Want to Raise Successful Kids? Science Says Praise Them Like This. (Most Parents Do the Opposite)

(Bill Murphy, Jr., Inc.) – What if I were to tell you that you could increase the odds that your kids will achieve great success in life — maybe greater success than you’ve had — simply by making a small change on how you praise them and talk about achievement?

It turns out, you can. What’s more, this change flies in the face of almost everything we’ve been told by so-called experts about raising successful kids — at least for the past 15 years or more.

It’s all about how we praise our kids for their accomplishments. An emerging and exciting body of research on the subject suggests several key things we might not have realized otherwise:

1. Praising kids merely for their innate abilities, such as their intelligence, actually makes it less likely that they’ll grow up to enjoy learning and to excel.
2. Praising kids instead for the strategies and processes they develop to solve problems–even when they don’t fully succeed–makes them more likely to try harder and ultimately achieve.
3. And–perhaps the kicker–the effects of these praise strategies can be quantified even when we’re talking about children as young as 1 to 3 years of age.

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