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How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise

The Inverse Power of Praise.

This New York Magazine article by Po Bronson is by far the most compelling and provocative piece on education and child-psychology I’ve read in recent years (and I read quite a few;-).

It’s well worth the 15-20 minutes it will take you to read it, as you will definitely rethink the way you talk to (your) kids.

Now go, read it!

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This entry was written by Steven Nishida and posted on March 15, 2007 at 9:03 pm and filed under human nature, happiness, life-coach, autonomous learning, relationship, psychology, health, teaching, community, learning. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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4 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. Fascinating! Not sure what it means for me…who grew up not knowing I had Mensa-level IQ, believing I was dumb.

    1. Kelly on March 18th, 2007 at 3:27 am

  2. Very interesting . I have not read this article but have seen similar stuff about praise before as it comes up a lot in terms of Gentle Discipline (GD).
    What he says is very true, and I have seen the difference with my own kids. For example, one might show me a picture they drew and if I say ‘ Oh that’s great”
    they’ll probably smile and walk away, but if I say, ” I love the way you put the orange and the purple together’ they’ll stay and tell me why they did it or something and go off and try hard with other colour combos .
    I love the part though where he talks about how they are gone for much of the day and we want to heap praise on them , that is how we show love, and I think we live in a time when we do not spend enough time with our kids, between school and clubs and all sorts of extra curricular activities. When my brothers and I were kids my Mum was at home and I think she was kind of a natural GD parent because she had the time, she would sit down with us and tell us exactly what we had done well etc. These days, sadly it so much easier to throw out some generic ‘ super darling’ s to pacify as you dash from one task to the next.
    You bury the deepest parts of yourself in them and they go outside and scatter them to the wind, I want them to love me when they leave the house, so they’ll be more gentle with those parts of me they take with them.

    2. Miss Behaving on March 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am

  3. Related article The Outsiders

    Steve Olson (who provided the Outsiders link) also has a post on intelligence listing a ton of links he’s recently bookmarked on the subject.

    I first came across the idea that praise may not be all good all the time in Mazlish & Faber’s wonderful parenting book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk. They got the idea from their parenting mentor, child psychologist Dr Haim Ginott . The main point I remember was that to describe is generally much more psychologically effective than either praising or blaming. “Dirty clothes belong in the laundry basket” is more effective than “Goddammit! How many times have I told you to…!!” “I see the milk spilled” is more effective than “You clumsy doofus!!”, and similarly with describing rather than praising, as Miss Behaving wrote above.

    3. Marco Polo on March 20th, 2007 at 12:55 pm

  4. Thanks for the comments everyone. Having a hectic month at work, so having ait’s hard to reply to all of your excellent thoughts, but I certainly appreciate each all contributions:-)

    5. realityonastick on March 30th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

2 Trackbacks

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