Encouraging a Growth Mindset at Home (Without the Empty Slogans)

If you’ve spent any time in a school newsletter, a staffroom poster, or a parenting group, you’ve met the phrase “growth mindset.” It gets used as a kind of magic word — believe you can improve and you will. That version is a slogan, and slogans are easy to be sceptical of, especially once you notice how thin some of the evidence behind the classroom version turned out to be. But underneath the poster-friendly phrase is a real body of psychology research, some of it genuinely useful for parents, and some of it more mixed than the popular version admits. This is an attempt to separate those two things.

What Carol Dweck’s research actually found

The term “growth mindset” comes from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who spent decades studying how children respond to difficulty and failure. In a 1988 paper with Ellen Leggett, she described two broad beliefs children hold about their own abilities. Some children hold what she called an “entity theory” — the belief that intelligence is a fixed thing you either have or don’t. Others hold an “incremental theory” — the belief that intelligence and ability can be developed through effort and learning. Dweck later popularised these as “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and the idea reached an even wider audience through her TED talk on the power of believing you can improve.

The core finding across her early studies was that children who held the more malleable, incremental belief tended to respond differently to setbacks. Faced with a hard problem, they were more likely to see it as something to work at rather than as proof of a limitation. Children with the fixed belief were more likely to read difficulty as a verdict on their ability, and to disengage from a task rather than risk looking “not smart.”

It’s worth being precise about what that research showed and didn’t show. It described a correlation — a link between how children think about ability and how they respond to challenge. It did not, on its own, prove that teaching a child to say “I can improve” causes better grades. That distinction between “this belief is associated with resilience” and “installing this belief in someone will improve their results” turned out to matter a great deal once schools started trying to teach mindset directly, which we’ll come back to.

The part with the strongest evidence: how you praise matters

If there’s one piece of this research that has held up well and is genuinely useful at home, it’s a specific, well-designed study about praise. In 1998, Dweck and her then-student Claudia Mueller published a series of six experiments with children around ten to twelve years old, working with fairly hard problems from a nonverbal reasoning test.

After the children completed the first set of problems, every child was told they’d done well. Then researchers added one more line, varied by group. Some children were told “you must be smart at this” — praise for ability. Others were told “you must have worked hard” — praise for effort. A third group got no extra comment at all.

What followed was consistent across the six experiments. The children praised for intelligence were more likely to care about looking smart than about actually learning something new when offered a choice of tasks afterwards. When they then hit a genuinely difficult set of problems and struggled, they were quicker to conclude they simply weren’t clever enough, enjoyed the task less, and — this is the part that tends to surprise parents — performed measurably worse on a final set of problems than the children who’d been praised for effort. The effort-praised children, by contrast, stuck with hard problems longer, described intelligence as something that could be built up rather than fixed, and their performance held up better under difficulty.

The mechanism Mueller and Dweck proposed is fairly intuitive once you see it laid out: telling a child “you’re smart” attaches their sense of worth to a trait they can’t control and that a single failure can seem to disprove. Telling a child “you worked hard” or “you found a good way to do that” attaches their sense of worth to something they’re actively doing, which they can keep doing even when the first attempt doesn’t work. This particular finding has since been checked and extended by other researchers, including a 2019 study on vocational students that found similar effects of effort-focused feedback on motivation. It’s one of the more robust, replicated pieces of this whole area — which is exactly why it’s worth taking seriously, separately from the bigger, shakier claims that got built on top of it.

The honest part: what happened when this went into classrooms

Here’s where it’s worth slowing down, because this is the bit that tends to get left off the posters. Once “growth mindset” became popular, schools and programmes started running interventions — short workshops, assemblies, online modules — designed to directly teach children that ability is malleable, on the assumption that this alone would lift achievement. Researchers then went back and checked how well that actually worked, and the results were considerably more modest than the popular version of the idea suggests.

The clearest evidence comes from a large 2018 meta-analysis by Victoria Sisk and colleagues, published in Psychological Science, which pooled data from 273 studies covering over 365,000 participants on the link between mindset and achievement, and a separate set of 43 intervention studies covering more than 57,000 participants. The relationship between having a growth mindset and doing well academically was weak overall. And when researchers looked specifically at whether teaching children a growth mindset actually raised their grades, the average effect was small — the kind of effect size that’s easy to detect across tens of thousands of children in aggregate, but not the kind of transformation the classroom posters imply for any individual child. There was a genuinely interesting exception: children from lower-income backgrounds or who were already struggling academically showed somewhat larger benefits than the average student. For a child already doing fine, a mindset lesson on its own didn’t move much.

A separate, very large and carefully designed study — the National Study of Learning Mindsets, led by David Yeager and published in Nature in 2019 — tracked around 12,500 US ninth-graders across 65 schools who were randomly assigned to receive a short online growth mindset intervention or not. This one found real effects, but they were far from universal. Lower-achieving students who received the intervention were somewhat more likely to take on harder maths courses afterwards; higher-achieving students barely moved. Critically, the benefit only showed up reliably in schools where the surrounding peer culture already supported the message — a mindset lesson delivered into a classroom culture that quietly mocked trying hard didn’t do much on its own. In other words, the belief mattered, but it clearly wasn’t the whole story; the environment around the child had to be pulling in the same direction.

Dweck herself has been unusually candid about this gap between the research and how it got used. In a widely read 2015 piece, she wrote plainly that the growth mindset “was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them,” and that she’d watched schools use the language to make children feel good about effort that wasn’t actually producing any learning — a teacher saying “great effort, you tried your best!” to a child who still doesn’t understand the material. She also acknowledged that her own early work “put too much emphasis on sheer effort,” making it sound as if trying hard was sufficient on its own, when what the original research actually pointed to was trying hard with a strategy that changes when the first one isn’t working — seeking help, trying a different method, asking a better question. She named this drift “false growth mindset”: adults who say the right words about growth and effort while their actual reactions to a child’s mistakes stay exactly as fixed-mindset as ever.

None of this means the underlying idea is wrong. It means the honest version is narrower and less dramatic than the slogan: how you respond to a child’s effort and setbacks does seem to matter, praise for process is better evidenced than praise for ability, and a short talk about “believing in yourself” is not, on its own, going to transform a struggling learner. The useful bit was never the belief in isolation — it’s what you actually do around a child’s mistakes, day to day, that the research keeps pointing back to.

What this means for the words you actually use at home

Given all that, the practical takeaway for a parent isn’t “recite growth mindset affirmations.” It’s something narrower and more doable: notice what you’re praising, and shift it from the trait to the process. That’s a habit of language, and like any habit it’s easiest to build with a few concrete swaps rather than a philosophy.

A few things about that list are worth spelling out, because the honest research above cuts both ways here. First, effort praise only works if the effort is actually connected to the outcome — Dweck’s own warning applies at home just as much as in a classroom. Telling a child “great effort” after twenty minutes of getting the same sum wrong the same way isn’t process praise, it’s a consolation prize, and children generally know the difference. The more useful move is to praise the strategy and then help them change it: “you tried subtracting first — what happens if you try adding instead?”

Second, notice that a couple of the “avoid” phrases aren’t about ability at all — they’re about quietly letting a child off the hook (“not everyone’s good at spelling”). That phrase feels kind in the moment, but it teaches the same lesson as “you’re just not a maths person”: that this is fixed, so there’s no point pushing. The swap isn’t to force relentless positivity, it’s to keep the door open — this is hard right now, not hard forever.

Third, be specific. “Good job” and “well done” are fine as warmth, but they don’t teach anything about what worked. “You checked your working before handing it in, and that’s why you caught the mistake” tells a child exactly what to repeat next time. Specificity is what turns praise from a mood boost into actual information.

And it’s fine — expected, even — for this to feel unnatural for a while. Praise for ability is the easy, quick, culturally default thing to say. Catching yourself and reaching for the process version is a habit you’re building in yourself as much as in your child, and it will feel clunky before it feels normal.

Modelling it yourself matters more than the words

Here’s the part that’s easiest to skip and probably matters most: children watch what you do with your own mistakes far more closely than they listen to what you tell them to do with theirs. If you drop a plate and mutter “I’m so stupid,” or throw your hands up over a wrong turn on the drive with “I’m hopeless at directions,” you’ve just given a live demonstration of the fixed mindset — regardless of how carefully you worded the praise five minutes earlier.

None of us are being watched constantly, and nobody manages a calm, growth-oriented response to every mistake they make. That’s not really the goal. What seems to help is narrating your own process out loud sometimes, especially when something doesn’t go to plan: “I got that email wrong — I should have reread it before sending. I’ll check twice next time.” “This recipe’s not working, let me try a different amount.” “I misjudged that, let’s see what I’d do differently.” You’re not performing a lesson; you’re just letting your child overhear how an adult actually handles being wrong — which, done honestly, includes some frustration, not just cheerful resilience.

This matters because it undercuts the exact failure mode Dweck warned about with “false growth mindset” — parents who say the right things about effort and mistakes but visibly panic, deflect, or shut down when they make their own. Children are good at spotting that gap, and they tend to copy the real behaviour, not the stated belief. If you want a child who tries a second approach when the first one fails, the most direct route isn’t a better speech — it’s being a person they’ve watched do exactly that, more than once, including on the days it’s annoying.

It’s also worth being honest with your child about the limits of effort itself, since that’s part of what the research above corrects for. Trying hard at the wrong method for twenty minutes isn’t admirable, it’s just frustrating, and pretending otherwise isn’t kind. The useful message is closer to: “if it’s not working, that’s information, not a verdict — so what do we try next,” rather than “just keep trying and it’ll come right.” That’s a subtler thing to model than a slogan, but it’s the version the actual research supports.

If you’re after a bit more structure for turning this into an everyday routine rather than an occasional good intention, Learnaroo Hub’s parent resources include some practical prompts for talking through homework mistakes without it turning into either a lecture or an argument — worth a look if you want something more concrete to work from than “just praise the effort.”

None of this is a promise that a few better phrases will transform how your child does at school — the honest reading of the research says that’s not how it works, and any advice claiming otherwise is overselling it. What the evidence does support is smaller and steadier: how you respond to a child’s mistakes, moment to moment, shapes whether they see difficulty as something to work through or something to avoid. That’s not a slogan. It’s just a habit worth building, one ordinary Tuesday-evening homework session at a time.