Why I don't tell children they're clever
| praise, confidence, ages 9 to 12
A child has solved a problem or finished a drawing and looks up. The sentence is already waiting, all you have to do is say it: “You’re so clever.” It is kindly meant, and it takes a second.
When a child I know shows me something like that, I say a different sentence: “Show me how you did that.”
It is not a verdict on the child. It is a question about the route. I can’t prove it is the better sentence. What I can do is write down why I don’t say the first one, and what the research actually supports. That turns out to be less than you might expect.
What a child hears in “clever”
One study on this comes from Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, published in 1998. Fifth graders were praised after a task either for their intelligence or for their effort. After a later failure, the children praised for intelligence persisted less, enjoyed the task less and performed worse (Mueller and Dweck 1998). I have written about the study before, in the post on the sentence I can’t do this.
The part that stays with me is the word “after”. The disadvantages showed up after a failure. The way I read it: if you have been told you are clever, a failure says something about your head, not just about the task.
Both sentences are in the book
In the first chapter of Mind Garden, Mika sits a maths test, and it goes badly. While he is still writing, he pictures his dad coming home that evening and asking: “How’d it go, Champion?” That is what his dad calls him when he brings home good grades. When he doesn’t, his dad just frowns and goes quiet, and to Mika that silence feels worse than yelling.
That is praise attached to a result. Mika knows exactly what it takes to be Champion, which means he also knows when he isn’t.
After the test, the teacher asks him to stay behind for a minute. Mrs. Schneider looks at his half-empty paper for a long moment and says: “I know you studied, Mika. Let’s go over this together during study hall tomorrow, okay?” She doesn’t say he is clever, and she doesn’t say he isn’t. She names what he did and offers to look at the route together.
The book is not a lesson about praise. It is about a boy who decided too early what he can’t do. But the two ways of talking to a child about a result stand side by side in the same chapter.
Not all praise does harm
You could conclude from all this that it is best not to praise children at all. The research doesn’t support that.
Eddie Brummelman and his colleagues followed 120 parents and their children, aged seven to eleven, in the Netherlands over time. The more inflated the parents’ praise, the lower the children’s self-esteem later on. In children whose self-esteem was already high, inflated praise also went along with more narcissism. Ordinary praise that wasn’t inflated was linked to neither (Brummelman and colleagues 2017).
An earlier study by the same group makes this more than a footnote. Adults are especially inclined to give inflated praise to children with low self-esteem, and in an experiment it was exactly those children who then sought out the harder task less often (Brummelman and colleagues 2014). The big praise tends to land on the children for whom it backfired in the experiment.
So the research separates two things that often come together in everyday life: praise that is too big, and praise aimed at the person rather than the thing they did. Both have shown side effects in studies. Nothing in these studies speaks against ordinary praise for something done well.
What the research doesn’t say
These studies are fairly clear about which kinds of praise can do harm. They don’t show that any particular kind of praise helps children in the long run. And my sentence isn’t praise at all but a question, so they say nothing about it either way. Programmes that teach students that their abilities grow with effort have shown no reliable effect on school results in a thorough review from 2023 (Macnamara and Burgoyne 2023).
So “Show me how you did that” is not something I would pass on as a recipe, as if it raised grades or produced confidence. It is an attitude, not a method.
What the question does is more modest. It postpones the verdict. As long as the child is explaining how they went about it, nobody has to decide whether the result was good, bad or brilliant. It may turn out that the route was bumpy and the answer still right, or that the child found a trick I didn’t know. You never find out either of those if you have already said “clever”.
The sentence Mika tells himself
In the middle of the maths test, as the problems slip away from him, Mika closes his eyes and tells himself one sentence: “I will find a way.”
It is not praise, and it is not a verdict. It is a plan.
This piece is by Dr. Wahed Hemati, author of the children’s novel Mind Garden: As You Think, So You Grow for children aged 9 and up.