Early on in my parenting journey, my head was full of Shoulds: “I should know better”, “I should do better”, “I should try harder”, “I should be more patient”, and on and on.
These Shoulds painted my daily experiences in grey. No matter how hard I tried to meet the Shoulds in my head, I kept falling behind. I felt powerless and disoriented.
“Something has to change”, I thought to myself.
As I gained more insights along my parenting journey, I discovered that the beliefs I had about parenting and my abilities held me back.
My biggest breakthrough was with growth mindset — specifically applying the growth mindset to parenting.
Today, many are familiar with growth mindset. It is considered a key to success and has become a common value for leaders, educators, athletes, coaches, and professionals around the world. How can we bring it home? Let’s start with the basics.
What is a Growth Mindset?
Growth Mindset is the belief that we can change — that human intelligence, qualities, and abilities are malleable. Stanford Professor Carol Dweck coined the term growth mindset and has been leading the research in this field for decades. In her book Mindset, she describes how the theory applies to key areas of our lives from relationships and work to school and parenting.
What does it mean for us as parents? Growth mindset is based on the belief that human potential can be developed. When applied to parenting, it’s the belief that we can develop our parenting potential, meaning – develop our parenting abilities and skills.
Why does Mindset matter
The belief itself won’t create a new ability. Believing that we can become more patient, for example, won’t lead to more patience, but learning will. As we all know, the process of learning (anything) involves ups and downs. It involves making mistakes, and making progress, struggling, failing, succeeding, coping with challenges and more. But, could what we believe about patience, for example, impact our success in developing it? This is where the power of mindset comes in.
Professor Dweck and her colleagues have found that the beliefs we hold lead to different behaviours and consequently, to different results. A growth mindset leads us to take learning-oriented actions, and consequently, we get better. This is how a growth mindset impacts the following experiences:
- Effort – effort is expected and associated with making progress. We know that in order to develop our abilities or qualities, patience, for example, we need to dedicate time, attention and energy to practice.
- Mistakes – when we make mistakes, we take the time to process them, learn from them and explore ways to correct them.
- Challenges – when challenges arise, we focus on our learning path (rather than on blaming, judging or shaming). We use these moments to assess our skills and reflect on the strategies we can try next in order to see progress.
- Setbacks – when we hit setbacks, we persevere and become resilient.
- Progress – when we make progress and reach our goals, big or small, we celebrate. We recognize the efforts and dedication that brought us to where we are.
- Feedback – when we get feedback we see it as an opportunity to learn. We don’t try to blame, make excuses, or prove we are right but rather ask questions to clarify how we can get better.
A growth mindset impacts our motivation, attitude, choices, and the words we use, as well as the way we experience, interpret and feel about situations. This is why a growth mindset is considered a key for learning and success. Cultivating growth mindset with care can help us transform our actions and progress toward our parenting aspirations.
How to get started? Explore your Mindsets
While there are many ways to embark on a growth mindset parenting journey, I encourage you to start by exploring your beliefs.
For example, let’s explore mindsets by looking at the quality of patience – the ability to endure difficult experiences. I’ve never met a parent who said “I have enough patience”. Most parents would agree that patience is a quality they wish they could have more of. But what beliefs do we have around patience? Think of the following questions:
- Do you really believe you can develop more patience as a parent? If so, what do you do to grow your patience? In a growth mindset, because you believe you can grow your capacity for patience, you actively work on developing it.
- Do you catch yourself thinking “I’m impatient” or “I have a short temper”? It might be that you learned to think about yourself as impatient and consequently, you believe that your capacity for patience is fixed and can’t be developed, what we call a Fixed Mindset.
- Do you wonder “why could I develop more patience for my colleagues at work but when it comes to my kids I am just impatient?” This is an example of a mixed mindset – in some circumstances you hold a growth mindset and in others a fixed mindset.
Each of us has a unique mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. The mindsets we hold are impacted by the context and environment we are in. Additionally, Mindsets are domain specific. We can hold a growth mindset about health and emotional intelligence and a fixed mindset about art or patience (“I can’t be an artist” or “I can’t be more patient”). But the good news is that you can change your mindset and cultivate a growth mindset.
I hope this introduction to growth mindset parenting is helpful. Growth Mindset Parenting is a courageous commitment. During my growth mindset parenting journey, I got disoriented several times. I learned the hard way that having fixed beliefs held me back and consequently, I had unrealistic expectations for myself and my kids. I’m committed to sharing insights and lessons learned from my experience as a mom and as a growth mindset learning specialist. In future posts we will keep exploring the nuances and strategies of bringing the growth mindset home.
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