Praising Children
“Great job!” “You’re doing super!” “Your song sounded excellent!” These are all things any parent might say to their child. But something is wrong with these. I’ll tell you why. We live in a world where children get a medal for showing up. Everything they do is “super”, “great”, “fantastic”, etc. We even sometime praise a problem child more than a well-behaved child for doing a simple task, only because we expect more from the well-behaved child. While the parent giving the praise may be trying to buoy up the problem child and encourage them to do more, Joanna Pocock, in her article Are We Spoiling Our Kids with Too Much Praise? states that this type of praise can be counter-productive. “Bill correctly works out a very easy problem and is given extra accolades; meanwhile, his classmates have managed much more...
