Commentary : A Realistic Measure of Your Child’s Potential: the Success Quotient

In meeting with parents, I’ve often noticed a relationship between how high their child’s intelligence quotient is and how eager they are to let me know about it.

But an IQ score, taken by itself, is really only half the story. It tells how well a person can do; it says nothing about how well they will do! For that reason, I’ve developed the concept of an SQ, or success quotient. It can tell something of a child’s potential for winning friends, gaining status, making money, achieving goals and, in short, being a success.

To better appreciate how a success quotient works (and how you may be unwittingly influencing your child’s SQ) consider the following experiment: Parents were asked to watch while their children were instructed to see how many blocks they could pile one on top of the other. After an average score had been established (let’s say the typical child could pile up 10 blocks), parents were asked to estimate how many blocks their child could stack. Parents who gave below average estimates of seven or eight and parents who gave impossibly high estimates of 20 or 30 both had children who did significantly better.

Interestingly, it seemed to be the mother’s encouragement more than the father’s that led to a high score. Successful children usually had warm, accepting mothers who were comfortable with physical expressions of affection. When the blocks tumbled, the mother who was quick with a hug and a kiss is the mother who taught that failure need not be feared. Children with low SQs often had overbearing fathers who stressed obedience, used verbal abuse and insisted on telling the child how it should be done.

But is hugging and kissing the way to make future Gold Medal winners? Psychologists warn that making the Olympics may not be an example of balanced, confident achievement. Once in a very great while, a child told to stack 20 or 30 blocks will actually manage to do it! This need to excel, all out of proportion to the demands of the situation, trains the child to disregard mental and physical excess, to pursue one goal single-mindedly and to fear failure. That, unfortunately, is what makes a champion. It’s also what makes some athletes collapse in despair and self-denigration (otherwise known as “the agony of defeat”) after having missed the mark by a fraction of a second or a part of an inch--all in all, just the opposite of what one should consider a healthy example for a child to follow through life.

And the reason that a child’s success quotient will tend to remain constant through life is that both the child and those around him or her will unconsciously try to keep it at the same level. Psychologists call this the halo effect.

A second experiment clearly demonstrates this phenomenon: After a group of children were tested and found to have average IQs, they were divided into two subgroups and assigned a teacher. The teacher was told that the children in the first group were exceptionally bright and that the children in the second were exceptionally dull. Believe it or not, after a time, those children said to be smarter did score higher on intelligence tests while those said to be duller scored lower.

This happens because people are most comfortable in a world they understand; a world that works the way they think it should. In fact, they would rather remain failures (if that’s the way they’ve been taught to see themselves) than risk being a success and then being faced with all the unfamiliarity it brings. It’s sometimes surprising to see how individuals with low SQs will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Success, then, is not simply a matter of luck. It is something children learn by the age of 9 or 10 and then embrace as a lifelong habit.

To heighten a child’s success quotient, stop getting them involved in “doomed-from-the-start” situations; stop forcing them to take on more than they can realistically accomplish, and stop believing they can’t succeed. Think about the block test: Do you assume your child will do less than average in a new situation or, even worse, assure failure by demanding twice as much as expected? Think about the halo effect: Are you and everyone else around your child convinced that he or she won’t make the grade?

Real success is, more than anything else, an attitude that becomes a habit. When parents and friends expect a child to succeed, the child can hardly expect less--and that’s what success quotients are all about.