Praising Effort, Not Intelligence

Praise, motivation and what children take from it

What the praise studies found, which parts have held up, how praise differs from rewards and comparison, how it lands at different ages, and what to say in practice, including after a setback

Written by Ivana, psychologist and psychotherapist

13 minute read  ·  2,818 words

Your daughter shows you a math worksheet with every answer right. “You’re so smart,” you say, and she beams. It’s a warm moment and a completely natural thing to say. The question researchers have been asking for almost thirty years is what a child takes away from a moment like that, and what happens the next time the worksheet is hard.

One of the best-known ideas in parenting is that it’s better to praise the effort than the child: “You worked really hard on that” rather than “You’re so smart.” The research behind it is real, but it’s more mixed than the advice usually suggests, and the part that has held up best is a little different from the version most of us have heard.

And the practical answer turns out to be simpler than the research: describe what your child actually did.

It started with a set of puzzles

In 1998, the psychologist Carol DweckCarol DweckAmerican psychologist at Stanford University, best known for her research on mindsets: whether people see ability as fixed or as something that can grow. and a colleague gave fifth graders in the United States a set of puzzles and told every child they’d done well. Some of the children also heard that they must be smart at these problems. Others heard that they must have worked hard at them. Then every child got a much harder set, and did badly on it.

What came next is the part that made the study famous. Across six experiments, the children praised for their intelligence were less willing to keep going, enjoyed the puzzles less and did worse on a final set than the children praised for their effort. They were also more likely to describe intelligence as something fixed, something you either have or you don’t.

Praise for the child, or for what the child did

A year later, Dweck and another colleague asked five- and six-year-olds to act out short role-play stories. After a small success in a story, some children heard praise about themselves as a person, and others heard praise about the way they’d gone about the task. When a later story ended in a mistake, the children praised as people were more likely to criticize themselves and to give up.

Researchers call these two kinds person praise and process praise. Person praise is about who the child is: clever, talented, a natural. Process praise is about what the child did: the effort, the approach, the choices along the way.

Even a single word can tip it. In a small study with preschoolers, children who heard “You’re a good drawer” coped worse with later mistakes than children who heard “You did a good job drawing.” The first turns one drawing into a fact about the child. The second stays with the drawing.

What happens at home

Role-play stories are one thing, and a kitchen table is another. One team recorded 53 families at home while the children were between one and three years old, and counted the kinds of praise the parents used. Five years later, the children whose parents had used more process praise were more likely to believe that ability can grow. When the same children were followed into fourth grade, that belief went together with better results in math and reading.

Two things to keep in mind. It’s one small group of families, and the parents weren’t asked to change anything, so it shows a link, not proof that the praise made the difference.

The famous result was hard to repeat

When researchers tried the puzzle study again, it didn’t come out the same. A series of studies with 624 children aged nine to thirteen in China, starting with a close repeat of the original, found that the kind of praise made no difference to how motivated the children were or how they explained failing. There was only a borderline difference in their scores. A careful 2024 study of 150 American eight-year-olds, planned and registered in advance, also found no clear difference between the two kinds of praise, although a further look at the data found that praising effort did beat saying nothing at all.

Research on growth mindset tells a similar story. Large reviews find that teaching children that ability can grow has small effects on school results on average. Researchers still disagree about who benefits: one review found the effect vanished in the best-designed studies, while a national trial and another review found a modest boost for students who were struggling.

Calling a child smart can still backfire

What keeps returning is the other half of the original idea. Calling a child smart seems to do more harm than praising effort does good. In studies published in 2026, five- and six-year-olds who’d done well on a test were then given a hard one, with a chance to cheat. Nearly two in three of the children told they’d succeeded because they were smart went on to cheat. So did about one in three of those told they’d tried hard, the same as children who were given no reason at all.

Other studies point the same way. The team behind the cheating study had found much the same in 2017, with three- and five-year-olds praised for being smart rather than for doing well. When mothers reported each day for ten days on how they praised their children, the children who heard more person praise were, six months later, more likely to see intelligence as fixed and to avoid challenges. In an experiment with 313 children, person praise left children with low self-esteem feeling more ashamed after they failed, and process praise didn’t.

Bigger praise isn’t better praise

A related finding is about size. Adults tend to give their most glowing praise to the children who seem least sure of themselves. In a series of studies, that inflated praise, such as “That’s not just beautiful, that’s incredibly beautiful,” made children with low self-esteem less willing to take on a challenge afterward, while children who already felt confident went looking for more of them.

The same pattern shows up at home. In a study of 120 Dutch families with children aged seven to eleven, the more inflated a parent’s praise, the lower the child’s self-esteem later on. Ordinary, in-proportion praise didn’t have that effect.

Praise seems to work best when it sounds true. Very grand praise may set a standard that a child is afraid of not meeting next time.

Praise isn’t a sticker chart

Praise is sometimes treated as one more reward, like a sticker or a treat, but the research suggests it works differently. A large review brought together 128 experiments on rewards and motivation. When people expected a reward, they were less likely to go back to the task on their own once the rewards stopped, and prizes and other tangible rewards did more harm to children than to adults. Positive feedback went the other way: on average, it made people more interested in the task, not less.

There’s a limit here too. Praise gave college students a boost, but in children the boost was too small to be sure of, and praise used to steer behavior, such as “Good, that’s exactly what you should be doing,” lost its benefit, and in a few small studies it even lowered interest. Praise seems to help most when it tells a child something about what they did, rather than when it’s used to get them to do more of it.

A major review of praise research came to a similar place. Praise helps most when it’s sincere, points at things a child can control, leaves them some say in what they do, and sets a standard they can actually reach. It helps least when it leans on comparing them with others.

Better than the others

Comparison is another kind of praise that seems to cost more than it gives. In two studies, fourth and fifth graders got a high score on a set of puzzles, along with praise that compared them with other children, praise for how well they’d mastered the puzzles, or no praise at all. When the next task left them unsure how they’d done, the children compared with others were less motivated than the children praised for their own learning. For girls, the comparison lowered motivation even when they went on succeeding.

At home, this is the difference between “You’re the best reader in your class” and “You can read chapter books on your own now.” The first depends on how other children are doing. The second is about your child, and stays true whoever else is in the room.

Young children take praise at face value

For preschool children, most kinds of praise seem to help. In one study, praise for the child, for the result and for the way they’d worked all made preschoolers more motivated afterward than a neutral comment did, for girls and boys alike. With fourth and fifth graders, the picture changed. After a later failure, girls who’d been praised as people were less motivated, while girls praised for the result or for how they’d worked were more motivated. For boys, the kind of praise made little difference.

Older children read between the lines

As children grow, they start to hear what praise might imply as well as what it says. Praise for something easy can carry a hidden message: that the person praising you didn’t expect much. Some researchers think this is why effort praise, which helps in early childhood, often stops working by adolescence. For a teenager, hearing “You worked so hard” after an easy win can sound like “You needed to, because this is hard for you.”

Praise that’s in proportion to the task, and that names what they actually did, is much less likely to be heard that way.

What to say to a teenager

So what works instead? With teenagers, it helps to name the strategy and the progress, not the effort alone. “Breaking the essay into sections really worked” says more than “You tried so hard.” So does comparing them with their own past rather than with anyone else: “Your times are way down since September.”

Keep it low-key, specific and sincere. Teenagers are quick to notice praise that’s there to push them somewhere, and quicker still to notice praise they don’t believe (eye rolls included). Often what helps most is asking how they did it, and listening to the answer.

Describe what they did

What’s most worth taking from all of this is less a new phrase to say instead of “You’re so smart” than a habit of noticing. “You kept trying different pieces until that corner fit.” “You went back and checked the ones you weren’t sure about.” “You used three different blues in the sky.” Praise like this tells a child what you saw, and it points at something they can do again.

Praise effort that really happened

Effort praise can go wrong too. In a study of toddlers, praise that came as a child tried and then succeeded went with more persistence. A steady stream of praise that didn’t match what they were doing went with less. It helps to name the strategy as well as the effort: “Starting with the hardest question first worked well.”

When it goes wrong, stay with what happened

A setback is where praise matters most, and where it’s most tempting to reach for something grand to make the disappointment go away. It usually helps more to stay with what happened. Say that it’s disappointing, and when they’re ready, look together at what they might try next time. Putting the feeling into words first gives both of you somewhere to start.

How you react to the setback may matter as much as how you praised the success. In one set of studies, parents who saw failure as something that holds children back tended to respond to mistakes by worrying about ability, and their children came to see intelligence as fixed. Children could tell how their parents felt about failure, even though they couldn’t tell what their parents believed about intelligence. So treating a mistake as something to learn from is a message children seem to pick up clearly.

Not everything needs praise

Children don’t need a comment on every drawing or every finished puzzle (the fridge only has so much room). Sometimes interest does more than praise: asking how they did it, or what they want to try next, tells a child their work is worth your attention without turning each moment into a verdict. A child holding up a drawing is often making a bid for connection, and turning toward it matters more than finding the right words. It also leaves room for them to judge their own work, and to make their own decisions about what comes next.

A child who hears “You’re so smart” learns something about who they are. A child who hears “You tried a new way when the first one didn’t work” learns something about what they can do.

It works for grown-ups too

None of this stops at childhood. A large review of feedback in schools found that feedback about the task, and how it was done, tends to help, while praise aimed at the person, the “Great student!” kind, rarely does much. Most of that research is about students, so for adults it’s a good bet rather than a proven rule. It’s worth trying with the people you work with, with a partner, and now and then, on yourself.