Smarter Kids Are Made not Born, Study Claims.

• Position: INTELGENCE

Many parents in past decades believed that intelligence and other abilities were fixed traits. A child was bom smart or not, and little could be done to change that. More recent research has upended that notion, and shown that encouraging parents to adopt a so-called growth mindset leads to better educational outcomes for their children, but it had been unclear at what point such a mindset can impact a child's life, and new research hints it may start very early.

A study by Mei Elansary, a pediatric specialist at Boston Medical Center, and five other scholars found that a maternal growth mindset could mitigate negative effects of stress on mothers in the early months of a child's life and promote brain development. The team's work built on previous research, including that of Meredith Rowe, professor of early learning and development at Harvard University, which showed the positive effects of a growth mindset in mother-child interactions.

"A maternal growth mindset is the belief that you can grow your abilities through work and effort, and that I can help my children learn new things and grow and expand their abilities," says Elansary. "Conversely, a maternal fixed mindset is the belief that abilities are going to stay the same over time, no matter how hard I work or how much investment as a mom I put into my child's learning."

The new inquiry included 33 mothers and their children, who were 12 months of age and part of a longitudinal cohort study on the role of stress and child development. The study was led by Charles Nelson, professor of pediatrics and neu-roscience at Harvard Medical School and professor of education at the Graduate School of Education. The mothers were recruited from the primary care clinic at Boston Children's Hospital, which serves families who are publicly insured.

The study's researchers asked mothers about their mindsets and stress levels. Children's brain activity was observed through electroencephalography. Previous research has shown the negative impact of maternal stress not only on interactions and attachments between mother and infants, but on childhood brain development.

The new results showed lower brain activity for infants of mothers who felt stressed and had fixed mindsets. In contrast, infants of moms with a growth mindset did not display negative impact.

"We found that [the children of] mothers who had high levels of...