I want to raise my toddler with a growth mindset. What is that? In a nutshell, it’s about believing that your intelligence and personality can be developed. You can affect your outcome.

Children Are Trained How to Think

When you think about it, children are trained how to think and how they think creates their worldview. So it’s really important if you believe that having a growth mindset is beneficial to a child, that you nurture that way of thinking from a young age while brain plasticity is still very high. One of the ways of nurturing this way of thinking is through the way we talk with our children, the phrases we use repeatedly and the words we choose.

Fixed Mindset

Counter to a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, where consciously or subconsciously, one truly believes that they are the way they are, and they cannot change.

I know people with a firmly fixed mindset – so fixed that they actually don’t try anything new for fear of their entire person being called into question. To clarify, the fear is not because that’s what others will judge them by, but because they themselves have labelled themselves as something (like ‘smart’) and to try something new and fail would potentially force them to re-evaluate that label they’ve given themselves. It’s pretty sad. But it’s understandable.

The Challenge for Parents

As my daughter is reaching the age of 2, she’s beginning to talk and understand us. I must admit that as a parent it’s often challenging to use phrases that will promote the development of a growth mindset instead of the regular phrases I grew up with which often labeled children with an identity early on in their lives. Sometimes they seem forced or contrived.

It can really take practise for these phrases to come out “naturally” when speaking with your toddler if you’re not used to speaking this way, or especially if you’re not used to thinking this way yourself. But I’m going to keep consciously trying because I think it will definitely be worth it. Here I’ve listed 7 such growth mindset promoting parenting phrases.

Phrases for Parents to Practise to Promote Development of a Growth Mindset in Young Children