Feb

28

When not to praise

Posted by nicki

February 28, 2007 |

The last 2 decades have been full of  much effort to rebuild the self-esteems of our youth.  Lots of effort on praising and not criticizing our children.  I think as a rule this sounds good, but a recent article questions that hard and fast rule that all praise is a good thing.

New Yorker Magazine reporter Po Bronson questions the benefit of praising your child too much. Much of the findings are taken from studies done by psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia on New York students.

“When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.”

I like this idea of not putting too many value judgments on the work the children produce  - trusting them to embrace what they like and what they don’t.  This is one advantage of being in a home-school  environment - allowing children the time and the space to come to their own conclusions.   An interesting article to consider.


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