âEvery word and action from parent to child sends a message. Tomorrow, letâs be thoughtful about the messages we send.â â Carol S. Dweck
If mindsets are beliefs that shape our entire relationship to effort, challenge, learning, and failure, then the origin of those beliefs is a question of enormous consequence. Dweckâs answer: mindsets are transmittedâoften unintentionallyâthrough the messages children receive from the adults in their lives. Parents, teachers, and coaches are the primary architects of childrenâs mindsets, often without realizing the profound power of their words and framing.
Children are extraordinarily sensitive to the messages they receive from the important adults in their lives. Not just explicit messages (âyouâre so smartâ) but implicit ones embedded in how adults respond to success, failure, effort, and challenge.
When a parent rushes in to prevent a child from struggling, the implicit message is: struggle is dangerous and to be avoided. When a teacher gives a student an easier problem after theyâve failed a harder one, the implicit message is: I donât believe you can do the harder thing. When a coach focuses only on winning and never acknowledges effort and development, the implicit message is: your value is in your results, not your growth.
These messages accumulate over time into deeply held beliefs about what ability means, what failure means, and what the point of effort is.
Dweck identifies specific types of messages that reliably transmit fixed mindsets:
Each of these sends the message that ability is fixed, that struggle is to be avoided, and that your worth is in your traits rather than your efforts.
One of the most well-intentioned but damaging things parents can do is tell their children they are gifted, special, or exceptional. These labels sound like giftsâtheyâre meant to build confidence and encourage ambition. But research consistently shows they backfire.
When children are told they are gifted, they:
Paradoxically, the children most likely to underperform their potential are often those who received the most unqualified positive praise for their innate abilities.
Dweck offers a clear alternative: praise the process, not the person. This doesnât mean never affirming your childâit means affirming the right things.
Instead of: âYouâre so smart for finishing that puzzleâ Try: âYou worked really hard on that puzzle. I noticed you kept trying even when you got stuckâ
Instead of: âYouâre a natural athleteâ Try: âYouâve been practicing so consistentlyâthatâs why youâre getting betterâ
Instead of: âYou got an Aâyouâre so brilliantâ Try: âYou got an A! What strategies did you use to prepare? What worked well?â
The goal is to help children understand that their successes come from their efforts, strategies, and persistenceâthings they control and can build onârather than from fixed traits that may or may not be there for the next challenge.
Dweck tells the story of Marva Collins, a Chicago teacher who worked with students who had been written off by the school systemâstudents labeled as learning-disabled, emotionally disturbed, or simply hopeless. Collins refused to accept these labels. She believed, and communicated to her students, that every child could learn and grow.
She pushed her students hard. She demanded effort, she challenged them with difficult material, and she refused to accept excuses. But critically, she communicated clearly that she believed in their capacity to do the work. âI know you can do thisâ delivered with genuine convictionâand backed by the resources and guidance to make it possibleâtransformed students who had stopped believing in themselves.
This is the growth mindset teacher in action: high expectations combined with genuine belief in studentsâ capacity to meet those expectations, and the willingness to provide the support and challenge needed to get there.
The way teachers give feedback sends constant messages about mindset. Research shows that students quickly detect what teachers actually believe about their potentialânot from what teachers say explicitly, but from how they treat different students.
When teachers give easier work to struggling students, those students get the message: âmy teacher doesnât believe I can do the harder stuff.â When teachers offer specific, constructive feedback, students get the message: âmy teacher believes I can improve.â When teachers acknowledge struggle as part of learning, students feel safer taking risks.
The most effective teachers Dweck identified shared a common orientation: they saw teaching not as sorting students into âcanâ and âcanâtâ categories, but as the process of helping every student develop further than they currently were.
Coaches who focus exclusively on winning rather than development often create fixed mindset athletes. When the only metric is whether you win or lose, athletes become afraid to try risky plays (that might fail), reluctant to develop new skills (that take time and involve poor performance before mastery), and dependent on feeling superior to others rather than genuinely growing.
Many coaches yell at mistakes in ways that communicate: âa mistake means youâre inadequate.â Over time, athletes trained this way develop a fear of making mistakes that limits their performance and their development.
The best developmental coaches share certain practices:
Dweck shares a personal story about a teacher whose message stayed with her. Mrs. Wilson arranged her class in IQ order, with the highest IQ students at the front. Every child in the class knew exactly where they stood in the intellectual hierarchy. When students in the front row struggled, she was disappointed; when those in the back row struggled, she expected it.
This is a portrait of a teacher whose fixed mindset beliefs shaped her entire classroomâwho she called on, how much support she gave, what she expected, and therefore what her students came to expect of themselves.
The impact of such teachersâpositive or negativeâcan last a lifetime. Dweck has heard from adults who can still name the teacher who gave up on them, and the one who believed in them even when they didnât believe in themselves.
This chapter ends with a call to responsibility. The adults who surround children are not just delivering lessons about reading or soccer or business strategyâthey are transmitting a worldview about what people are, whether they can change, and what the point of effort is.
This is an enormous responsibility. But itâs also an enormous opportunity. The growth mindset can be deliberately cultivated. Adults who understand what messages encourage growth and which ones stunt it can consciously choose to send the right messagesâand in doing so, give children a more resilient, more capable, and more fulfilling relationship with learning for the rest of their lives.
Think about the messages you received from parents, teachers, or coaches during your development. Which messages implied that your abilities were fixed? Which ones implied they could grow? Can you trace your current relationship with challenge and failure back to those early messages? And if youâre raising, teaching, or coaching children nowâwhat messages are you sending?