I have (almost) promised myself that this won’t become a parenting blog. (My excuse is we are busy at work building a portal and series of interactive media for children at the moment.)
But here is another great article from the New York Magazine – The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids – New York Magazine.
2 replies on “The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids – New York Magazine”
how about you write an article entitled “The Power of Praising Peril’s Kids”?
Oof!
This makes perfect sense to me. Brings to mind Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theories – that we get best personal satisfaction out of our own achievements earned through gradual effort.
A friend of mine has a very smart daughter (now studying science at uni) who, when in primary school, felt so much pressure from always being called up the front of the class by the teacher and called ‘smart’ in front of the class for always getting 20 out of 20 for her tests – she started purposely answering the 19th question wrongly. She got her result: the teacher stopped praising her cleverness in front of the class; and she released the pressure she felt on herself to always be perfect by bringing forward a perception of failure – so any real error on her part in the future wouldn’t be so painful. Pretty smart for a primary school kid, huh?