“This is too hard!”

“I can’t.”

“Will you do it, please?”

Do these phrases sound familiar?

When facing challenges, some children seem devastated over a small setback. Others rebound quickly and tackle a problem with tenacity.

Why do children respond so differently to frustration? And how can we build up our children’s grit and resilience to handle the many problems they will face over the course of their lives?

This post explains growth mindset as a crucial part of building resilient thinkers and lifelong learners. Read on to find out what it is, what’s going on in the brain, and what you can do today to build up a growth mindset in your children.

Contents

Defining growth mindset and fixed mindset
What’s going on in the brain? (Under the hood)
What can parents do? (Try it Today)
Takeaway

1. What is growth mindset?

Our thoughts and self talk create mindsets about who we are and what we are capable of doing.

In the words of Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can or you can’t—you’re right.”

In 2006, Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University released her book Mindset (2006), detailing her research of children’s mindsets about intelligence. Essentially, she studied children’s views of intelligence as either a fixed trait that could not be changed or a quality that could be grown and improved. She coined these perspectives as either a 1) fixed mindset or 2) growth mindset.

A fixed mindset:

A fixed mindset sees intelligence or success as things you either have or you don’t. People with fixed mindsets fear failure, evade challenges, and avoid mistakes. (Pawlina & Stanford, 2011)
A person with a fixed mindset sees an obstacle in the road as an immovable barrier and may struggle to see the path around it.

A growth mindset:

The cornerstone of growth mindset is that intelligence is not something you are–intelligence is a quality that can be grown with hard work on challenging problems. It’s the idea that anyone can learn and grow no matter how much you know or whether or not you’ve been told you are “smart.” It’s a positive attitude toward effort and improvement toward learning, no matter the individual starting point (Dweck, 2008; Pawlina & Stanford, 2011; Ng, 2018; Goldberg, 2022; Shaw, 2022)
A person with a growth mindset sees a mistake as a challenge and opportunity.
A person with a growth mindset sees an obstacle in the road as a chance to forge a new path or create their own solution.
A student with a growth mindset views progress as
incremental, not instant.

A student with a fixed mindset may see themselves as “a math person” and another person as “not a math person.” or “I’m just not a good reader” and see another student as “naturally good at that.”

A student with a growth mindset doesn’t see themselves as “good” or “bad” at a particular academic subject. They see themselves as a learner who is always improving with incremental steps through focused effort. That simple shift in mindset can help a student with a growth mindset succeed across multiple subject areas or academic skills.

A student with a **growth mindset** views progress as
**incremental**, not instant.

According to Dweck, when you build a growth mindset in your child:

you build their ability to “bounce back” from setbacks
you teach them that incremental growth is how we learn across our entire lifetime
you embolden them to not fear failure
you give them vision to see mistakes as opportunities

Much of the research on growth mindsets in the last two decades have focused on student self reports or observations of student behavior. However, there are connections between growth mindset and what neuroscientists know about the brain’s structure and function.

2. What’s going on in your child’s brain?

If we were to lift up the hood and see what’s happening in your child’s brain…

…we would see different pathways throughout the brain that are created by learning and training experiences. Those pathways are strengthened (reinforced) through repeated practice, and infrequently used pathways aren’t prioritized and sometimes even pruned (removed).

Neurons (the cells that are the basic units/building blocks of the nervous system) are like the links in a chain that create the pathways in our minds. The reinforcement of frequently used neuronal pathways in the brain is easily summarized by this popular phrase:

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

This is called neuroplasticity–the brain’s ability to change and adapt. The brain isn’t a static organ that sits in your skull, unchanging, throughout your life. It changes its own internal structure by forming neural connections based on experiences with the environment around us.

So…what’s the connection? If a growth mindset is how we view our capacity to change and grow, and neuroplasticity is what is happening to our brains on a micro level…how are these two concepts linked?

Neuroplasticity enables a growth mindset.

Neuroplasticity, the changing structure and function of the pathways in our brains, provides a physical foundation for developing and expanding our cognitive abilities.

Your child’s brain is physically wired to change and adapt while learning from experience. And that means that your child, through their own mindset, can directly influence their personal learning and brain growth.

While it is possible and beneficial to develop growth mindsets in adulthood, young children and school aged children are in an especially fruitful season of brain development. Their changing brains are ripe for building mindset and expanding their cognitive capacities.

“During the first two and a half decades of life, the human brain is a construction site and learning processes direct its shaping through experience-dependent neuroplasticity.” (Goldberg, 2022)

What kind of experiences can construct growth mindset and take advantage of this developmental season of brain construction? Let’s talk about that next.

3. What can parents do? You can try this today:

You can build a growth mindset in your child by modeling it, teaching them about what their brain is capable of, and using the power of the word “yet.”

1. Model it! Mind your own mindset.

Your growth mindset as a parent (or lack thereof) has direct implications for your child’s views of mistakes and success. Research has shown that parents and teachers greatly influence student growth mindset and performance.
- Children see and follow. That means if you have a negative view of failure or you only look for instant results after one attempt at solving a problem, your children will follow in your footsteps. Likewise, if they see you persevere through challenges with focus, or learn a new skill through tiny baby steps of growth, they will follow.
- If you want to change your child’s outlook, change what they see—that starts with what they see in you as their parent.
Tell stories of your own ups and downs. This not only provides a model of resilience, the brain is wired for stories and uses narrative to file and retrieve information more easily.
Let your child see you make mistakes, or tell them about times when you’ve failed. But don’t stop there! Let them see you handle the mistake and move forward. Tell them not just about times that you failed, but how you were thinking and how you took action and tried again.

2. Brain Chat! Teach them what their brain can do.

Explaining your brain’s capacity to grow and change with experience and mistakes is crucial for building resilience and perseverance. It’s empowering for students to know that their brains are wired to learn, especially for children who have previously seen themselves in a fixed mindset. It can be a mind opening experience to demonstrate that each of their brains have capacity to build new and difficult skills.
“…inducing a growth mindset by teaching neuroplasticity has an overall positive effect on motivation, achievement, and brain activity.” (Sarasin et al., 2018).
For preschool and elementary aged students, the book Your Fantastic Elastic Brain is of my favorites for introducing the concept of brain based growth:

3. Say YET! Reframe struggles with one powerful word.

Reframing is a strategy for shifting a person’s perspective in a positive way. The goal is to provide your child with language that shifts negative or limiting self-talk to growth oriented views.
- You can change your own words to support a growth mindset, and you can directly challenge words of a fixed mindset in your child.
One of the easiest and simplest ways to reframe is to use the word yet.
- “If a student calls me over with a problem and says, “I can’t do this,” I make sure to reframe their initial statement to “I can’t do this…yet” before I help them. “ (Shaw, 2022)
- YET is a powerful word that communicates to your child that you are optimistic about their success in the future and it also doesn’t let your child back away from the problem altogether. Use the word YET along with your support and encouragement to help your child persevere through learning challenges.

4. Takeaways

Talk about struggles as a normal part of life and not things to be feared.

Building a growth mindset is a crucial skill for lifelong learning, because if your child can apply himself to anything with effort and practice, and stick with it, he can grow and learn. What skill could be more applicable for preparing him for the challenges of the future, and for everyday life?

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