"... if a child thinks that their success is due to being smart then they will fear trying again and possibly failing because then they won't be smart anymore. It makes sense and I believe it."
I don't think it's as simple as that. [...]
Today, I let my children know they are smart. I see no reason to hide it. It doesn't have to be presented as, "You're smarter than everyone else and you can let them know it." but it can be along the lines of "I know you have the ability, now let�s work a bit harder!" and "wonderful, you pushed yourself and look what you did!�
This one is so tricky, isn't it? An anecdote: I was reading
a blog just the other day by a young man whose education has had much of what I'm looking for for my DS - in fact that was how I got to the blog, by searching for things by and about people who'd been through one particular school, which attracts (and savagely selects) an extraordinarily talented cohort of students and then challenges and enriches them to the nines. He's clearly both very talented and very well educated, and he sounds like a nice young man as well - but as far as I can tell from his writing, he genuinely has no feeling for how unusual he is. When faced with an exam paper that's supposed to be very hard, and it isn't, he assumes he was misled about the paper; on the occasions when he fails to do something, he assumes he was being terribly stupid and that everyone else will think so. In a way this is endearing, but even at the high powered universities he's looking at, it will get him into trouble. He'd be better off realising how unusual he is and knowing when to keep quiet about it. On the other hand, that he's been surrounded at school by enough people of comparable achievement that he's able to hold this misconception is quite something. I don't know what's the right thing to do as a parent, beyond "tell the truth and share your values" which can't really be wrong.
