CHILD PROOF
The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Praise Your Kids
Phrasing is everything
Your preschooler draws a picture of you. It looks like a potato chip.
“Wow, look at that!” you’re probably tempted to say. “You’re such a good artist!”
Before you do, though, take a beat to consider your words. The right phrasing might keep your little artist happy and hardworking, but researchers say praising children the wrong way can make them less motivated, harm their self-esteem, or even turn them into tiny narcissists.
“In general, in the U.S. particularly, we tend to view all praise as good,” says Shannon Zentall, a developmental psychologist at the University of Akron. But focusing on a child’s innate qualities — saying “You’re so smart” or “You’re great at math,” for example — can actually be harmful, possibly because it suggests that these qualities are fundamental to the child’s identity. Kids who hear this kind of “person praise” may be less persistent after a failure or avoid difficult tasks in favor of easier ones, perhaps because a failure would threaten that identity.
They may also be more keenly attuned to potential mistakes. In a 2012 study, Zentall and her co-author, Bradley Morris, used eye-tracking technology to show that young kids who had heard…
