Here's a scenario
for parents that's not as easy as it looks. Your child,
your pride and joy, walks in the door from school and announces
she or he got 100 percent on a spelling test. What do you
say? "Good job!" Or maybe, "Wow, you're smart."
How about, "I knew you could do it."
You have to say something. There's your little one beaming
up at you, pleased as punch that the i ended up before the
e in the word friend. And you want to encourage your child
to take school seriously. You want him or her to work hard
and do well on future spelling tests and math tests and
the SAT and that first job interview and whatever else lies
between the kid standing in front of you and all her or
his hopes and dreams. So you probably do what most of us
have always done: praise our children to help them feel
good about their accomplishments.
It's a no-brainer, right? Well, according to new research,
maybe not.
For years, we thought high self-esteem was the key to growing
up happy and successful. Parents were supposed to make sure
their kids felt like they were good, capable, and smart.
Kids who believed they were special, the thinking went,
would not be hindered by self-doubt. Instead, these children
would be brave and inquisitive and, eventually, successful.
According to the prevailing wisdom, good parents took every
chance they got to let their kids know how great they were.
But new research challenges the merits of constantly praising
young people. In fact, it seems that repeatedly telling
kids they are special may actually cripple their future
ability to overcome hardship and expend the necessary effort
to succeed. In particular, praising children for intelligence
rather than their effort appears to discourage kids from
working to master tasks that don't immediately come easily.
Recently, Columbia University psychologist Carol Dweck conducted
an experiment to see how praise affects fifth-graders' willingness
to attempt a task that does not come easily. In the experiment,
some of the kids were told that they were smart when they
completed a puzzle. Other children were praised for their
effort when they finished the puzzle. Astoundingly, the
kids who had been told they were smart did worse, much worse,
than the kids who had been noted for their hard work when
it came time to complete a new puzzle of similar difficulty.
Dweck suggests that kids who think they are expected to
be intelligent become easily frustrated and embarrassed
when they have to expend effort on a task. As a result,
many smart children end up becoming risk avoidant. In other
words, telling these children they are special hurts their
chances for distinguishing themselves in the future.
This problem of being paralyzed by praise seems to be exacerbated
by the media-saturated consumer culture in which we live.
So much comes easily to wired kids. Entertainment, information
and gratification are a few clicks away. Being a MediaWise
parent means not just limiting and monitoring media use.
It also means making sure our kids learn the rewards of
sustained effort and hard work. Then we can give our kids
praise they deserve: "I'm proud of your hard work.
Keep it up."
David Walsh, Ph.D. is the founder of the
MediaWise Movement, a program of the National Institute
on Media and the Family (www.mediawise.org).
His latest book, No: Why Kids - of All Ages - Need to
Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It (Free Press) is
available in bookstores.
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