What kind of praise do kids need to hear?

My mother abstains from Mother's Day. She thinks the whole thing is forced and commercial and not worth the fuss. In asking around, I turned up only one other friend whose mother similarly sniffs at the day as a "Hallmark holiday." My own feeling is that while my kids are small, I'm happy to forfeit Mother's Day in exchange for not having to engineer a Father's Day hoopla for my husband. But once the holiday isn't a bartered work exchange, I'm planning to milk it.

Motherhood, after all, is already all about self-abnegation. Why give up the one day of praise to which we've entitled ourselves? The kids eat up far more than their share of the praise pie the rest of the year—though lately we're being told the boosting and raving isn't very good for them. That's a killjoy note worth hearing, though we should approach it with a bit of skepticism.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month on the travails of employers faced with twenty- and thirtysomethings who've been told how brilliant and wonderful and special they are all their lives. The articletells of a consultant who counsels a manager to praise young employees for showing up on time after a pattern of lateness. How to conjure a compliment out of "pathetic" and "entitled"? A personality test for narcissism given to college students every year shows an inexorable rise, with today's students being on average 30 percent more narcissistic than the students of 1982. Substitute "self-esteem" for "narcissism" and the results suddenly look rosy, but you simply can't, because all the $10 trophies and the lavish praise of mediocrity, or even failure, doesn't really bolster kids' self-worth. They drink the Kool-Aid, but they also know it.

New York magazine offers a solution of sorts, in the person of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In a February piece * called "How Not To Talk to Your Kids," the magazine lays out Dweck's prescription—also found in her recent book, Mindset—that it's not praise itself that's the problem, it's the kind of praise we heap on our offspring. We tell them that they're smart or athletic or musically gifted, when what we should be praising is hard work and effort. Tell a kid he's smart and the only place he's got to go is down, so he'll avoid challenges and freeze at failure. Tell a kid you admire his determination and he'll keep plugging away, bettering himself all the while.

In my favorite Dweck-inspired experiment, discussed in the New Yorkarticle, researcher Elizabeth Blackwell divided middle-school students at a magnet school into two groups. One group got eight weeks of study skills. The other group got study skills plus lessons on brain plasticity and neuron growth. The second group improved their grades and math scores. Tell kids their brains can get bigger and—voilà!—they do. The kids in this experiment happened to come from a mostly minority school, but Dweck says her findings are the same across races and classes.