Raising Kids with a Growth Mindset

Have you seen the new “Finish the Sentence” trend on TikTok? Parents give kids the start of some classic (mostly toxic) parenting phrases to see how they'll finish the sentence.

You can probably fill in the blanks right away:

🗣️ Children should be seen and… 

🗣️ I’ll give you something to… 

🗣️ As long as you live under my roof, you’ll…

Yep, most of us have these locked in our brains:

🗣️ Children should be seen and not heard. 

🗣️ I’ll give you something to cry about. 

🗣️ As long as you live under my roof, you’ll follow my rules.

But it’s really sweet to hear how kids finish the phrase when they’ve obviously never heard it before. (Seriously, if you need a dopamine boosting activity today, go Google “children finish toxic parenting phrases”! Here’s a compilation of some really sweet ones!)

So I tried it out with my son.

🗨️ “Hey, kiddo, how would you finish this sentence, ‘I brought you into this world, and I can…’” 

He didn’t miss a beat: 

🗨️ “Take you out.”

Yeah, so my kid was not confused. 😂

And that got me thinking about all the ways we parented in the past, and how much they’re connected to a fixed mindset. When you tell a kid, “Children should be seen and not heard,” what you’re really saying is, “I have nothing to learn from you, and you have nothing valuable to contribute to this conversation. Grown-ups get to talk because we already know it all, and kids need to just listen.” Yikes, right?

Do you ever get a feeling, as an adult, that if you'd just known about a growth mindset earlier in life, things might have been different? You see the power of it now—the way it transforms challenges into opportunities, setbacks into lessons, and effort into true potential. It's a game-changer, and if you're like me, you probably wish someone had taught you how to think this way when you were younger. 

I actually get a lot of questions about this when I’m out giving keynotes and leading workshops: Do you have any content for kids? I love what you do and I really want to share this with my teenager/middle schooler/little one.

I completely understand why. We all want to help our kids reach their full potential. Many of us weren't necessarily raised by parents who were actively practicing a growth mindset. We don't have a clear roadmap for what this looks like in action. But we can create that roadmap for our children.

This isn't about teaching them every skill they'll ever need. The world is changing too quickly for that. Remember being told, "You won't always have a calculator with you"? Well, guess who has one on her phone and uses it constantly? 

👏This gal! (And maybe you too?)

Our kids will face similar world-changing shifts. That's why the most impactful thing we can instill in them is how to approach the world with a growth mindset. We can equip them to be resilient, observant, persistent, curious, optimistic, and hard-working, no matter what challenges come their way.

So how do we shift those old parenting paradigms and prepare our kids for a world we can't fully predict? It starts with us. To effectively teach these tools to our kids, we have to become growth mindset parents.

Model the Messiness: Share Your Mistakes and Struggles

One of the most powerful ways to parent with a growth mindset is to give your kids a transparent view of what it's like to be human. When you're navigating hard, tricky stuff, share that with them. If you make a mistake, whether at work or at home, talk about what's going on inside you, even if it feels messy. There's actually comfort in that messiness.

Our kids, like all of us, often deal with their struggles internally, and it can feel incredibly isolating for them. They don't always know that everyone else is dealing with challenges too. As their parent, you have the opportunity to break down the stigma around struggle. You get to show them how to handle hard things better.

We might worry that sharing our mistakes will make our kids anxious, but these can be light conversations. I don’t think we should overwhelm our kids with every detail of our struggles or all of our tough emotions. I feel very very strongly that we need to protect our children’s innocence for as long as we can. They have time enough to be adults and deal with the craziness of the world.

But I also think that we can find ways to just be more human in front of our kids. 

🧠Try This: For example, if you're navigating a career transition, you don't need to burden them with every heavy detail about the job market or your uncertainties. But telling them a bit about your experience can show them that changing careers is normal. It's okay to outgrow one choice and start fresh. Sharing your own experiences navigating challenges ensures your kids see what a growth mindset looks like in the real world.

Embrace Imperfection: Acknowledge When You're Out of Alignment

As humans, sometimes our emotions get the best of us. We have moments where we're not thinking clearly, where we're just reacting. Parenting is hard, and none of us will navigate it perfectly. Your emotions will boil over sometimes.

If we're operating from a fixed mindset, we'll try to sweep those moments under the rug and move on. But even if you don't address what happened, your kids will notice. They might get the message that adults have no control over their emotions, and that's just how it is.

As a growth mindset parent, however, you can show them what it looks like to navigate those challenging emotions. 

🧠Try This: When you have one of those moments, recognize that you're no longer in alignment with who you want to be as a parent. Acknowledge it to your child. Tell them that you noticed you were lashing out and weren't showing up as your best self in that moment.

Apologize.

Your child will learn that they are responsible for noticing and managing their own emotions, but they can also take accountability when they act in a way that doesn't align with their values, even if it's uncomfortable. They can choose to ensure that doesn't become their default way of being. You’ll be modeling emotional intelligence and self-correction, key components of a growth mindset.

Praise the Effort, Not the Outcome

Earlier this year, my son got a message from one of his teachers. He was at risk of failing the class. He was absolutely devastated, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going wrong because he’s pretty good at math.

When I looked back at his assignments, it was clear what was going on. He had a whole string of assignments that were marked incomplete. When I dug in a little deeper, I realized that it wasn’t that he wasn’t doing the work. He just wasn’t putting his full effort in; he wasn’t finishing the last bit of each assignment.

Don’t you know, as soon as he got called out on the consequences of that slacking, he got all of those assignments done in one morning and raised his grade from failing to a high B.

Once he was back on track again, I said to him, “You’re just looking at that grade, but you’re forgetting the effort it takes to get there. You have to complete the job. You have to put the work in. I’m not saying you have to get an A. What I’m saying is that you can be proud of a C that you worked really, really hard to get, but that’s not the same as a C you got because you just couldn’t be bothered to give it your best effort.”

🧠A Mindshift Tip: If good grades come easy for your kids, the best thing you can do is find ways to create challenges for them. I know so many adults who feel like they breezed through school only to struggle in the “real world.” Find ways to push your kids to flex those resilience muscles: sign them up for an extracurricular activity that’s a bit outside their comfort zone, find them an enrichment program or class that allows them to do a deep-dive into something that excites them, look for things that will help them practice getting mentally “unstuck” (puzzles, games, writing or math challenges). And then be sure to support them along the way and praise them for their effort when they persevere.   

Prioritize Exploration Over Blind Obedience

Old-school parenting often emphasized the "Do what I say" approach. 

There's a time and place for immediate obedience, especially for safety or efficiency. Our kids will encounter this in the real world too. But obedience can't be the only way you operate as a parent.

We need our kids to understand compliance, but not at the risk of losing their individuality or failing to develop critical thinking skills. Encourage your kids to ask questions. Model what it looks like to respectfully ask for more information. This is how we can be compliant while also exploring and using critical thinking. Sometimes we ask questions because we need more information to meet expectations, and sometimes it's because we see things differently. We want to empower our kids to be confident in how they see the world, even if it's different, because it adds value to the conversation.

Prepare Them for the Future with Growth Mindset Activities for Kids

We can't teach our kids all the skills they'll need for the future. The most important thing we can teach them is how to adapt to a changing landscape, embrace challenges, and believe in the power of lifelong learning.

Consider something like AI. I know, it can feel controversial, and many adults are struggling with its implications. But I'm going to encourage you to put in the work to learn at least one AI tool, for your kids. Pick one that seems useful in your life or work—an LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini, a note-taking tool, a grammar checker. You don't have to become an expert; just by stepping out of your comfort zone and learning something new, you'll be looking at change from a perspective of growth. This alone will shift your parenting.

Your kids will be entering a world where they must understand how to grapple with AI. You have the opportunity to prepare them to use new technology responsibly. Many of us grew up with the early internet. Some had parents who taught responsible use; many didn't. That meant we were at risk of using it irresponsibly and were slower to learn its productive uses.

🧠Try this: Here are a few simple ways to show your kids the potential and the limits of an AI tool like ChatGPT.

1. Summarize points: I use ChatGPT for writing emails, dictating thoughts and asking it to summarize main ideas in bullet points. It helps me ensure my points are clear and communicated effectively. The AI isn't generating ideas; it's helping me be more efficient and clear. If your kids are old enough for emails, let them try!

2. Help with meal planning: ChatGPT is great for creating dinner menus. You can give it groceries you have and ask for recipes, or ask for meal suggestions within a budget. Let your kids try! Make it a competition: each starts with the same prompt, adds details, and compares menus. Who ever 

3. Check the computer: One of the best ways we can teach kids how to use AI responsibly is by showing them its limits. Have them bring you a writing assignment that they did well on. Ask them to put the teacher’s writing prompt into ChatGPT and tell the AI to write an essay based on those instructions. Then ask them to fact-check what the AI produced. That opens up the conversation about how and why AI can get things wrong and how much human thinking and knowledge is still necessary. It will also show them, in real time, the problems with relying on AI to complete their assignments.

4. Challenge My Thinking: When used responsibly, AI can challenge us to build on our own knowledge and ideas. Here’s an activity you can use to show that to your kids: Have them tell Chat GPT, “I think the best movie is [fill in their current favorite]. Ask me a question that can challenge my thinking.” Let them go back and forth with the AI for a bit, answering its questions and asking it to challenge their thinking. It will push them to think more deeply about their own opinions.

You can't teach your child everything about AI; your job is just to help them see what it looks like to adapt and navigate a moment of massive technological change.

I totally get that there are concerns about kids using AI to generate writing assignments. This isn't so different from our parents' worries about plagiarizing from the internet. People suffered consequences then, too. But pretending the internet didn't exist wasn't the solution. You need to know enough to be transparent with your kids about these real challenges and how to respond to them.

Becoming a Growth Mindset Parent

Embracing a growth mindset as a parent means recognizing that your child's abilities and intelligence aren't fixed and showing them that challenges are opportunities to get stronger and smarter. By focusing on the process of learning, trying, and even failing, you're equipping them with the resilience and love for learning that will serve them well throughout their lives, no matter what obstacles they face.

Our children are constantly learning and growing, just like we are. And because there’s no manual for parenting, we will always be learning and growing together. Embracing that will help you build trust and a lifelong connection that will carry your kids through any challenge or setback that comes their way—today or in the future.

A big part of preparing our kids for the real world is making sure they understand how to measure their own growth. If the only thing they learn to value is the final result, turning in an AI-generated essay might feel worth it. But if we're teaching them to value the process of learning, if we're celebrating what they learn instead of just what they produce, it will shape who they become and how they understand their true potential. That's how we raise the next generation of leaders who will change the world.