As we begin to clean our homes and prepare for what is MY favorite holiday of the year, I can’t help but lean into one part of the Haggadah with my child development specialist hat on and say, “what were you thinking?” The passages of the Four Sons, wherein four children are labeled as Wise, Wicked, Simple, and the one who doesn’t even know what to ask - is a hazardous slope to try to climb when all of your children and loved ones are sitting around the table.
Labeling a child, or a person for that matter, with these types of character traits, can do absolutely no good. Even if you are the wise one. Why? For a simple explanation, just fall onto the “it’s not polite or nice to do so.”
However, a deeper and more detailed understanding of the pitfalls of labels can be found in one of the dozens of widely read research studies wherein results clearly showed how labels were able to demonstrably change the course of a person’s life.
Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences on students' achievement and motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more low-ability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.
Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33
While this is a mouthful, the Cliff Notes version is that children who are praised for effort with words such as, “you are so hard-working,” tend to do better in the long run than children who were told they are smart. Why? Because if they fail, the label of smart could be taken away. For a child that is hard-working, no matter the outcome, they will still be hard-working.
So, let’s add a twist to your seder this year. You can see from the photos above that this is a Charoset Table. You can do this separately or set it up during the seder. Each element of a possible charoset ingredient is included on the table and each food has a description (see below). If you add prunes, one of your character traits is that things go right through you. If you add finely ground nuts, you like to blend into the background. Coarsely ground nuts and you like to stand out in the crowd, and so forth.
Have fun with this! Invite participants to make their own individual charoset based on who they think they are. Alternatively, have people work in pairs and make one for the other, based on who they think the other one is. Then discuss. The whole idea of the seder is to discuss, question, answer and then question some more.
Imagine if we all spoke honestly, fairly, and with intentions of fun and love. Oh, what a world it could be.
Chag Sameach!