Table Of Contents
Praise what your child has control over.
We communicate our values through praise, according to Patricia Smiley, Ph.D., a professor of psychological science at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. One of those values is autonomy, so it’s helpful to praise what your child has control over, such as the choices they made along the way of solving a problem or drawing a picture. This helps keep expectations realistic, she said, and it also encourages them to continue doing the activity. “It goes to the intrinsic interests of the child,” Dr. Smiley said. “A parent says, ‘I see.’ It can make the child feel like, ‘Ooh, what I’m doing is fun, and my parent thinks it’s fun, too.’ They connect a parent’s good feeling with their own good feeling.”
Jennifer Henderlong Corpus, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who runs the Children’s Motivation Project, and Kayla A. Good, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, write in their chapter of the book “Psychological Perspectives on Praise” that this can also increase your child’s enjoyment of praiseworthy behaviors. Saying, “Wow — it looks like you really enjoyed that project!” they write, focuses on your child’s self-determined reasons for engaging in a task. As they note, this kind of praise has been shown to predict enjoyment, engagement and performance at school and even in sports. By contrast, they write, interviews with elementary school students revealed frustration with praise that undermined their sense of agency— for example, crediting innate traits such as being smart, rather than demonstrable choices, like persistence.
Don’t praise by comparison.
It can be tempting to praise a child’s achievement by casually comparing her with others (“Wow, you jumped in the water all by yourself when your friend was too scared!”). Not only does this foster an unnecessary sense of competition, but Dr. Corpus and Good’s research suggests that it doesn’t actually motivate younger children.
Beware of praise inflation.
Inflating praise can lead to what Dr. Corpus and Good termed “praise addiction,” in which a child compulsively performs behaviors to earn approval. There’s another risk, too — one thing most researchers seem to agree on is that children can sense when praise is not genuine.
What’s particularly interesting is how this affects kids with low self-esteem. Parents (and teachers) of such children often try to boost the spirits of these kids by offering lavish praise (“Your drawing is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen!”), but kids with low self-esteem respond poorly to it. This is because this type of praise creates an impossibly high standard, and children quickly lose motivation in the face of that impossibility, according to Dr. Corpus and Good.
Instead, consider simply describing what you observed your child doing, along with a neutral expression of delight: “Wow! You dug a big hole in the sandbox with your truck!” This reinforces the behavior (and communicates that you’re paying attention) without setting an unrealistic standard.
Rather than praise, offer descriptive feedback.
In their parenting book, “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,” Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish introduced the concept of descriptive feedback in 1980 (the book was updated in 2012). Your child might do something praiseworthy, but rather than compliment it — which can turn an achievement into something done for your approval — merely describe the action you saw. This in turn might encourage your child to consider and even discuss the thinking that went into their artwork. It’s similar to how asking “How was your day at school?” often invites silence, while saying something like, “I noticed a colorful drawing in your backpack” might invite your daughter to provide you with the artist’s commentary.