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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

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I'm Okay, You're Dead

By Marjorie Williams
Posted Tuesday, July 7, 1998, at 4:47 PM ET

Dear Tim,

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I knew you'd, um, rise to that bug story. But yikes--I read it so fast I missed the whole concept of monandry, confusing it with the concept of monogamy. Only once? Bummer. Now why is it that insects miss the happy median of coupled bliss? I knew I didn't like bugs.

Enough slumming. This week's Newsweek offers a hilarious example of reaching for a peg. An otherwise unexceptionable story about how the self-esteem movement, when taken to an extreme, tends to produce narcissism, is illustrated by a photograph of Mississippi school-shooter Luke Woodham, who murdered his mother and two students last October. Apparently a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claims that undergraduate subjects who have unrealistically inflated notions of themselves showed heightened levels of aggression in an experiment. Oh no! If I over-praise my child's egg-carton caterpillar, he's going to run amok with an AK-47?! Well, not exactly, if you read the fine print. The study "found that inflated self-esteem had as powerful an effect on aggression as does being male, drinking and soaking up media violence." But the researchers' restraint doesn't stop Newsweek from intoning, "At best you get a disillusioned kid; at worst you get a shooting spree."

It is, of course, a valid point that constantly over-praising your child can set him or her up for a life of being unable to tolerate frustration. But my impression is that the pendulum of child-rearing advice has long swung toward recognition of this fact. T. Berry Brazelton is always admonishing parents not to overdo the praise, and almost all the institutions I've brushed up against as a parent have furthered this advice. Willie's school, as you know, urges parents to respond to childish effort with such exclamations as "You worked hard on that!" and "I am interested in your ideas!" (Once I tried to recite this last line to Willie, and he scrutinized my barely-straight face with a look that found me distinctly fishy.) It's so much easier, especially when you're trying to cook dinner at the same time, to say that the product in question is just great.

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But then, Newsweek tells me, "Giving kids something they can truly feel proud of is hard work for everyone." Where's the study of what sanctimony does for a reader's aggression level?

Interestedly yours,

Marjorie

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