As your awareness of your child’s strengths deepens, the conversations between you and your child will naturally begin to change, because you’ll start communicating more from a strength-based perspective. Of course, you’ll want to communicate your insights about your child’s strengths to her as clearly as possible so she can develop her own awareness of them, cultivate them, and know when to call on them. One of the most powerful ways to do this is through praise.
Working with parents and teachers from many different walks of life in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, I’ve heard many opinions about praise, most falling into one of two camps. Some worry: “Praise makes a child complacent, and he’ll stop trying.” Others take the opposite view: “Praise gives a child confidence, so he’ll keep trying.”
Indeed, research shows that there is praise that might keep kids from pushing themselves—but not because it makes them feel complacent. And there is praise that seems to spur kids to keep trying—but it’s important to also help kids feel OK just the way they are.
I believe that, all too often, praise is either overlooked in the rush of everyday life and the pressure to handle problems, or it gets diminished into well-meant sound bites that don’t really tell the child anything useful—and may even be counterproductive.
Fortunately, strength-based parenting naturally provides you with the perfect ingredients for nutritious, sustaining praise. With a few tweaks and adjustments to your communication patterns, your words can become tools that build your child’s strengths. And, according to the data, these changes are desperately needed.
If you’re reading this book, it’s because you adore your child and want to do the best possible job as a parent—so you’re probably talking with and praising your child a lot already. But the research shows that we don’t communicate with our kids as much as we think we do—or as well as we think we do. For example, when teenagers and parents discuss topics such as chores, allowance, and homework, and are then asked separately by psychologists to guess what the other person was thinking, 93 percent of the parent-teen pairs guessed wrong.1 Further gaps are seen when we ask about the communication style in the family. When teens, moms, and dads are asked to give their perspective on two types of communication: open communication (e.g., “My mother/father is always a good listener”) and problem communication (e.g., “My mother/father has a tendency to say things to me that would be better left unsaid”), teens report less open communication and more problem communication than parents do.2
This apparent mismatch has implications for the strength development and psychological health of our children. In a longitudinal study testing the relationship between parent communication and brain development in upper elementary school kids as they grew into teens, high levels of positive communication (defined as a pattern of communication where the parent is approving, validating, affectionate, humorous, happy, pleasant, and caring) were associated with beneficial brain alterations that enhance capacity for learning, decision making, social skills, and emotional functioning. In contrast, children whose parents displayed low levels of positive communication had a greater risk of growing into the teen years with brain alterations that create a vulnerability for depression.
We tend to think that if we’re not being negative toward our kids, then we’re doing OK—but this study showed that even low levels of positive communication may adversely affect a child’s brain.3 Failing to do a bad job doesn’t mean you’re doing a great one. So while you may not be nasty, the absence or scarcity of affectionate, validating, and caring communication harms the brain. It’s like depriving a young plant of the sunshine it needs to grow.
In research with fifth graders, psychologists assessed how the parents reacted to their children’s display of emotions during difficult situations (e.g., a pet dying, the child not winning a contest).4 Parents’ reactions were categorized as being warm or cold. A warm response was coded when parents accepted and encouraged children to express their emotions by asking about, paraphrasing, and validating the child’s feelings. A cold response was coded when parents actively discouraged the child’s expression of feelings by invalidating the child’s feelings (e.g., telling the child that it was wrong to feel that way or that there was no point in getting upset) or saying hurtful things (e.g., teasing or criticizing the child for being weak). Almost half of the moms (44 percent) and more than half of the dads responded coldly (64 percent).
We can blame some of this mismatch on our inherent negativity bias. Simply being clued in to this is hugely important, but it’s a lesson we need to reinforce through mindfulness of our daily communication habits, drawing ourselves gently back to seeing positives in our kids when the world tends to fixate on weakness or when we focus more on what our kids are doing wrong than on what they’re doing right. As I mentioned in Chapter 2: Where attention goes, energy flows. Mindfulness can shift us away from criticism and into strength supportiveness by shifting our attention to how we see and speak to our children, as this mother movingly describes:
My son is now thirteen and for many years he struggled academically. I was continually called to the school for meetings with psychologists, teachers, speech pathologists, and occupational therapists focused on “fixing” him. It was an awful time and I felt like a failure as a parent. Upon reflection, I believe one failure I did succumb to was focusing too much on what was wrong with him and not nearly enough on his many accomplishments. I remember the moment when I became mindful of this. I was with a friend, cataloging the range of specialists I had been to see and their perceptions of my son’s weaknesses. When I finally paused for a breath, I noticed a tear running down her face. Whatever could it be? She reminded me what a thoughtful, gentle, generous, kind, funny child my son was. She told me how sad she felt because not once had I acknowledged this since she had arrived.
It was a turning point and a trigger for me to listen more intuitively to the lessons I knew were true—that focusing on his abundant strengths was the path to growth. My son is still not going to win academic prizes, but my shift to a strength focus and moving my son to a school that similarly focused on strengths rather than on deficits have helped improve his progress. I’m thankful, too, that the school appreciates his humanity: He was recognized for his kindness on a school excursion when he volunteered (unprompted) to give his seat to an elderly gentleman. He’s also now performing at the appropriate academic standard, which is great to see.
Remember, our kids have the same negativity bias that we do. So unless we tell them quite specifically that they have strengths, the negativity bias can magnify the effects of criticism—or, worse, of harsh words—to the point of leading kids to think that they have no strengths, as this school administrator recounts:
Brad is sixteen and living in an unstable home environment. He also had significant struggles with mental health. He came to our school after being expelled from three other schools. His self-talk about his future was pervasively negative. His teacher took him through the usual academic assessments and then the VIA Youth Survey. When asked prior to the survey, “What are your strengths?” he answered, “I don’t have any. That’s why I’m at this school. My teachers and my old family weren’t good, and I’m bad at most things, except some video games.” When his teacher went through the VIA Survey with him, humor arose as his top strength. His teacher was startled, because his emotions and demeanor had been flat the entire time. She asked, “Do you want to retake the assessment? You may see other strengths coming forward, too.” (She later told me that she thought she had administered the test incorrectly, because it seemed there was no way humor could have been his top strength.) He replied, “No. And you know what? The test is right. No one knows I’m funny. But I am. I see the world in funny ways, but I just don’t tell anyone. I like that humor is at the top. No one ever told me I was good at anything, but this test did, and maybe at this school I’ll share my funny ideas with people.”
As these stories show, when children’s strengths are recognized and affirmed, they have a better chance to bloom.
Praise can enhance all three elements of your child’s strengths: performance, energy, and use. Science shows that in toddlers through adults, praise is related to task achievement (performance), task enjoyment (energy), and motivation (use).5 Praise makes your child feel good and influences how he reacts to failure and recovers from setbacks, so it’s an essential aspect of instilling optimism and resilience in your child.6
But all praise is not created equal. There are three types I’d like to talk about. Each has an important effect on a child’s mind-set.7 In fact, the most powerful outcome from the praise a child hears is the mind-set it cultivates.
As I explained in Chapter 4, our mind-set is our core belief about whether our qualities, such as intelligence, personality, and strengths, are fixed or can change. Dr. Carol Dweck and her colleagues have shown that praise plays a key role in shaping a child’s mind-set. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the three types of praise.
The most common praise we hear (and tend to give) takes the form of general, sweeping positive statements, such as: “Great job!” “Good work!” “Awesome!” “Well done!” “Way to go!” “High five!”
When you say these things to your child, you’re basically saying, “I love you, I care for you, I think well of you”—and that’s great! But while these statements may help to affirm your child, they don’t build the child’s strengths, because they don’t help the child identify the strength(s) he used to succeed.8 “Good job” doesn’t tell the child what he did that was good, so he can’t figure out how to replicate his success and continue to receive your praise.9 Thus, generic praise can leave kids in a state of uncertainty (and, in some cases, anxiety).10 So while generic praise has a role in affirming your love for your child, it’s not a powerful tool for building strengths.
Then there’s praise for achievement, also known as process-praise. This is praise for what your child does. It focuses on the child’s effort, improvement, technique, or strategy. Suppose your child brings home a painting from school. Generic praise would be: “That is beautiful!” Process-praise would be:
Or suppose your child gets a better grade on a test than on the previous test in that subject. Generic praise would be: “Good job! I knew you could do it.” Process-praise would be:
According to Dweck’s research, process-praise is the most effective way to promote a growth mind-set.11 By focusing on the processes your child undertook to succeed, you give her a shot of good feelings while also helping her see what she did to succeed so she can “own” her success and, presumably, replicate it. It stands to reason that a person who understands the processes she’s used to succeed will be more optimistic about future outcomes and better able to deal with challenges and setbacks (i.e., be more resilient).
But here’s an interesting point. Sometimes process-praise can backfire. If a child has to expend a great deal of effort to meet a challenge, and your process-praise is, in effect, telling the child, “Keep trying, keep trying,” the child may conclude that if she has to use so much effort so much of the time, it must be because she has little or no innate ability.
After a parenting workshop last year in Hong Kong, a mom approached me about precisely this problem. “What happens if process-praise demotivates a child?” she asked. She explained that she had recently read about the importance of process-praise and had been using it with her teenage son for his homework. It had totally backfired. Her son was actually doing less and less homework! In fact, earlier that week he had yelled at her: “Stop saying stuff like that, Mom. I know you think I’m dumb.”
Naturally, this mother was perplexed. So was I. How could this mom’s well-meaning praise about her son’s process end up being viewed by the son as a negative judgment about his ability? I promised her I’d do my best to find an answer to her question.
I thought about it all during the nine-hour flight back to Australia and hit the university library when I got home. After hours of searching, I found a study that gave me an answer. Curiously, the study had been conducted at the University of Hong Kong, a thirty-minute drive from the school where I’d delivered the workshop and met this worried mother.
The researchers at the University of Hong Kong12 found that the way a child views the relationship between effort and ability is a key determinant in whether process-praise motivates or demotivates. Some children believe effort and ability are negatively, or inversely, related. In this belief, a person with high talent doesn’t need to put in effort, whereas a person with low talent needs to put in a lot of effort. Thus high effort implies low ability. Children with this belief see effort as an indication of low talent and therefore feel embarrassed to put in effort because it shows everyone that they’re not talented.
The teenage boy in Hong Kong probably had a belief that effort and ability are negatively related and had interpreted his mother’s process-praise as a judgment of his incompetence. The message he heard was, “You need to put in extra effort because you’re not smart enough.” He reduced his effort because he wanted to prove to himself he could get good grades simply through his intelligence, not through having to try.
In contrast to process-praise, which focuses on behavior, praise for character singles out and recognizes a person’s innate qualities—thus the term “person-praise.” Using our examples of the child bringing home a painting or a test with an improved score, here’s what person-praise might sound like for those achievements:
There’s evidence that person-praise can build moral qualities in children—for example, telling a child he’s a “helpful person” rather than praising his helpful behavior spurs the child to greater levels of generosity—around the age of eight, when kids’ sense of identity might be in a critical phase of development.13 When you praise a child for his moral strengths and help him see that these strengths are assets and qualities within him, rather than just behaviors or processes he’s decided to undertake, he’s more likely to internalize these strengths and use them consistently.14
But when it comes to achievement, Dweck’s research has found that person-praise is more likely to lead to a fixed mind-set in the classroom, which can be an impediment to performance.15 How so? Because if a child identifies herself as having a specific quality such as intelligence, then experiences challenges or setbacks in that area, instead of viewing these events objectively as “hmm, this isn’t working,” she’s more likely to take it as a personal message of “I’m no longer smart.” Essentially, problems can become threats to identity. That can lead to a tendency to play it safe, to a reluctance to try, or to an unwillingness to take on new challenges.
Dweck has found that while person-praise might make kids feel good in their moment of success, it weakens their resilience when confronted with academic setbacks later on.16 In fact, when faced with challenging tasks, children who receive person-praise rate the quality of their work and their ability lower, and report lower levels of task enjoyment and motivation and higher levels of negative emotion compared to children who receive process-praise.
• • •
As you can see, there appear to be two conflicting models here. Person-praise seems to encourage moral qualities in children, particularly within a certain age frame, but it can discourage achievement. And process-praise may encourage achievement but has less effect on moral development and can backfire if the child believes effort signals low ability. What’s a parent to do?
I propose that strength-based praise can meld the best of both types of praise, neither overwhelming kids with the pressure of having to uphold their image to the point where they don’t take risks (the potential downside of person-praise), nor undermining them with the idea that they aren’t enough just the way they are (the potential downside of process-praise).
Besides, in the busyness of daily life, parents need a clear, workable strategy they can easily use. Are you really going to step back in each moment and think: This is an achievement moment, so I’ll use process-praise. Or: This is a moral development moment, so I’ll use person-praise. Not likely.
My workshops with parents and teachers have given me a lot of insight into praise. First, there was the mother in Hong Kong whose son’s demotivation showed how process-praise can backfire. Then there’s what I call the “yet” story.
A few years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel for a group of schools that were using positive psychology in their classes. One teacher on the panel spoke of the emphasis her school had put on using process-praise and the big push on using the word yet to indicate that learning could always improve and to encourage growth mind-sets in students. For example, when a student in art or in physical education class said, “I can’t do it,” the teacher would reply, “Yet.” When a student said, “I’m no good at this,” the teacher would reply, “Not yet.” Many of the teachers on the panel agreed that process-praise had been successful in their schools.
Then a teacher in the audience lifted her hand to ask a question. “I’m confused,” she said. “Isn’t it OK for a student not to be good at some things? Do students always have to persist in what they can’t ‘yet’ do? If you’re asking them to improve on everything, doesn’t this mean you’re not playing to their strengths? I’m wondering whether process-praise might diminish students’ sense of their strengths, which do, in fact, have to do with them as a person.”
She had a point. I decided that the real downside of praise comes from binary thinking—one of the mental habits we discussed in Chapter 2 that needlessly narrows our view—in this case, the idea that there’s only one best way to praise kids. Generic praise, process-praise (including the “yet” model), and person-praise each have their positives and negatives, but the negatives are most likely to kick in when we use one to the exclusion of the others. I vote for a “balanced diet” of praise that sensibly blends them—and I suggest we throw strength-based praise into the mix.
Strength-based praise combines the best of both worlds by connecting a child with his strengths (person-praise) and then praising him for how he uses those strengths (process-praise) to be a good person or perform well. It says two things to kids:
Used this way, strength-based praise encourages both achievement and good character by connecting kids with the positive forces they unleash through the combined power of their strengths and their actions.
So how does it look in practice?
Strength-based praise for the child who brings home a painting or a good test grade might sound like this:
Interestingly, when Dr. Dweck took her research into the homes of families,17 spending dinnertimes with them to analyze how many times parents used person-praise versus process-praise with their young kids, and then testing the mind-sets of the kids five years later, she found that person-praise didn’t lead to a fixed mind-set in those kids. I believe this is because in the more natural setting of the home, where parents likely use a mix of praise over a period of years as kids pass through various phases of identity formation and skills development, it’s the blend of praise that happens dynamically and organically over time that constructs a growth mind-set.
Here’s how one child internalized his mom’s strength-based praise over the years to the point where it positively shaped his identity and his decision about how he could contribute at school:
Tom is a very organized kid. When he was younger, he’d pack his older sister’s schoolbag and put it at the front door each morning before school. When I asked him why he did this, he said he did it because it was easy for him to do—and it helped to make sure that no one (particularly him!) was late for school. I have always reinforced how helpful being organized is for him and others with comments like, “I reckon that being organized makes life feel easier and more enjoyable for you,” and, “You are the best helper when we need to get things organized.” Tom now prides himself on his ability to remember things that need to be done and says things like, “Tell me what we need to do, Mom; you know I won’t forget.”
A couple of weeks ago when I was washing Tom’s school cap, I saw that he had written inside the cap: “throw your hat in” and “organized.” When I asked him what this was about, he told me that they had done an activity in school where each child had to throw his hat into the center of their circle and share a strength that he would be known for and would contribute to the class this year. Tom said his strength was “being organized.”
Tom told me that he uses this strength to contribute to the class by reminding kids when things are due and what activities are planned for the next day. Knowing that he has this ability has given Tom something valuable and unique to contribute to his peers—which he does in an authentic way and feels proud and good about doing.
Strength-based praise can also remind a child that he has abilities on those days—and we all have them—when he doubts he has any:
The other morning Paddy [age ten] climbed into bed with me and cuddled up close. After a while he let out a deep sigh and said, “None of my talents are useful.” Fortunately I was really listening at the time and was able to engage him in a chat. He told me he thought his talents were running and playing the guitar but he couldn’t see how these offered anything and wouldn’t help him “be good at school.” We spent some time talking about how these talents had been useful for him already: He could win running games at school and get out of doing jobs because he had to do guitar practice. I asked him how he thought his talents could be useful to the world. It took him some time to generate answers, but he did, including: It’s fun to watch fast runners in the Olympics, so maybe he can make other people feel happy when they watch him run fast.
I then told him a bit about Thomas Edison and his invention of the lightbulb. I made Paddy guess how many times Edison failed before he succeeded. Then I told Paddy how, as an eight-month-old, he had mastered climbing out of his bed before he could even walk because he was so determined to find me.
He and Edison “have the characteristic of persistence in common,” I said, noting that both of them are good at solving problems others can’t see.
I felt my little boy’s body grow, just a little bit, as it unfolded right next to me, and I watched him jump out of bed. Talk over. The whole chat probably took less than ten minutes, but it completely changed how he saw himself for that day. Reminding him of his abilities was my little “magic moment” with my young son and a positive-thinking gift I could give him.
Strength-based praise can also remind kids that their unique mix of abilities will help them live out a life story that only they can tell:
We have two great sons. Anthony is now twenty-two and in the honors program at a prestigious science university, and James, nineteen, is taking a gap year after completing the first year of a business degree.
When Anthony was in high school, he was an academic achiever who scored high on tests.
When it was James’s turn to prepare for senior year in school, he felt pressured by his older brother’s outstanding academic achievements. I remember one conversation in the car where he voiced his concerns about the year ahead: “I can’t do what Anthony did!” I realized that he was feeling anxious and replied that I understood his concerns, but then I said, “Be happy for Anthony, but know that that is his story. You are writing your story, the ‘James’ story.” I encouraged him to draw on his hope and perspective to look forward to his journey through this year, along with the kindness and social intelligence that he shows to others. Happily, he completed a successful year filled with study, good friends, and basketball. His final grades resulted in his being offered admission to his preferred college.
I like to think of strength-based praise as a relationship builder between parent and child, helping them rise above the criticism loop that families tend to fall into.
Spotting strengths in kids is also about catching them doing good things. Strengths conversations really are elevating conversations, as opposed to conversations that are about catching kids doing something wrong or misbehaving.
I’ve devoted a full chapter to praise because it’s such an important part of the parent-child relationship, yet it often gets pushed aside in the rush of daily life. Let’s all make a pact to be more mindful of opportunities to praise not only our children but also all the important people in our life. This parent captured it well:
I love the “reframe” that strengths allow. My partner, Gary, is strong in prudence, and a core strength of mine is kindness. Seeing this helped to reframe our conversations and to see each other’s point of view. When we built a house together, I was able to understand that his need to inspect everything came from that strength and that it was often necessary and helped get the job done well, while I might have let things go to be “kind.” Our relationship has improved a great deal, thanks to this new lens. Our children, too, are learning to see that we all have different strengths. The ability to see value in the way we are has helped our family become a team.
If you’re already practicing savoring and gratitude (see Chapter 5), you’re probably already becoming more aware of what you appreciate about others. And if you’re practicing mindfulness, too (Chapter 6), you’ll be in the moment and present so you can see the strengths as they unfold in action. I hope you’ll soon find, as I have, how quickly strength-based praise can improve your relationships. What better feeling is there than to know that your words have put a smile of delight on someone’s face?
Of course, our conversations with kids consist of more than just giving praise. A big part of my work with parents is to help them reframe how they interact with their children when dealing with challenges, from misbehavior to sibling spats and more. And that’s where we’ll turn in the next chapter.