small as a rounding error.
I say me included because I fell for this one completely. I read Dweck's book, and for years afterward I judged grandparents for telling their grandchildren they were smart. Wrong word, I would think. Say they worked hard. I had read the research, and they hadn't, and I took that to mean I was the more enlightened one in the room. The reality is that I'd swallowed some incomplete science. They were just being kind to a child.
So the lesson, for me at least. Every generation learns what the one before didn't, and the temptation is to turn that new knowledge on the people who raised you. They were parenting without it. Use it to berate them, and you are betting that the science holds, and this science didn't. The judgment I handed out looks foolish now, and I got off lightly. Some families don't.
That is the pattern I keep circling, and it is the whole subject of Cut Off. A finding loses its caveats somewhere between the journal and the bookshop, an industry grows in the space and ordinary people inherit the anxiety. With growth mindset, the result was guilty parents and a few smug know-alls like me. With therapy language, adult children get a vocabulary to judge the people who raised them, and some of them act on it. Cut Off is that story. It's out now on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle ebook.
One more thing on the book. On Thursday, November 19, I'm doing a live launch for Cut Off at Solid Grounds Coffee House in Woodland Park, Colorado: a talk on why adult children cut off their parents and what helps families find their way back, then a Q&A and a signing. It runs 6:00 to 7:30pm, tickets are $50 and include a signed copy, and there are 30 seats. If you're anywhere near Colorado Springs, come and say hello in person.
You were never one compliment away from ruining your kid. Put that one down.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. This edition keeps a promise. Over on Instagram I said I'd start taking psychology's biggest myths apart here, so if a reel about praise brought you in, welcome. Hit reply and tell me which myth you want next. I read every reply.
Disclosure: I wrote the book this email promotes. None of the research above is mine. No affiliate links in this email.
References
Dweck, C.S. (2006) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.
Li, Y. and Bates, T.C. (2019) 'You can't change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that's how we get hard things done: testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability', Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), pp. 1640–1655. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000669
Macnamara, B.N. and Burgoyne, A.P. (2023) 'Do growth mindset interventions impact students' academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices', Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), pp. 133–173. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352
Mueller, C.M. and Dweck, C.S. (1998) 'Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), pp. 33–52. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33
Sisk, V.F., Burgoyne, A.P., Sun, J., Butler, J.L. and Macnamara, B.N. (2018) 'To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses', Psychological Science, 29(4), pp. 549–571. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
Yeager, D.S. et al. (2019) 'A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement', Nature, 573(7774), pp. 364–369. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y