Three Reasons You Should Never Praise Your Kids

We all want our kids to grow up confident, but psychologists have recently shown how praising your children often leads to some unanticipated negative outcomes. Here are just three reasons why praise turns out to be not such a good idea.

1. Responding to something a child did well with praise encourages them to link their self-esteem with being able to reproduce their achievement. Getting more praise (rather than improvement) becomes their focus, which discourages growth and experimentation (Why move on to harder things when small achievements bring so much adulation?)

2. Life comes with natural learning experiences–little successes and failures. Children are fully capable of perceiving whether what they do is good or bad. Repeatedly telling a child that what they are doing is good takes away their opportunity to reach their own conclusions.

3. What children really long, for more than approval, is to be noticed and understood. Thoughtless praise is often a replacement for really taking interest in what a child is doing. Instead of praising a child’s drawing, for example, asking thoughtful questions about the drawing will prove a much richer experience for parent and child.

Verbal praise can be an ingrained habit that is hard to break. The next time you feel tempted to praise your child, describe what they are doing, or ask questions, with an interested tone of voice, instead.