How to Praise Your Child’s Process,

Instead of Their Product

It may sound counterintuitive, but the best praise does not focus on what a child did or how
smart or talented they may be. Rather, the most meaningful and effective praise comes in
the form of specifically recognizing the strategies, effort, or determination your child used
to accomplish a task or goal—no matter how small. Remember that meeting incremental
goals eventually leads to big successes, so be sure to praise your child’s journey on the
road to accomplishment!

Here are some samples of how to praise a child’s process:

• You did a good job drawing. I like the detail you added to the people's faces.
• You really studied for your social studies test. You read the material over several
times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. It really worked!
• I like the way you tried a lot of different strategies on that math problem until you
finally got it.
• That was a hard English assignment, but you stuck with it until you got it done. You
stayed at your desk and kept your concentration. That's great!
• I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot
of work—doing the research, designing the apparatus, making the parts, and
building it. You are going to learn a lot of great things.

When working on something with your child, continue to focus on the process:

• Even though this is challenging, it’s also a lot of fun!

• Oh, sorry, that was too easy—no fun. Let's do something more
challenging that you can learn from.
• Let's all talk about what we struggled with today and learned from. I'll go first.
• Mistakes are so interesting. Here's a wonderful mistake I made recently.
• Let's see what we can learn from this setback.
• This only took us four tries before we were successful. I bet next time we can do it
on the first try!

These examples are adapted from “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids” by the creator of the growth mindset, Carol Dweck (Scientific
American, 2015).

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