What Is Growth Mindset in Children? What the Research Actually Shows

Growth mindset is one of the most widely discussed
concepts in education and parenting over the past
two decades — and one of the most frequently
misapplied. The term has become so popular that
it is often reduced to a slogan: “just tell children
they can improve and they will.” The research
behind it is both more specific and more nuanced
than this popular version suggests.

This article covers what growth mindset actually
is, what the original research shows, what the
limitations of that research are, and what
parents can specifically do to support a
genuine growth mindset in their children.

What Growth Mindset Actually Is

The concept of growth mindset was developed
by psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford
University, building on decades of research
on motivation, achievement, and how people
respond to challenge and failure.

Dweck identified two broad orientations
toward ability and intelligence:

Fixed mindset — the belief that abilities
are fixed traits that you either have or
do not have. In a fixed mindset, intelligence
is something you are born with, talent is
innate, and effort matters less than
natural ability. When things are difficult,
a fixed mindset interprets this as evidence
of limited ability.

Growth mindset — the belief that abilities
can be developed through effort, good
strategies, and support from others.
In a growth mindset, challenge is an
opportunity to grow, difficulty is
a signal to try harder or differently,
and effort is the primary route to
improvement.

Research by Dweck and colleagues finds
that children with a growth mindset
show significantly greater persistence
in the face of challenge, greater
willingness to try difficult tasks,
better recovery from failure, and
better academic achievement over
time than those with a fixed mindset —
particularly in challenging academic
environments.

The research also finds that mindset
is malleable — it can be shifted
through specific types of feedback,
teaching, and experience. This is
what makes it practically significant
for parents.

What the Research Shows

Praise type significantly affects mindset.
One of Dweck’s most influential findings
comes from a series of experiments in
which children were praised either for
their intelligence (“you must be really
smart”) or for their effort (“you must
have worked really hard”) after
completing a task.

Children praised for intelligence
subsequently chose easier tasks
(to protect the “smart” label),
showed less persistence when tasks
became difficult, reported less
enjoyment, and performed worse
on subsequent challenging tasks
than those praised for effort.

Children praised for effort chose
more challenging tasks, showed
greater persistence, reported
more enjoyment, and performed
better on subsequent tasks.

The type of praise — ability versus
effort — produced meaningfully
different mindsets and meaningfully
different outcomes from a single
experimental session. Across years
of daily interaction, the cumulative
effect is significant.

How adults respond to failure
matters more than how they
respond to success. Research
by Dweck and by Kyla Haimovitz
at Stanford finds that children
are particularly sensitive to
how parents respond to failure —
whether the parent treats failure
as a learning opportunity or as
an indication of limited ability.
Children whose parents respond
to failure with curiosity and
problem-solving develop more
growth-oriented responses to
their own failures than those
whose parents respond with
disappointment or reassurance
that ability is fixed.

Mindset interventions in schools
show real but modest effects.
A large-scale study by David
Yeager at the University of Texas
and colleagues, published in
Nature in 2019, found that a
brief growth mindset intervention
delivered to ninth-grade students
across the United States produced
significant improvements in
grades among lower-achieving
students. The effects were
real but modest — and were
larger in school environments
that supported a growth mindset
culture, and smaller in those
that did not.

Important Caveats

Growth mindset has genuine
research support — and has
also been oversimplified in
ways that reduce its usefulness.

Telling children to “have a
growth mindset” does not work.
Research on mindset interventions
consistently finds that simply
telling children that abilities
can grow — without changing
the specific feedback and
environmental conditions they
experience — produces minimal
effect. The mindset shift comes
from changed experience, not
from changed labels.

Effort praise without accurate
feedback is not helpful.
Praising effort regardless
of outcome — “great job trying!”
when the strategy was ineffective —
can become a form of false
reassurance that does not build
genuine growth orientation.
Research by Dweck emphasizes
that the most useful feedback
acknowledges effort AND
directs attention to strategy:
“You worked really hard on that.
What strategy did you use?
What might you try differently?”

Growth mindset does not override
the need for genuine skill
development. A child who
believes they can improve
but is not taught effective
strategies and given adequate
practice will not improve
through belief alone. Mindset
is a motivational orientation
that supports learning —
it does not replace the
conditions that learning requires.

What Parents Can Do

Praise effort and strategy,
not ability. The research
is clearest on this point.
Replace “you’re so smart”
with “you worked really hard
on that” and “what strategy
did you use?” Replace
“you’re so talented” with
“you’ve really been practicing —
I can see the difference.”

Respond to failure with
curiosity rather than
reassurance or disappointment.
When a child fails or struggles,
the most growth-mindset-supporting
response is curious and forward-looking:
“That was hard. What do you
think happened? What could
you try differently?”
Rather than: “Don’t worry,
you’re really smart” (reassurance
that implies ability is fixed)
or visible disappointment
(which communicates that
failure is a verdict).

Share your own growth experiences.
Research on parental modeling
and mindset finds that children
are influenced by observing
how parents talk about their
own challenges and learning.
A parent who says “I’m finding
this really difficult — I’m
going to try a different
approach” is modeling growth
mindset in a way that
instruction alone cannot.

Teach explicitly that the brain
grows through challenge. Research
on neuroscience-informed mindset
interventions finds that teaching
children specifically that the
brain forms new connections
through effortful practice —
that struggle is literally
the mechanism of learning —
produces more durable mindset
shifts than motivational
messages alone.

For school-age children,
the explanation is simple:
“When things are hard for you,
that’s your brain working
to build new connections.
The difficulty is not a
sign that you can’t do it.
It’s a sign that you’re learning.”

Value the process over the outcome.
Research on goal orientation and
achievement finds that children
who are focused on learning goals —
what did I understand, what did
I improve, what did I learn —
show more persistent and more
resilient learning behavior than
those focused on performance goals —
what grade did I get, how did
I compare to others. Parents
who ask “what did you learn
today?” as consistently as
they ask “how did you do?”
are shaping goal orientation
in ways that support growth mindset.

The Bottom Line

Growth mindset is a genuine
and well-researched concept
that has been significantly
oversimplified in popular
culture. Simply telling
children to believe they
can improve does not work.
Creating the conditions —
through specific types of
praise, through curious
responses to failure, through
modeling growth orientation —
in which growth mindset
naturally develops, does.

The research is clear on
what those conditions are.
They are not complicated.
They require consistent
intention across thousands
of ordinary interactions —
but they are available to
every parent in every
daily moment that involves
challenge, effort, and
the inevitable experience
of something being hard.

Sources

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset:
The New Psychology of Success.
Random House.

Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L.
(1988). A social-cognitive
approach to motivation and
personality. Psychological
Review, 95(2), 256–273.

Yeager, D. S., et al. (2019).
A national experiment reveals
where a growth mindset improves
achievement. Nature, 573,
364–369.

Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S.
(2016). What predicts children’s
fixed and growth intelligence
mind-sets? Psychological Science,
27(6), 859–869.