Growth Mindset Crash Course: Helping Your Child Change Their Approach to Schoolwork and Setbacks

Rob Beattie
Dec 5, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Aug 18

At Elevate Education, we’ve spoken to over 15,000 Australian parents in our fortnightly webinar series. After each session, we’re flooded with questions about mindset, resilience, and how parents can help their children bounce back from setbacks.

In this article, we’ll explore:

What is meant by “mindset”
Why mindset is crucial for your child’s success
How to help your child develop a growth mindset so they can self-motivate, overcome challenges, and thrive.

What is Mindset?

You’ve likely heard “mindset” discussed in schools. Coined by renowned psychologist Carol Dweck, mindset refers to beliefs about our abilities. Dweck argued that people have two kinds of beliefs around intelligence:

Fixed Mindset: Intelligence is fixed and cannot be improved.
Growth Mindset: Intelligence and abilities can develop with effort and persistence.

Why Mindset Matters

Research shows that mindset directly impacts how children approach:

Challenges: Students with a fixed mindset avoid hard tasks, fearing failure. These students are only likely to take on challenges they see as being manageable. Growth mindset students are the opposite. These students embrace challenges, viewing failure as a chance to learn.
Obstacles: Fixed mindset students give up easily, seeing effort as fruitless. The obstacle is seen as confirmation that the challenge cannot be overcome. Students with a growth mindset, however, persevere, seeing obstacles simply as temporary setbacks.
Effort: Finally, students with fixed mindsets believe hard work doesn’t matter. Hard work cannot help overcome one’s innate limitations, and therefore there’s no point in trying. Growth mindset students view effort as key to improvement.

	Fixed Mindsets	Growth Mindsets
Challenges	Avoid	Embrace
Obstacles	Quit	Persist
Effort	Pointless	Essential

Common Parenting Mistakes That Create a Fixed Mindset

Parents play a vital role in shaping their child’s mindset. The nature of the conversations you have with your child about their progress and academic performance will play an important role in determining which mindset they develop. The following conversations in particular have been found to create a fixed mindset:

Praising traits, not effort

Praising children with remarks such as “you’re so smart” teaches them to equate success with intelligence. Therefore, when they fail, they are much more likely to jump to the conclusion that “I’m not smart enough.”

Focusing on results, not preparation

Similarly, praising high marks on a test, especially if little effort was put in at the time, reinforces the idea that intelligence, not effort, is what matters.

How to Help Your Child Develop a Growth Mindset

If you’ve noticed your child has a fixed mindset, I have good news for you: Mindsets can change! And you as a parent can help create that change. Here’s how you can help:

1. Praise Effort Over Outcome

Hard work is the one variable your child has the most control over. This means any praise you give related to effort will help your child create more of a growth mindset. Focus on the hard work your child puts in rather than their results. For example:

If they excel in an exam after studying hard, highlight their preparation.
If results are poor despite effort, praise their persistence and discuss how to adjust their approach.

2. Reframe Poor Results

When students receive poor marks, they often think, “I’m not smart enough”, or “I just can’t do Maths”. In actuality, their results could have come from one of three places:

Insufficient preparation: The simplest factor could have been that your child just didn’t spend enough time preparing. To understand how much time your child should spend preparing for an exam, click here.
Ineffective preparation: While it’s widely regarded as true that the longer your child spends studying, the better they’ll do, there is a caveat to this – they need to be spending their time on the right work. If your child is getting poor marks in a test, they may need to tweak their study methods.
Content gaps: Finally students can underperform simply because they don’t understand parts of the subject, or have content gaps. The implication here is that with additional support, or a tutor, these gaps can be closed and your child’s results will go up.

3. Focus on Small Wins

Finally, big, lofty goals can feel overwhelming for children with a fixed mindset. Break their goals into manageable steps. This way, what they want to achieve feels far less daunting. Read more about goal-setting here.

Need Support?

One of the most common things we hear is “I’m trying to have these conversations with my child, but it’s not working”. If this is the case, our Elevate Education coaches can help. We work one-on-one with students to: