"Honey, I think our son is not very happy ... he seems down and sad. I think he feels inferior to others because it costs him more than others to learn things. We should start to encourage him more."
This, which any father or mother could say to their partner, speaking of their child, is one of the most typical and logical conversational beginnings in this situation. The child has low self-esteem, little self-confidence and needs help. His parents, in an attempt to lend him a hand, decide to encourage him more and begin to praise and praise your achievements in an exaggerated way. The result? Well, according to some research may be counterproductive in the long term.
Children with lower self-esteem receive more excessive praise
A group of researchers from Ohio State University has done a series of studies to see how praise can help or worsen a child's condition. In the first investigation they wanted to simply take a picture of reality.
First they divided praise or praise into two types, the exaggerated and the normal. The exaggerated ones were those that included an adverb or additional adjective. For example, a normal compliment would be to say something like "I see that you are good at it" and an exaggerated one would be to say "I see that you are doing incredibly well."
Once defined, they observed the behavior of adults in relation to children and saw that the elderly naturally grant twice as many compliments to children with low self-esteem than to children with greater self-esteem.
To do the experiment, they studied 114 parents who gave their children timed math tests. Days before doing these tests the children had completed some questionnaires that were used to measure their levels of self-esteem.
After the math tests the parents scored the children while a camera recorded everything that happened. Investigators counted the number of times parents had praised their children and saw that they did it about six times on average. The most typical normal compliments were "Well done!" and "This is good for you!" The excessive praise was 25% of all praise and the most frequent were "You have responded very quickly!" and "Super good!"
They saw, as I say, that parents with children with low self-esteem dedicated twice as much praise as the rest.
One here might wonder what comes before, if low self-esteem or excessive praise. So from the beginning, it seems that the most logical thing is to think that when parents observe that their child has low self-esteem, in an attempt to give him greater confidence and make him feel better, they exaggerate compliments. However, I do not dare to eliminate the possibility that exaggerated praise first came, in the mouth of parents, since childhood, with the intention of supporting their son in his achievements and of increasing self-confidence and that, as a result, the result was the opposite.
What do I mean? Well, that the children who live in a fictional realitysooner or later, they realize What is the reality. And sometimes they face her face to face. They believe that they are incredible, the best in something, that they do great and it turns out that when they can compare their achievements with those of other children they realize that what they do, not only is not extraordinary but sometimes it cannot even be compared with what others do. Also, when they are wrong, when they do something wrong, they are very ashamed because they suddenly realize that they will not receive the praise they are accustomed to. This can obviously undermine a child's confidence and can help you feel that you are not able to do the things that others do and feel that it is better to do very simple things, than complex things, to avoid erring (then we talk more about this).
Or maybe low self-esteem comes from the two reasons I comment, of the mistake of judging or admiring a child for what he does and not for who he is, believing the child that his parents love him more when he does things right and waiting for his judgments to move forward and, at the same time, to see that he is not really as good or as magnificent as his parents seem to show when they praise him.
Praising in an exaggerated way can be counterproductive
We continue with the topic commenting on the following research they conducted. In an experiment with 240 children they were made to draw the painting Wild Roses by Vincent van Gogh. The children received a note with an exaggerated compliment, a normal one or no compliment from someone who identified himself as a professional painter.
After receiving the note, they were asked to copy another box. This time they were told that they could draw anything. They were told that if they chose an easy picture they wouldn't learn too much. If they chose a more difficult picture would learn more, but they could also make mistakes.
The result was that Children with lower self-esteem were more likely to choose to make an easier picture when they had received excessive praise. Children with high self-esteem, upon receiving exaggerated praise, were more likely, instead, to choose a more difficult picture as an option.
Eddie Brummelman, one of the authors of the research explains this behavior as follows:
If a child with low self-esteem is told that he did incredibly well, he may think he always has to do incredibly well ... He may worry about meeting these high standards and decide not to face any new challenge ... It contradicts what many people think It would be more useful, but giving an inflated compliment is really not useful for children who already feel bad about themselves.
I think it sums it up perfectly. Children with low self-esteem, when they receive exaggerated compliments that make them feel good and surprise them they feel the need to keep pleasing. The fact or activity to be carried out loses some importance (or all the importance) and then it only matters to make the adult feel the same pride again. That is why many children prefer to do something easy, knowing that they will do it well, rather than doing something harder than it would perhaps be wrong and risk receiving a "you could have done better."
Therefore I have never liked to praise my children in excess. I recognize their achievements, I tell them that I like when they do something right, I describe their good behaviors so that they see that I am aware that they have done something right, something that I expect from them (just as I describe the bad ones when they have done something that I do not like ), but not great because I do not want them to live pending to make me feel good or happy, or pending my note or my judgment about everything they do.
I just want them to be themselves, to remain spontaneous and to keep doing things because they like it, because it makes them feel good, because they learn from it, but I want them to internalize the values as something natural and at the same time immovable. One has to be good, respectful and humble because you have to be like that, not for dad or mom to tell them that they do very well. Similarly, a child has to learn to be autonomous, he has to understand that things go better with effort and he has to know that mistakes are an opportunity to learn because that's the way to learn and move forward. Avoiding being like this will avoid the criticisms of others, but it will also prevent progress, and sometimes it is better to venture and make mistakes than even to try just in case.
