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Little GeniusesWhat kind of praise do kids need to hear?

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007, at 12:09 PM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to exapnd.

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 article tells 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 York article, 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.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What's wrong with head patting? What's wrong with feeling good? Sorry but this is yet another go round of calvinistic reactionism.

[According to the article:] "We tell them that they're smart or athletic or musically gifted, when what we should be praising is hard work and effort."

Yeah, if you want them to become worker drones with no real definition of self other than work.

Einstein is attributed as having said, "all the hard work in the world won't make up for a touch of genius." Benjamin Franklin pointed out, "Hard work may not kill you - but why take the chance."

Praising only work praises the outcome and not the person. It is precisely the sort of dehumanization that allows the Guanatanamos, the "boot in THEIR ass", the RagHead/Towelhead comments to flourish.

It is Calvinist mythos at its worst.

--Degsme

(To reply, click here.)

Our 20 somethings have grown up during a fairly bleak time in our society--in their lifetimes: two wars, a five year long fear of terrorism, economic downturns, pension scandals, etc...I watch parents give over the top praise to their often poorly mannered children. It disgusts me, and I know it isn't helpful. However, this is not the only reason that we have a seemingly lazy, unmotivated young work force. We have bigger problems.

--thought

(To reply, click here.)

One of the main themes in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" was that the tyranny of the future would use positive reinforcement in lieu of negative.

When my kids were small I would go to the zoo and watch a bird show were they showed the power of positive reinforcement on birds. Do you think this training was in the interest of the bird?

[I] see young people - who are newly hired - struggle in the work environment, more because they feel entitled [than] because they lack experience. They expect to get what they want simply by asking for it. They fail to realize that other people may want something also.

They have a harder time achieving what they want in life because they never get any realistic feedback. Most people just tell them what they want to hear, so they can get what they want from them right now.

--Hi

(To reply, click here.)

Of course you provide praise to those workers who are overcoming an obstacle - whether that's timely arrival or poor spelling or learning a new software program or anything else by which their job performance is judged. When I needed my twenty-something assistant to act more independently, I told her that she needed to inventory and re-order supplies without reminders from me. When she did that on a regular basis, I provided positive feedback on her job evaluation.

And, of course you tell your kid that she did a great job cleaning up those toys or her painting has amazing colors or you tell your spouse that the dinner he cooked tastes great or you appreciate that basketful of clean laundry. Those kinds of messages mean I am grateful for the gift of you, a complement to the oft-spoken I love you.

Vague praise is like vague anything else - sometimes funny but mostly useless, or whatever and junk.

--bright_virago

(To reply, click here.)

Kids know when they are getting the kool-aid, certainly. This is shown by how ineffective lines like 'you are special and unique' are in raising a kid's sense of worth. He rejoins 'Everybody is special!'

But skills and intellect - well, some kids are on the top of some things some time, and the sheer number of things they can conquer allows for a large number of them to be great at _something._

Now, sometimes this backfires - being a prodigy is being the best below a certain age, but as age creeps up, being a prodigy begins to backfire badly. But in general, it is a good thing to encourage kids with praise specific to things they do really well... and not evince too much dissatisfaction with them on the whole.

Note that praise about 'hard work' isn't a lack of praise altogether. But it shouldn't be praise about hard work when the work wasn't hard...

--BenK

(To reply, click here.)

(5/14)

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