'So proud of you!'

Knowing how and when to praise kids sets them up for success, experts say

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette praising children illustration.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette praising children illustration.

Parents do a lot in hopes of ensuring their kids' futures -- sign them up for extracurricular activities, save for college -- but what if the way to ensure that they become well-adjusted, successful adults is to compliment them?

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette praising children illustration.

"This is not just a tool or a gizmo," says Sharon Long, lead trainer for the Nurturing the Families of Arkansas program through the University of Arkansas School of Social Work, MidSouth Center for Prevention and Training. She says sincere, meaningful praise is essential to a child's well-being.

"Children who know they're valued value themselves," she says. "Children who know that they're valued value their friends. They have worth so they understand that people and things around them have worth, too."

But before you start gushing willy-nilly all over your child, what kind of praise works best? What is the best way to deliver the message? How much is too much?

"There is a lot of controversy about it. Meaningless praise doesn't do a whole lot to raise children's self-esteem. Praise for every single thing a child does has raised a whole group of children who think that they now can rule the world," says Wendy Wood, facilitator of the Love and Logic classes being held at Centers for Youth and Families and owner of Education Plus Inc.

"What we hear from business is the biggest problem of young people going into the business world has nothing to do with their academic achievement. It's got to do with them thinking that they're the best at everything they do whether they have any actual skills or not, and when they get out into the real world, you're not praised for showing up for work on time -- it's a really rude awakening for these kids."

An American Psychological Association study published in 1998 by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that fifth-graders who were praised for being smart or intelligent were less motivated to tackle new challenges than children who were praised for working hard.

"After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more low ability attributions and worse task performance than children praised for effort," the authors wrote. "Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement."

Other, more recent research by the association has made similar findings.

Wood says children know when praise is sincere, so it's best to keep it real.

"When you get constant praise for everything, you start thinking you're perfect or you start thinking you need to be perfect at everything, and that's an impossible standard. And inaccurate praise confuses them," says Wood. "If I'm terrible in math and my parents keep telling me how fantastic I am in math, I also come to not believe what they say because I know I'm not good in math."

MONTESSORI MODEL

In Montessori schools, development of a high self-esteem is a core aim. But Vera Chenault, head of school at Urban Garden Montessori in Little Rock, says praise does little to motivate children and, in some cases, can thwart their quest for knowledge.

Stickers and trips to the treasure chest for reaching a higher reading level, for example, constitute material praise for achievement, but don't set children up for success.

"The reward for learning to read is that you get to read," she says. "And the worlds that open up to you are fantastic, and when you advance to a higher reading level, you get to read even more fantastic things and that's a beautiful lifelong rewarding thing that far outweighs being praised or getting a good grade or getting a sticker."

Children who aren't working for external rewards develop a deep love of learning and self-confidence "because they aren't looking always to that authority figure for validation," she says.

Under the Montessori model, teachers watch for mastery before moving on to the next lesson. But in some educational settings, children seeking praise for learning pretend they understand because they know that will please the grown-ups, even if it means they fall behind as lessons progress, Chenault says.

"We're losing students along the way," she says, "and we don't even know where we've lost them because students are good at faking and the whole class has moved on to the next subject."

Giving them the prerequisite skills they need to perform tasks develops competence, and that gives them healthy self-esteem.

UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE

"Praise isn't just saying, 'Oh, yay!' Praise does not have to be verbal," says Long. "You can praise with one word. You can praise with a gesture. You can praise just by looking at someone."

That kind of praise, coming from a parent, is especially powerful, she notes.

"Praise for 'being' is the highest form of praise anyone can receive. Praise for being lets children -- everyone, for that matter -- know that you value them for who they are. It's unconditional. It's 'I'm so happy you're my son.' 'I love you so much.' Period. It is not connected to any behavior. Those praises have nothing to do with ability and everything to do with the fact that I value them for being. It's given freely at any time. They don't have to do anything to earn it.

"And you cannot give too much," she says. "It's so powerful. It's what tells a child, 'I am valued. I am connected to my parent. My parent responds to me.' That is what builds that sense of self-worth. It had nothing to do with my success today or my failure, and it has everything to do with just who I am."

Praise for "being" and praise for "doing" -- the distinction being that this kind of praise is tied to an accomplishment, an effort or a behavior -- should be carefully balanced, Long says.

"We often piggyback that praise for being with praise for doing," she says. "You know, 'You made awesome grades.' Or, 'You didn't move your marker for an entire six weeks. I am so proud of you. I love you so much.' That's not praise for being. That's polluting it. We need both."

PRAISE CIRCLES

Praise is a key piece of the Nurturing the Families of Arkansas program, which serves families referred by the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Children and Family Services. Each weekly session ends with parents and children sitting in praise circles, taking turns offering up praise to each other. Praise is also a part of the daily homework parents are asked to do during the program.

These exchanges don't come easily for everyone.

"We are all capable of giving and receiving praise. Sometimes we have to practice, but it can be learned," she says. "Parents always say at the end of these groups that the one thing they really used was the praise circle."

Long says these kinds of positive interactions between parents and children are a good counterbalance to effective discipline.

"We understand that when there's behavior we don't want, there's timeout," she says. "But timeout is not effective unless you have 'time-in.' Time-in is the place where praise is."

Long says praising -- with words or without -- can foster a healthy sense of self-esteem, boost academic achievement, help children make and keep friends and help them weather the storms of adolescence.

"If we've found a balance and praised them for just being, when our child fails, when they make mistakes, when they do things that we don't necessarily approve of, they still have that foundational value of self-worth that, 'Hey, I'm valued as a person, and even though I messed up I'm still a good person and I still have my parents' unconditional love.' That's so important. Then they know they can make it."

She believes that kind of praise creates people who love themselves rather than those who are narcissistic.

"It doesn't mean that a child who is praised will become braggy or conceited," she says. "It means they have a strong sense of self, and they don't need to [brag]. They already feel good about themselves."

Wood says there's probably not a thing in the world wrong with praising your child for studying hard and doing well on a math test, but she considers teaching kids how to navigate the world a much higher priority.

"When your kid is walking across the stage at graduation, what kind of character do you want them to have?" she says. "Character and feeling like you can handle the world are actually the most important things."

Family on 05/06/2015

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