To Praise or Not to Praise Your Chilldren

In the past several years there has been some discussion among parenting experts and researchers regarding the value of parents praising their children.  Some researchers  have even reported that inflated praise can harm children with low self esteem. One article in New York Magazine carried the following, alarming headline “The Self Esteem Movement Backfires—When Praise is Dangerous.” Another headline in a Psychology Today article read, “Praising Children With Low Self Esteem Can Backfire.”The headlines appeared to be more attention seeking than informative. The actual research projects provided some interesting and helpful information for parents about the best ways to praise their children.

Some researchers  looked at the effect of praising a child’s intelligence vs. praising a child’s effort.  Other researchers  looked at the effect that  inflated or exaggerated  praise has on a child with low self esteem Dr. Carol Dweck, along with a Columbia University team, for ten years studied the effect of praise on students in 20 New York schools.  Researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a non-verbal IQ test..  When the researcher told the student his score,  he would be  given a single line of praise.  Randomly divided into groups,  some were praised for their intelligence. They were told “you must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort.  They were told, “you must have worked really hard.”

In follow up research, students were given the choice of taking a  more difficult   second test  or an easy test just like the first test.  The students were also  told that they would learn a lot if they took the more difficult test.  Of those praised for their efforts,90 % chose the harder test.  Of those praised  for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test.  Other subsequent  tests,  so  hard that all of the students failed,  looked at the two groups of  students’ response to failure. Those praised for their effort on the first test, assumed that they hadn’t focused hard enough on the difficult  test.  Those praised for their intelligence assumed that their failure was evidence that they really weren't smart at all.”

At the end of her 10 years of studying the effects of praising students for their intelligence vs praising students for their effort, Dr.  Dweck  concluded”Emphazizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control.  They come to see themselves as in control of their success.  Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure” .

Dr. Dweck, based on  some of the findings from   her ten year study ,  went on to develop a   theory of two different  mindsets that she believes  shape our lives and our brains.  LS Blackwell,  a member  of Dr. Dweck’s team, took the study one step further. Acting  on the findings of the previous tests , Blackwell took a group of students who had a history of decreasing math grades. A total of 50 minutes were spent  teaching the students a single idea: that the brain is a muscle, giving it a harder workout makes you smarter.  That alone improved the students’ math scores.  

In another university, research was done looking at the effect that inflated or exaggerated praise has on children with low self esteem.  Eddie Brummelman and Brad Bushman conducted research at Ohio State University in which they found that adults seem to naturally give more inflated praise to children with low self esteem.

For the research, inflated praise included one additional adverb such as “ incredibly” or an  additional adjective “ perfect.”  An example of simple praise would be, “you’re good at this”  while “ you’re incredibly good at this” was considered inflated praise. The findings of this study showed that children with high self esteem seemed to thrive with inflated praise,while  those with low self esteem, who had been given inflated praise  actually avoided attempting any new challenging work. Brummelman said their findings suggested that the inflated praise may put too much pressure on those with low self esteem. “ They may think that they always need to do incredibly well.”  Bushman in an article for Psychology Today when providing a conclusion regarding the Ohio research says it is important when praising a child to focus on behavior or the process of the behavior  vs praising the good qualities of the child.   

The overall message for parents seems to be  that  praise for children needs to be sincere, specific, contain no exaggerations, and the focus of the praise should be on effort vs. the achievement or intelligence of the child.