The way you praise a child can have an effect on their definition of success and their goals. For example, something as subtle as praising a child for his intel

The way you praise a child can have an effect on their definition of success and their goals. For example, something as subtle as praising a child for his intelligence vs praising him for his hard work can make him too focused on the number of points he gets vs actually understanding and learning. That means that when offered a choice between problems that allow them to get a lot of right answers vs a challenging problem, kids that were praised on their intelligence chose the easy problems (so they wouldn't look dumb) and kids praised on their hard work picked a problem where they would actually learn something and have to work hard. Also the ones praised for their intelligence interpreted failure to mean they weren't smart. The ones that were praised for hard work thought they didn't work hard enough and tried harder. So maybe we wouldn't be doing them such a favor by teaching them to care about good looks instead of hard work, because when they fail they will think that they are too ugly and have bad self esteem. Praising them for something they have control over and can actually change (such as their education, interests or hard work) would be much better. (you can read the article I skimmed for this answer "Intelligence praise can undermine motivation and performance" https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/system/files/Intelligence%20Praise%20Can%20Undermine%20Motivation%20and%20Performance.pdf https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/sys... )