Is inflated praise for your child a bad thing?

Posted on April 7, 2014

When you've done something good, or performed a task well, it feels great to get some praise for it. And parents and teachers, especially in Western cultures, are encouraged to dole out praise to children in an increasingly generous manner. A drawing might not just be 'good', it might be 'incredible'. That song wasn't just 'beautiful', it was 'epic'. Such praise is often given with the best intentions, particularly in the belief that positive feedback, especially for children who don't have much faith in themselves, might help to raise their self-esteem. But does it work?

Recent research by Eddie Brummelman and colleagues has tried to shed light on this question. In three studies, they looked at how adults dish out praise to children in both an experimental and naturalistic setting, and how children with varying levels of self-esteem take it. Their results suggest that overly positive praise might not have the intended effect for children who have low self-esteem.

Brummelman's team found that if children with lower self-esteem were given overly-inflated praise, they were less inclined to seek a challenge in the second task - they would go for easy drawings over the harder ones, and therefore miss out on the chance for a new learning experience. On the other hand, children with high self-esteem were more likely to seek a challenge after being given inflated praise. Interestingly, the only difference between the inflated and non-inflated praise was a single word - incredible ("you made an incredibly beautiful drawing!" versus "you made a beautiful drawing!").

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Category(s):Child Development, Parenting

Source material from British Psychological Society