To Praise or Not To Praise What Children Need to Hear and Not Hear from Parents and Teachers

by Marcy Axness, Ph.D.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Renewal: A Journal of Waldorf Education.

When my second child was a toddler, the teacher of our RIE class (Resources for Infant Educarers) gently suggested that we as parents reconsider our attitudes toward praise. She presented the notion that praise-especially the praise that is often routinely and mechanically doled out to children these days-can insidiously erode a child’s inner motivation, pleasure, and self-satisfaction in a given task or activity. Each “Beautiful painting!” “Great throw!” and “Good girl!” repeated throughout a child’s development can deflect her focus away from the inner will to create, play, and do, outward to our adult response to what she creates, plays, and does.

For the first time, I wondered if praise might be something other than the wonderful self-esteem-building tool it is generally assumed to be. I shared my new insights with my husband, and he began trying in earnest to bite his tongue before uttering such comments as “I like your painting, Ian.” He and I would joke over the sometimes-unnatural approaches suggested as alternatives to praise, such as “I notice you’ve used a lot of blue in your painting.” Meanwhile, I tried to use this new consciousness to fashion ways of responding to our children that were both respectful and authentic.

One morning, our two-year-old daughter Eve called to me, “Come look, Mama!,” and when she let me open my eyes, there was her new puzzle, all put together. Rather than the standard, “Great job!” or “I’m so proud of you!”, I responded with “You finished that puzzle all by yourself.” I simply reflected what was, with no judgment attached. My gratifying reward was Eve’s comment back to me: “I smart!”

Expressions of self-esteem doesn’t come more vivid or more authentic than that. But the self-esteem and pride were Eve’s, given by herself to herself, and were based on her own appraisal of her own accomplishment.

Roughly two years later, after learning to make comments of encouragement and acknowledgment rather than to praise, I read an article in Mothering magazine that strongly discouraged those too!

The author, Naomi Aldort, wrote,

Sensitive and smart, [our children] perceive that we have an agenda, that we are manipulating them toward some preferred or “improved” end result. …Gradually, a shift occurs. …No longer do they trust in their actions, and no longer do they trust us, for we are not really on their side (p.41).

Regarding a parent’s offering encouragement or demonstrating loving support by commenting on what a child is doing, Aldort says,

Even when we intervene with casual commentary on our children’s imaginative play, doubts sneak in. What children are experiencing inwardly at these times is often so remote from our “educated” guesses that bewilderment soon turns to self-denial and self-doubt (p.41).

I was reminded of an incident that happened the first time I took Eve to the local children’s gym. She was not yet two and was quite taken with all the climbing and bouncing apparatus available to her. She carefully climbed the ladder to the loft atop the slide and stood there concentrating, deep in thought. Just at that moment the facilitator called out, full of cheerful enthusiasm, “Eve, you’re way up on top of the slide!” I will never forget Eve’s face. It was as if someone had slapped her—such was the shocking intrusion on whatever had been going on inside her at that moment.

As I reflected on what I was learning from Aldort, on my own interactions with my children, and the interactions I witness between other parents and their children, I wondered why we feel this need, this near-compulsion, to constantly comment. Why do we have to say anything at all? The reasons for this are many. One is that nowhere in our society is something allowed to simply be, without commentary, blurbs, hype, or headlines.

Aldort suggests a more insidious cause of our verbal meddling. What we don’t trust in ourselves, what we weren’t supported in trusting in ourselves as children—our natural impulse toward self-directed learning—we have a hard time supporting in our own children.

Soon I discovered Alfie Kohn’s extensively researched book Punished By Rewards, about the problems connected to praise, incentives, and grades. Kohn highlights a basic—but rarely noticed—fact about praise:

…the most notable aspect of a positive judgment is not that it is positive but that it is a judgment. [Emphasis his.] Just as every carrot contains a stick, so every verbal reward contains within it the seed of a verbal punishment (p.102-3).

Praise is just one side of a two-sided coin, whose other face is criticism. Kohn further comments:

Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave (p.104).

One study Kohn cites found that students whose teachers praise them heavily demonstrated less task persistence (i.e., diminished intrinsic motivation) and also were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice, and were less likely to take the initiative to share their ideas with other students. Praise was also a factor contributing to a tendency to back off from an idea they had put forward as soon as an adult disagreed with them.

Kohn proposes to parents who worry about seeming like sterile, unresponsive killjoys to their children, that they remember two general principles, standards against which praise can be measured. One is intrinsic motivation. Are our comments creating the conditions for our child to become more deeply involved in what she is doing, or are they turning the task into something she does to win our approval? The other is self-determination. Do our comments help our child feel a sense of control over her life? If we accept the understanding of the nature of childhood implicit in Waldorf education, this principle must be balanced with an awareness that it is not appropriate or healthy for a young child to have control over her life. She needs and craves authority, guidance, and protection rather than self-determination, which is for later stages of development. “That is just the way the carrots like to be cut up,” seems a respectful comment in this regard, rather than, “I like how you cut up those carrots.”

Another alternative, suggests Whole Child/Whole Parent author Polly Berrien Berends, is to offer celebration in place of praise:

Enthusiasm, love, gratitude! “How happy that looks!” we can say. “You must be so glad to see it turn out that way! Thank you for showing me.” To the child, shared discovery and appreciation of what is beautiful is worth ten times more than personal praise and actually furthers creative growth where praise stunts it (p.254).

Several years later, the evolution of my consciousness about praise took another leap. A friend was bemoaning the fact that she simply can’t “say nothing” when her daughter has just set the table perfectly without being asked or her son has just pitched a shut-out softball game. And since there are so many times she has to correct the children about various things, she feels it important to balance that with positive feedback when it’s deserved. This last comment, especially, caused me to ponder as deeply as I had since first exploring the issue of praise. It seemed an excellent point, so where was the flaw? The flaw, I finally decided, was that, except on issues of safety, there never needs to be any correcting of our children in the realms of creativity or play.

In those realms where correcting is necessary, as in certain chores and personal hygiene, I have relaxed my words-off policy. “You put all the silverware in exactly the right places, Eve—thank you!” is a fine balance to having corrected her the day before. In the areas of health and safety, I go all the way and praise, praise, and more praise—for excellent tooth-brushing and for diligent sun-screening, for example.

Around the time my own children were ten and thirteen, they sometimes let me know very clearly that they wanted my affirmation for their accomplishments. I realized that as children get older—beyond the first seven years and the critical development of the will forces—acknowledgment and even, dare I say it, praise are sometimes appropriate. This is especially so when they participate in sports, music, household chores, and other activities for which there are existing, objective standards for excellence. I try to be specific and thoughtful with praise, so that it’s meaningful and doesn’t smack of garden variety Pavlovian positive reinforcement. And I still believe that praise doesn’t belong in the realm of the spontaneous, creative activities that emerge freely from the souls of our children.

At this point in my evolution regarding praise and self-esteem, I hope for several things for my children. I hope that they respect and value the opinions of others and can accept and enjoy sincere praise for their accomplishments. I hope also that they are full of positive feelings for themselves, are grateful for and celebrate their ability to do something well, and are clear that the ultimate arbiter of their achievements lies within themselves.

Children learn and develop by imitating adults around them. They absorb and replicate our ways of moving and speaking and our very consciousness. The most effective way to help our children develop a positive self-concept and a healthy attitude toward praise is to cultivate these attributes in ourselves and to manifest them daily.

Resources

top

Sensitive and smart, our children perceive that we are manipulating them toward some preferred or “improved” end result.