Rounding the corner into the nursery school classroom to collect my daughter, I overheard the nursery assistant tell her, ‘You’ve drawn the most beautiful tree. Well done.’ A few days later, she pointed to another of my daughter’s drawings and remarked, ‘Wow, you really are an artist!’
On both occasions, I found myself at a loss. How could I explain to the nursery assistant that I would prefer it if she didn’t praise my daughter?
Nowadays, we lavish praise on our children. Praise, self-confidence and academic performance, it is commonly believed, rise and fall together. But current research suggests otherwise – over the past decade, a number of studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to under-perform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting – why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may simply repeat the same work – why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets applause?
In a now famous 1998 study of children aged ten and eleven, psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of mathematical problems. After completing the first set of simple exercises, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise. Some were praised for their intellect – ‘You did really well, you’re so clever’; others for their hard work – ‘You did really well, you must have tried really hard.’ Then the researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were dramatic. The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new approaches. They also showed more resilience and tended to attribute their failures to insufficient effort, not to a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure, tended to choose tasks that confirmed what they already knew, and displayed less tenacity when the problems got harder. Ultimately, the thrill created by being told ‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to children in another school, recounting their experience, some of the ‘clever’ children lied, inflating their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters’ confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.
Why are we so committed to praising our children?
In part, we do it to demonstrate that we’re different from our parents. In Making Babies, a memoir about becoming a mother, Anne Enright observes, ‘In the old days – as we call the 1970s, in Ireland – a mother would dispraise her child automatically … “She’s a monkey,” a mother might say, or “Street angel, home devil,” or even my favourite, “She’ll have me in an early grave.” It was all part of growing up in a country where praise of any sort was taboo.’ Of course, this wasn’t the case in Ireland alone. Recently, a middle-aged Londoner told me, ‘My mum called me things I’d never call my kids – too clever by half, cheeky, precocious and show-off. Forty years on, I want to shout at my mum, “What’s so terrible about showing off?” ’
Now, wherever there are small children – at the local playground, at Starbucks and at nursery school – you will hear the background music of praise: ‘Good boy,’ ‘Good girl,’ ‘You’re the best.’ Admiring our children may temporarily lift our self-esteem by signalling to those around us what fantastic parents we are and what terrific kids we have – but it isn’t doing much for a child’s sense of self. In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we’re actually doing much the same thing – doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, and about what our child feels, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.
Which brings me back to the original problem – if praise doesn’t build a child’s confidence, what does?
Shortly after qualifying as a psychoanalyst, I discussed all this with an eighty-year-old woman named Charlotte Stiglitz. Charlotte – the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz – taught remedial reading in northwestern Indiana for many years. ‘I don’t praise a small child for doing what they ought to be able to do,’ she told me. ‘I praise them when they do something really difficult – like sharing a toy or showing patience. I also think it is important to say “thank you”. When I’m slow in getting a snack for a child, or slow to help them and they have been patient, I thank them. But I wouldn’t praise a child who is playing or reading.’ No great rewards, no terrible punishments – Charlotte’s focus was on what a child did and how that child did it.
I once watched Charlotte with a four-year-old boy, who was drawing. When he stopped and looked up at her – perhaps expecting praise – she smiled and said, ‘There is a lot of blue in your picture.’ He replied, ‘It’s the pond near my grandmother’s house – there is a bridge.’ He picked up a brown crayon, and said, ‘I’ll show you.’ Unhurried, she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed, she listened. She was present.
Being present builds a child’s confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we’ve not been attentive to her?
Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness – the feeling that someone is trying to think about us – something we want more than praise?