How to give your kid a growth mindset

If kids need to believe in anything, it’s growth.

The head coach of the Navy volleyball team preaches a growth mindset for his players. 

Many of his players come with a big ego. They’re used to being winners, after all. But the downside of this is they only know how to handle winning.

How do you convince someone who loves winning to be okay with losing? 

Teach them the growth mindset. 

When a player absorbs this mindset, nothing about them is set in stone. They can’t spike the ball yet. They can’t serve aces yet. Everything can change–you just need time.

To become great, a player must be willing to charge headfirst into mistakes, understanding that they will not define her. She will be defined by her ability to grow over time. 

Psychoanalysis Carl Jung called this growth over time the “self.” The self, according to Jung, was the part of us (not the ego) that remained after we transform. 

“The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves.”

A growth mindset consists of 

1. Accepting where you are

2. Experimenting and failing often

3. Learning from mistakes

Here are some easy steps to impart a growth mindset to our kids, which make it so you don’t have to micromanage their education.

Let them lose

Let’s face it, we all pop out of the womb big losers. We can’t do much of anything right. We’re loveable, that’s for sure. But we can’t walk, talk, or pay taxes. 

What makes kids so amazing is their unstoppable growth mindset. They will babble, toddle, and grasp awkwardly, without fear, until they get it right. That’s why kids can learn Spanish in a year, and it takes adults a decade.

Slowly, as kids touch a hot stove and skin their knees, they get more and more cautious. Some kids get cautious sooner than others. It’s completely understandable. When you stick your fingers into the pond, sometimes the turtles bite. We lose our growth mindset.

As parents, it’s tempting to empathize with our kid's reactions of fear and discomfort. To jump to their aid. But this teaches them the wrong lessons. For their own happiness and sanity, they need to keep finding the sharp corners of life. They need to learn that it is okay to get hurt (usually, they’re more frightened than hurt) and that it signals that what they are looking for is not here, but maybe it is somewhere else. 

Let them go to the party they’re nervous about. Let them ride the bike. Let them play. Don’t always be there to catch them. Let them feel the skinned knee. Tell them to “walk it off” (something that’s almost illegal these days). But, if you can stand feeling like a “bad” parent in a short moment, you’ll give your kid an inexhaustible gift–growth. 

Teach them how to be invited to more games

Kids like to play with other kids. Not necessarily kids of exactly the same age group (which we’ve weirdly demanded of them in public schools). They will approach other kids independently and offer to play (if they haven’t been sheltered too much). If you have an especially shy kid, practice approaching other kids with them. Whatever your kid’s social standing now, it’s anything but a life sentence. All they need is a little practice. 

Here’s one way to think about raising kids: you want to make your kid so fun that other kids and adults will raise them when you’re not around. It takes a village, after all. 

You want your kid to be the one who is invited to play again (not just the first time). That means they can’t cry every time they lose, for one. It also means they have to know how to grow. That’s what kids are doing with each other–they are finding the limits of their ability and playing at the borders of what they know. That’s why play is so engaging. 

The goal for your kid is not to win any particular game. The goal is to be the sort of kid who gets invited to play lots of games. That’s how you win the set of all games. 

Teach them to be a good loser, a good sport, and someone who knows how to include others. That way, everyone they interact with will want them around. 

Watch them win

When you give your kid a growth mindset, they will be invited to play many games. That means they will have lots of practice. And it’s not a small thing to be good at games—games are a model for life. 

When they play lots of games and are well-liked, they naturally rise to the top pretty often. 

That’s when you know you have done your job well as a parent—your kid is okay with losing any particular game, but they are invited to lots of games, get lots of practice, and therefore become more likely to win. Winning makes them more confident, cooperative, and even generous. But you can’t get there without a bunch of losing.

Studies show that kids who are good at games are more successful in life. That’s because kids who know how to play the “meta-game” are good at life. 

That’s the essence of a growth mindset. 

Give your kid that as early as possible, and the world will raise your kid for you.

Share this with someone looking to outsource some parenting.

Thank you for reading,

Taylor + rebelEducator team

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P.S.

Here’s what we’re looking at:

The book A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brain Grazer

“It’s exactly the opposite of what you would hope, but authentic curiosity in a typical seventh grade classroom isn’t cultivated— because it’s inconvenient and disruptive to the orderly running of the class.” — @BrianGrazer

Writing a board game with your kids

This 2-week program by gt.school to teach kids real-life skills

Quotes were pondering:

“A lot of teens disqualify the cool things they do if they enjoy doing them. Schools encourage the idea that for something to have value and be worthwhile, it can’t be fun.” — Austin Scholar

“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.” — Henry David Thoreau

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” — Aristotle