ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

Praising all together should be discouraged and instead, encouragement should be used with child. Praise fills a child with an artificial sense of worth identified by someone else, and must be artificially replenished regularly by others. This means that the child may have great difficulty making smart decisions on their own and unable to make repairs to their own self-esteem when bad things happen to them. Encouragement helps a child fill them self with self-created, internal, authentic worth. They begin to feel sincerely capable and lovable without someone having to continue to replenish their worth.

The article is directed towards parents who are likely to push their kids too hard using criticism; the author of the article fails to point out the target audience in the introduction and thus parents who already have a tendency to laxity might find the article as a useful rationalization or excuse for their habitual behavior.

Praise can work the way the author describes, but there are pitfalls to it that she avoids pointing out: if you praise habitually and uncritically, for example if you praise every work of art in a similar manner regardless of the effort that went in to it, then you can accidentally teach that effort is not worth the trouble. The most meaningful way to praise (and the one that is most likely to leave a child’s intrinsic motivation intact) is to carefully observe, describe and question what the child did and though, not who the child is. Comments like “You made a big line here. I see you mixed lots of paint colors over here,” “Why did you make this hole?” and “Do you know how high you jumped?” are very helpful, while old chestnuts like “Good job” and personal praise like “You are so smart” are not likely to either make the child feel especially accomplished or encourage them to try harder next time. The actual article mentions something similar on page 4 and also mentions problems with personal comments like:

<quote>
“You’re Brilliant”…. If you praise kids' intelligence and then they fail at something, they think they're not smart anymore, and they lose interest in work. But kids praised for effort get energized in the face of difficulty.
</quote>

I think the author of the summary left out some central points of the article she was describing, and the article did not fully describe the best ways to use praise nor was that the primary focus of the article.


Terri: Are you serious? The word "daughter" comes from the vedic word for "milkmaid." Does the obvious valuing of family for the work they can perform seem disrespectful enough so you won't say "daughter" anymore? If not, then what's your problem with "kid?"

I am disappointed to see the word "kid", instead of child, used in this article. To me this is not a professional or respectful approach.

Terri.