How to Teach Your Kids a Growth Mindset & Boost Mental Resilience
Elastic thinkers are able to let go of comfort, experiment, reframe questions, and rely on imagination.
A growth mindset helps kids develop several lifelong skills such as adaptability, commitment, curiosity, determination, enthusiasm, and motivation. It is about improvement, not perfection. Kids with this mindset are able to jump through life’s hurdles willingly with an understanding that learning takes time and effort.
Kids who are confident in themselves and know that it’s okay to struggle with something or fail sometimes are more likely to get back up again and keep trying.
Keep reading to find out how to help your child develop a growth mindset.
What is a Growth Mindset?
From an early age, we develop our own set of beliefs about ourselves and our abilities. This stems from our mindset, which is shaped by present experiences and predictions of future possibilities. “Big Life Journal” overviews these two main types of mindsets.
A growth mindset is a belief that if given the right resources and strategies, we have the potential to improve our intelligence and capabilities. Those with a growth mindset tend to be individuals who see failure as an opportunity for growth and learning. This way of thinking leads to embracing the challenge, applying feedback, and a lifelong commitment to become better with time and practice. Kids with this mindset may be found saying phrases like, “I am still learning,” or “I’m going to keep trying even if it’s difficult.”
The opposite of this is a fixed mindset. Those with this way of thinking believe that mistakes are failures, which lead to fear and avoidance. They tend to avoid risks for this reason and stay in the comfort of outcomes they can control. This way of thinking results in quitting, giving up, or labeling ourselves as “not good enough.”
If you believe your child is in a “fixed” state, there are resources and tools to help them develop a new way of thinking. If your child already has a “growth” mindset these effective strategies will accelerate their learning process.
In order to help your child’s growth mindset journey, first, you can start by teaching them about building resilience.
How resilience plays a part
Resilience is what you do after something goes wrong – kids can make the choice to get back up or give up. Kids need to understand they have options to make a choice. This is found in what kids see and hear.
In a way, having a growth mindset is synonymous with resilience.
We want our kids to be resilient and keep trying when things get tough.
There are three main types of resilience:
- Emotional resilience teaches kids how to deal with the emotions that they have. It’s knowing that you can have a bad day and that you can keep going because feelings don’t last forever.
- Intellectual resilience is understanding that if you are in a leadership position you are at the front. You need to know that your ideas are original and you are learning. Just because an idea doesn’t pan out doesn’t mean it’s not a good one.
- Applied resilience is making sure they do the action and put the effort in.
In order to boost a child’s resilience, try doing more interest-based learning at home. When kids are excited by what they’re doing, they’re more likely to stick with it through challenges.
You can also talk to them about when it’s smart to delay gratification. For example, you might explain to them that your family didn’t do out-of-country vacations for years so that you could save up for the home you now live in.
Set a model for them by not giving up. Set expectations and tell them failure is a part of the process for everyone. Tell them they are not perfect and teach them to anticipate failure as inevitable.
Smart Ways to Boost Kids’ Growth Mindset
Some kids naturally have a growth mindset and understand that it's okay to "fail forward." For others, this takes more work to develop. Here are ways to strengthen that muscle.
Identify their growth mindset heroes
In order for kids to truly understand and apply a growth mindset, it helps to have a list of role models who they can look up to. That way, any time they think they can’t do something they remember someone who has done something difficult before them.
Here are some popular examples, but we encourage you to look up heroes that your child will look up to, based on their interests.
Steve Jobs is a perfect example of someone who embraced his failure to become a better leader. After 10 years as the CEO of Apple, he was fired for always wanting to be in control and valuing the machines more than the humans helping him create them. It took him 12 years to learn how to handle criticism, lead, give credit, mend relationships, and release control.
Before she went on to have her own talk show, Oprah Winfrey, started on a failed news show and was demoted from her primetime co-anchor role. Through her story, she taught others that failure was really just pushing her in a new direction.
Kids could also be inspired by the author of their favorite “Harry Potter” series, J.K. Rowling. Failure taught her the power of having strong will and discipline. She received dozens of rejection letters from publishers and was penniless during the process of writing the first novel.
Even one of the most iconic inventors in history, Thomas Edison failed before inventing the lightbulb. In an interview, he was asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
All of these famous innovators have one thing in common, they maintained a growth mindset and made decisions to pivot instead of giving up. This willingness to adapt and change allowed them to end up in places of success.
Read content that fosters a growth mindset
Kids can make real-world applications most easily through watching and reading. Books and movies allow kids to relate to complex topics and characters with hidden lessons. We chose some of the most popular picks for you below and explained how each story contributes to a growth mindset.
OUR TOP BOOK CHOICES:
“The Celestina Code,” by Nora Szanto is a choose-your-adventure book to help kids see the real effects of having a growth mindset. They get to choose what the character does next and experience how that affects their life. Kids learn the essential high-performing traits needed to rise from adversity, overcome obstacles, step into their truth and reach their goals with integrity.
“After the Fall,” by Dan Santat, is the story of Humpty Dumpty from the egg’s perspective after the fall. It carries the theme of a growth mindset with lessons of perseverance, overcoming fears, and courage.
“The Bad Seed,” by Jory John, tells the story of a “bad seed” who receives negative feedback on his behavior. This inspires the long journey of developing self-awareness, emotional maturity, and growth mindset behaviors.
Utilize online resources
Synthesis is a global problem-solving community for kids ages 6 to 14. Children on various planes of development and academic levels learn about collaboration, teamwork, winning, and losing. The minimum learning requirement is only one hour/week, along with optional open play sessions, so kids can engage with people in their cohort more than once a week. This space allows students to learn how to think independently and solve (and fail at solving) real problems at their own pace – skills that are necessary for building mental resilience.
Cosmic Kids’ videos vary across several topics and help kids develop transferable growth mindset tools. These videos inspire kids what it looks like to solve problems and overcome challenges with enthusiasm. The video host, Jaime, includes 5 simple strategies to use when facing thoughts of giving up.
Kids in the House is an online parenting resource that offers video lessons from renowned experts such as JoAnn Deak, Ph.D., Edward Hallowell, MD, EdD, and Carol Dweck that cover a range of topics about a mindset shift, developing a positive growth mindset, tips for changing a fixed mindset, and more.
Do growth mindset activities at home
Here are a few growth mindset exercises and activities that you can try at home:
- The Hard Thing Rule – A concept created by Angela Duckworth where students choose a difficult task that they have to complete with persistence.
- Grit Pie Exercise – Have your child visualize a pie, or draw out a model of one. Each slice is the cause of the problem, which is the pie. Walkthrough each slice and if it is a temporary or permanent problem and who is to blame. Students who can use grit and self-discipline in solving problems are better indicators of success in college than standardized testing (Bashant, 2014).
- Vocabulary – When your child learns new words, they are improving the neuroplasticity of their brain. Vocabulary leads to better reading and writing skills, which creates more confidence. Help your child improve their vocabulary through reading more challenging books and using vocabulary flashcards at the dinner table or during road trips.
- Interviews – Students are known to learn from others, so have your child ask others about challenges they’ve recently faced/overcome and advice they’d give. This helps students learn that obstacles are a universal, shared experience.
- Draw It Out – In order to visualize two opposing mindsets, a T-chart is a great way to see conflicting perspectives. It can help children identify the different phrases and thoughts without judgment.
How Real-World Problem Solving Creates a Growth Mindset
At Synthesis, we solve real-world problems to create growth mindsets in kids. Teams of students from around the world work in cohorts to play thoughtfully designed simulations, and review their results as a team. It is about an understanding that learning isn’t a competition.
Teaching kids to build a mindset to overcome challenges and failures with resilience is key. A growth mindset is something that takes time to develop – whether it's a daily mental shift or weekly problem-solving with Synthesis, there are opportunities for your children to build this way of thinking.
Learn more about Synthesis, a fun, collaborative-program solving program for kids.
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Synthesis Tutor is built on research by DARPA—the government agency behind GPS, the Internet, and early self-driving cars.
DARPA sought to create a digital learning system as good as the classroom, but they accidentally made something far better. In fact, their average student performed better than 99.99% of students who learned in a classroom.
But the DARPA students didn’t only outperform the classroom, they also outperformed 99.9% of Navy technicians with an average of ten years of experience. This shows us that there is a way to teach concepts—even advanced concepts—in a way that’s far more efficient and empowering.
To achieve those results, the DARPA team created software that mimicked the way experts tutored their students. Unlike human tutors, software never gets tired, frustrated, or impatient. It never has an off-day or fumbles an explanation. If a student misunderstands a concept, the digital tutor always provides just the right guidance. This, it turns out, is critical.
Most importantly, the students felt like they were learning from a real person. The tutor was digital, but it had soul. Its care, intentionality, encouragement, and patients built unbreakable trust with students. They relied upon the digital tutor, shared their struggles, and treated it like you’d treat your favorite teacher. It’s hard to believe, but the digital tutor created a bond with the students—a bond that acted like fuel for unimaginably deep, fast, and joyful learning.
To test its effectiveness, DARPA set up a competition between three groups:
- Navy technicians with an average of 10 years of experience
- Students who learned in a classroom for 36 weeks
- Students who learned with the DARPA digital tutor for 16 weeks
The DARPA students outperformed both groups by huge margins. In only 16 weeks, they were better than 99.9% of Navy technicians and 99.99% of classroom students.
No other way of learning has ever achieved anything close to these results.
If you want to get close to the DARPA results, you’ll need to hire a world-class tutor to work with your child one-on-one. But even then, research shows those students won’t perform as well as the DARPA program.
Simply put, the DARPA program is the greatest way to learn in the history of humanity. It’s a big statement—we know. But it’s inexpensive to try it and to quickly discover this for yourself.
Synthesis partnered with the team that created the original DARPA program. We expanded upon their research, tailor-made a platform for kids ages 7-10, and extended what they achieved with modern AI tools.
For the first time, any kid with an internet connection can receive the best education in the world—no matter where they are.
If you’d like to dig deeper, you can read this study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analysis.
Or check out this helpful summary of the results.