Passover is supposed to teach our children about how we can create a world filled with more justice, kindness and compassion, so where I struggle is with the idea of calling a child inherently “wise, wicked, simply or unable to ask.” I had always been taught that to raise moral children, we should praise behavior (“that was very kind of you to share your toys!”) and not identity (“you’re such a nice person!”).
So when it came to the four children, I believed that by calling them “wise” or “wicked,” “simple” or “unable to ask,” I would be pigeonholing them into an identity, and one that they could never grow out of. But it looks like I might have been wrong — at least when it comes to encouraging good behavior and creating good people.
On Sunday, Adam Grant (author of the book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success), wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times and shared some fascinating research on what we can do to raise ethical children. One of his main points is that at the age when children begin to create their sense of identity (about 7 or 8 years old), we should praise “who they are” in order to help them start to see themselves as good people.
In one experiment, children won some marbles, and then donated them. They were all told, “Gee, you shared quite a bit.” But for some of the children, the action was praised (“that was a nice and helpful thing to do”), while for others, the character was praised (“you are a nice and helpful person”).
The question was, what would happen down the road, when the children were given a new chance to be nice and helpful? As it turned out,
…[t]he children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been.
Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person.
This dovetails with new research led by the psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who finds that for moral behaviors, nouns work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-year-olds to help with a task, rather than inviting them “to help,” it was 22 to 29 percent more effective to encourage them to “be a helper.” Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.”
When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.
While we may still grapple with the Haggadah “labeling” children, the truth is, our behaviors create our identity, and our identity informs our behavior. After all, some of us relish being “the curious one” or “the provocative one,” some of us are always just happy to be together with friends and family, and some of us need to be shown what we are missing.
In the end, Passover reminds us that we are free, which means that we have the freedom to choose how we act. Yet those actions will ultimately define who we are.
So with all the questions this holiday encourages, perhaps the most important one is, “What kind of person do you want to be?”
(Cross-posted with My Jewish Learning’s Rabbis Without Borders Blog).