Fernando Gros

When Praising Your Kids Can Be Harmful

Con­scien­tious par­ents are obsessed these days with heap­ing praise on their chil­dren. Better to err on the side of too much, seems to be the common wisdom. Cer­tainly for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren who are for­tu­nate enough to grow up in loving homes, there is a much richer back­drop of praise to their daily life that what their par­ents typ­ic­ally grew up with.

So, it is sober­ing to read How Not to Talk to Your Kids from the New York magazine (link via Mind Hacks — together with some com­ment­ary). It seems that not just the quant­ity, but also the con­tent of the praise we give our kids can be import­ant — some­times praise can be detrimental

A recent study com­pared the effects of prais­ing chil­dren for their intel­li­gence versus prais­ing them for their their effort. Those praised for their effort seemed to respond better, both to chal­lenge and to fail­ure, whilst those praised for their intel­li­gence dealt poorly with pres­sure and failed to bounce back after fail­ure. They key seems to be that effort is a vari­able the child can con­trol, whereas the sense of intel­li­gence can be undermined.

In fact, the whole edi­fice of “self-esteem” is now under chal­lenge, with the link between it and achieve­ment being ser­i­ously chal­lenged by a number of stud­ies and a re-evaluation of exis­it­ing research. Not only do chil­dren poten­tially filter out excess­ive and non-specific praise, but it can actu­ally make them more risk-averse and depend­ent on par­ental or teacher reinforcement.

“In the opin­ion of cog­nit­ive sci­ent­ist Daniel T. Will­ing­ham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwit­tingly send­ing the mes­sage that the stu­dent reached the limit of his innate abil­ity, while a teacher who cri­ti­cizes a pupil con­veys the mes­sage that he can improve his per­form­ance even further.”

If we look away from the edu­ca­tional research for a moment, there is some­thing we can learn from the bio­graph­ies of suc­cess­ful and cre­at­ive people through his­tory. Feel­ings of per­sonal esteem, con­fid­ence and worth can fluc­tu­ate, often dra­mat­ic­ally. But con­sist­ent per­form­ance is usu­ally the result of con­sist­ent effort and craft. Per­haps as par­ents we should focus more on the child’s self-persistence, than their self-esteem?

“Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have per­sist­ence by care­fully not reward­ing them when they get to the finish. ‚ÄúThe key is inter­mit­tent rein­force­ment,‚Äù says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frus­trat­ing spells can be worked through. ‚ÄúA person who grows up get­ting too fre­quent rewards will not have per­sist­ence, because they‚Äôll quit when the rewards disappear.‚Äù”

In some ways the greatest chal­lenge rests with the parent, with their needs to express their praise and love. As the art­icle sug­gests a few times, the high levels of praise may well reflect more of the parent’s need to assuaged in their choices and expect­a­tions than the child’s needs to flour­ish as a grow­ing person.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Par­ent­ing, Praise, Self-Esteem

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 7:09 am. It is filed under Education, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.