New Thinking about Praising Kids
From Nuture Shock by Bronson and Merryman, 2009
Generally as parents we have believed that any kind of praising of our kids is good, right? Well maybe not. The authors of Nurture Shock talk about a study from Columbia University on the effects of praise on students from 20 New York schools. They wanted to see how sensitive to praise these kids were to a single line of praise after an IQ test. Some were praised for their intelligence and some for their effort. When the kids were given the choice of a harder or easier test for the 2nd round the kids praised for their effort mostly chose the harder test and those praised for their intelligence mostly chose the easy test.
The head of the research team, Dr Carol Dweck, says “Emphasizing 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 failure.” In fact those kids who think “I’m smart” also think “I don’t need to put in effort”. Expending effort becomes stigmatized – it’s public proof that you can’t make it on your natural gifts.
This research was repeated with the same results across every socioeconomic class, gender and age, including pre-schoolers.
In another piece of research a group of students were given 50 minutes of teaching about the brain being a muscle and that if it’s given a workout we can become smarter. These students had been low achievers, however their math scores improved so much that their teachers could figure out who had been in the control group and who had been given the brain information.
So praise needs to be specific and sincere – children can tell when praise isn’t genuine. Excessive praise can distort motivation so that kids do things just to be praised. It’s important for parents to talk about mistakes so that failure doesn’t become a taboo subject and so that mistakes are seen as an opportunity to learn.
See my recommended reading list:
- How to Really Love your Child, Ross Campbell
- The Whole Brain Child, Daniel Siegel
- Kids are Worth It, Barbara Coloroso