Are smart children born smart?

Here’s a story of a… Brady Bunch of Lies.

Mike and Carol Brady, just like the real parents of the 1960’s, essentially raised their children on a series of misconceptions:

White bread was good for you, parents never argue, Alice the maid was happy, talking like a baby is cute (think Cindy), and the tragic belief that our intelligence was fixed at birth.

Society believed that some people were born intelligent.

Some were not and pretty much just like Jan and the braces episode, you just had to learn to accept your lot.

‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia’, was born smarter than ‘not happy Jan’, and along with those psychedelic pantsuits, Jan just had to wear it.

So too, Greg, Peter, Bobby and Cindy, and the real-life baby boomers went through life, dealing with the cards they were dealt, ignorant that all of them could (and still can) influence their level of intelligence.

Of course, the cards we are dealt still impact our IQ, as ‘the heritability of IQ is actually quite high’, but in recent years, we have discovered our intelligence is malleable, not fixed.

In fact, GET SMART or more to the point GET YOURSELF SMART is the name of the real game. Now, we know that WE control our intelligence.

Smart kids are smart, mostly, because they work hard.

Carol Dweck, a leader in this field has proven: Hard work makes connections in your brain that make you smarter.

Learning makes you smarter.

Carol Dweck and other leading psychologists have discovered that adopting this growth mindset, where we firmly believe we can control our intelligence is revolutionising learning both in and outside of the classroom.

It is now an accepted scientific fact that “you can always change how intelligent you are”.

Students who know this and accept it, get higher grades.

So, our IQ’s, previously thought to be fixed are malleable. Ponder this for a minute. We can all lift our IQ.

How does this change all of our lives?

It empowers everyone to adopt a growth mindset and to throw away any ideas that began with “I’m not smart enough”.

It puts an end to comments such as “she’s not got a maths brain, because she takes after me”.

Of course, it is still true that some people are born with a higher IQ, but this does not mean that forever and a day, that person is smarter than average.

It is an exciting time to be raising and educating children.

When you say to your children “just keep trying, you will get there”, unlike the groovy Mike and Carol swishing around in their flares, you are calling it straight.