I believe 4 to be bad advice for most children. If you’re from a rich, stable family and recieve a good education yet still struggle at a particular subject then maybe, yes, it does reflect some kind of inherit weakness.
But the majority of children who are behind in an area simply haven’t spent enough time working on it. Regardless of a childs genuine abilities, they’ll do worse if you tell them they should consider themselves to be “less capable”.
It’s also generally hard to be well-calibrated on how good you are relative to others as a child, when you haven’t been exposed to that many people yet. Some people think they’re of average smarts when they’re kids and only realize as adults that they’re exceptionally smart, or vice versa.
In my experience adults are not good enough judges of capabilities for this to be non-damaging. I’ve tutored lots of kids in math at lots of different ability levels. Except in cases where the parents were highly-involved high-achieving mathematicians and the kids were high-achieving as well (math olympiad prep basically), parent and teacher evaluations were not more informative than mere report cards, which were not all that informative (grades and test scores are very predictive if you have a standard life path, but you should not have a standard life path, there are deep interventions available for math for most students imo.) I imagine the same issue exists in other fields, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who I think would be competent to give their child useful assessments of their long-term capabilities in more than two fields at a time, even assuming the children were not vulnerable to the self-image damage that I think you’re basically ignoring here.
It’s not just about spending time working on something, either. Maybe the problem is that there’s something they just don’t get, and if they can figure out what it is, they’ll suddenly be able to do much better. See Errors vs Bugs and the End of Stupidity.
I believe 4 to be bad advice for most children. If you’re from a rich, stable family and recieve a good education yet still struggle at a particular subject then maybe, yes, it does reflect some kind of inherit weakness.
But the majority of children who are behind in an area simply haven’t spent enough time working on it. Regardless of a childs genuine abilities, they’ll do worse if you tell them they should consider themselves to be “less capable”.
It’s also generally hard to be well-calibrated on how good you are relative to others as a child, when you haven’t been exposed to that many people yet. Some people think they’re of average smarts when they’re kids and only realize as adults that they’re exceptionally smart, or vice versa.
Ideally parents can help here by giving best-effort objective assessments.
In my experience adults are not good enough judges of capabilities for this to be non-damaging. I’ve tutored lots of kids in math at lots of different ability levels. Except in cases where the parents were highly-involved high-achieving mathematicians and the kids were high-achieving as well (math olympiad prep basically), parent and teacher evaluations were not more informative than mere report cards, which were not all that informative (grades and test scores are very predictive if you have a standard life path, but you should not have a standard life path, there are deep interventions available for math for most students imo.) I imagine the same issue exists in other fields, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who I think would be competent to give their child useful assessments of their long-term capabilities in more than two fields at a time, even assuming the children were not vulnerable to the self-image damage that I think you’re basically ignoring here.
Ideally so, though children often don’t trust their parents to be objective (and are often correct not to).
It’s not just about spending time working on something, either. Maybe the problem is that there’s something they just don’t get, and if they can figure out what it is, they’ll suddenly be able to do much better. See Errors vs Bugs and the End of Stupidity.