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 difficult ones but are shown less approval. This undermines the child’s trust in the person praising their efforts, thus devaluing the praise.” Ultimately, being inconsistent with praise, leaves the child only distrusting the parent’s words of approval.

            To help strengthen the child’s confidence, the parent needs to be honest. Evaluating the child’s effort instead of their outcome can also help the child and their desire to work hard.

            So back to why those first sentences of praise are detrimental. The first two are evaluating the child, saying “You’re _______!”, but what about all the times when they are not? What if you said “excellent” one day, and then “good” the next. These words can be read into too much, but are given without any thought at all.

            The thirst one evaluates the child’s outcome. Even if their song sounded excellent, why are you having them take piano lessons in the first place? In most cases it is not to create excellent music. Parents want their children to work at something and learn to dedicate themselves to improving. So if the compliments are only geared towards their outcomes, they may be afraid to do something too hard for fear of it not turn out as “excellent” as they think their parents want.

            To avoid these pitfalls with praising children, parents really need to think hard about the characteristics they want to help bring out in their children. Here are a few characteristics that meaningful praise can engender: Hard work, determination, tenacity, stability, and resilience.

            The main ways a parent can help a child with these is by giving the child descriptive praise. This type of praise does not evaluate the child’s outcome, acknowledges the effort they put forth, simply states what you have observed, and supports hard work in the future.

            So what kind of things can a parent say if they want to give a descriptive praise? Here are a few examples:

·      “You got through that whole book in just a few days. Seems like you are getting faster at reading the more you do it.”

·      “I’m so happy to hear your song. It seems like practicing every day is really helping you improve.”

·      “You sat still all through church. That must have been hard, but you did it!”

·      “I’m happy you completed your first recital. You worked really hard on that song.”

These examples show that the parent really cares about all the work the child put into their task, and they help the child see how their work contributes to their end goal.

Pocock continues in her writing by asking the question “How do we foster in our children a desire to learn, rather than a desire to please us?” This question is so important because it points out that if we give evaluative praise, the child will just be looking for the “Great job!” and not put forth their real effort.

Pocock reiterates what we have discussed by saying “One simple way is to praise the effort over the outcome.” And then continues, “Not only does this encourage them to keep doing whatever it is, it takes the focus away from ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ placing it on the idea that working toward something can be its own reward.” What a gift it would be to give our children the motivation to work hard. It really is in our power to build them up to a place where they can excel even in the most difficult circumstances.

            To conclude, every child will have failures. Every child will struggle with their worth. But if the parents can take some time to properly praise their child, building that tenacity and resilience, their children can come out on the other side of those challenges knowing that they can do hard things.