Other media which is inclusive of that kind of messaging includes Dragon Tales and My Little Pony.
Bibliotherapy selections-- that is what I probably WOULD have tried.
I also would have squashed the very real impulse, as a parent of an emerging HG+ child, to retain my position of perceived omnipotence for a bit longer.
It felt like it was too soon for our DD to be noticing that we weren't all-knowing, all-powerful, or completely competent at everything we encounter. And in addition, there is a dark side to demonstrating that those things are untrue, which is that a child can get the sense that his/her world is a scary place that parents are not entirely empowered to protect him/her from.
But still-- I'd have shared more of my own "growth mindset" internal dialog at the time. I tend to not share those internal dialogs at all, and neither does my DH. We're both quite private when it comes to our metacognitive processing, and the reason probably has to do not with being perfectionistic ourselves (though that is also part of it) but in being so alien relative to so much of the world. DH and I both learned pretty early that "how this works for me" immediately garners one the honorary title of "Mental Freak of the Week" in almost any group of people. We share things with one another, but not with the world at large.
We should have done more sharing with our DD, though.
Sometimes I worry that I won't ever be able to remember the new algorithm correctly! But I know that it will eventually stick, even if I have to look it up step by step the first fourteen times. I have faith that I can learn to work around it, even if I can't memorize it easily.
It has been fun to learn so many new skills that I didn't know. I sure felt awkward when I first showed up to class, though! I feel really proud of my hard work-- I think that my ____ (skills) have come a long way since I started.
Oh, I'll do that-- I mean, I don't know much about _____, but it will be great to have a chance to learn it now!
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It isn't that we didn't do those things-- I think that we just started too late in DD's case. We should have been modeling those growth-mindset statements all along, not just when she was six or seven and had well-entrenched perfectionism.
I think she was BORN with it, truthfully-- but I also think that placed the onus on us as parents to help her develop more robust coping skills at a younger age. We didn't start to FORCE her to undertake higher risks until she was 11 and 12yo, and that was a profound error on our part. We should have really pushed HARDER when she was 3 and 4.
