Your Parents Did An Honest Job Raising You If You Were Taught These 5 Phrases
How your parents spoke to you as a child predicts how well-adjusted you'll be as an adult.
elenavagengeim | Canva Praise is a hot-button issue in parenting nowadays, and many well-meaning parents have no idea when and how to praise their kids. For people who grew up in households without much praise, praising their kids may be healing for them, but this steady stream of praise may unintentionally be making their kids somewhat, shall we say, narcissistic (or for the layperson, “unbearable to be around.”)
Other people withhold praise, whether for personal or cultural reasons (certain cultures are not big into praising kids), and their kids grow up feeling like their parents don’t like them very much. This begs the question: When should you praise kids, and how much praise is too much?
For some background, there is a real and valid theory of “growth mindset” which states that when you praise kids for their intelligence, it stops them from working hard in that area. They may end up doing worse because they are scared to take risks that may show them to be less intelligent than previously thought.
(Read about Carol Dweck’s work in Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success — as a fun fact, I worked as a research assistant for her graduate student Lisa Blackwell when I was at Columbia.)
This theory is particularly true for smart little girls, who end up turning away from subjects like math where they don’t instantly do well because they’ve always been told they are smart and they don’t want to “mess up” this reputation by being bad at something, so they stop engaging in the subject entirely.
This happened to me, I was effortlessly good at verbal subjects but needed to work harder at math, so I basically “gave up” on it around high school. (I know many female readers are nodding their heads!) On the other hand, teaching kids that effort leads to improved performance, and that the brain is a muscle that can grow and develop if given challenging work, is tied to perseverance and increased performance.
So, telling a child that she’s great at math will often make her scared to keep doing math in case she ends up disappointing you eventually, but telling her that every new math problem she tries helps her brain get better at problem-solving will eliminate that fear of failure and even make her excited to learn.
My kids’ school is really big on promoting a growth mindset, and my kids are invested in the idea that practice makes their brains grow, which is true and great. However, among parents who have read about growth mindset (and this stuff is everywhere in parenting blogs and books), there is a new type of praise that is proliferating: praise for effort.
But this often includes some other types of praise: praise for anything that looks like it potentially might have taken effort, praise for any small (read: minuscule) effort, and praise for things that, if we are being objective, took our child zero effort at all. Unfortunately, this doesn’t end up helping our children, and in fact, may be sabotaging their ability to assess what “effort” even means.
When my daughter, who is fully capable of writing out a nice birthday card with a nice picture on it, hurriedly scrawls a misspelled birthday card to a friend whose name is sitting on her desk on a class list, I do not say “good job” and I don’t say another current parent fan favorite, “That was great but maybe you could just erase “HPPY BIRTHDY MKIE” and write “HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKE” but I know he’ll appreciate it!”
(Note: if my child struggled with letter order, writing, or even with ADHD, this would be a different story. I am using, in the example, a child who is a strong writer who did not put much effort into a hypothetical activity.)
Instead, I say, “Mike’s name is right in your class list, and I know you can do better if you don’t rush. If you need me to spell out happy birthday then you can ask me.
Perhaps we will save this one for when someone named MKIE joins the second grade.” (You don’t have to say that last part unless your kid has a sense of humor like my kid’s.)
Your parents did an honest job raising you if you were taught these phrases:
1. 'I don’t lie to you'
The card wasn’t great.
2. 'You are capable of doing a good job'
StoryTime Studio / Shutterstock
3. 'There are strategies to employ that will help you do a better job'
4. 'You did not put much effort in'
Effort is correlated with a job well done and here is a shining example of how the converse is true as well.
5. 'Your friend deserves to have his name spelled correctly on his birthday card'
antoniodiaz / Shutterstock
Here are some options for what “good job!” might have taught her:
- I lie to you to protect you.
- I have zero judgment.
- You are, sadly, so crappy at writing that this is truly the best you can do.
- Writing a great birthday card takes 30 seconds and an unsharpened pencil.
- You don’t need to try; you’re above that.
- Mike should appreciate being called MKIE and should be grateful that you wrote him a card at all.
The first two points are crucial in setting up a relationship where your child respects you later in life. I see so many young adults who consider their mom/dad “really nice” but think that these nice parents lie to spare their feelings so much that they can’t count on them for any honest feedback at all.
I know others who feel that their parents have no conception of what is good/right/true and are just blinded by either stupidity, age, or the “nice” parental inability to see what the child does clearly.
When a child who feels one of these ways has a real question to ask a parent, like, “Do you think I was at fault at all in my breakup with John/Jane?” or “Do you think law school is the right choice for me?” or “Do you think I’m drinking too much on the weekends?”, they will not trust the overpraising parent, whether they think the parent lies out of true lack of judgment or a conscious attempt to protect them.
In the 3rd case, the kid may go to the party, see that everyone else wrote a nicer and neater card, and conclude, “Boy, if this is what got all that praise from Mom, I must just be bad at writing after all.” You don’t need too much imagination to see what happens to the kid’s desire to improve his writing after that.
In the 4th through 6th cases, the child starts to take on narcissistic traits. They feel that even a minimal amount of effort should be praised by others, and when it isn’t, they feel angry and frustrated — not at themselves, but at the others in their lives who aren’t recognizing their greatness.
These are the people who come to marriage counseling and say, “I did do the laundry just two weeks ago! Yeesh! Nothing is good enough for my spouse.”
There are multiple ways to soften the blow of genuine feedback if you fear that going cold turkey off the fake praise will upset your child. The first, which you should be doing anyway, is sincere praise for even the small things that make your child a kind, honest, and hardworking person (and not just in academics.)
E.g., “I liked it when you waited for your sister to come downstairs before telling your story. You must have known she would find that story funny.” Or, “You never give up with that jump rope. You are getting faster and faster.”
Another great way is humor, which I included in my example above. If you tend to be too harsh in your sarcasm, little kids will find it aversive, but gentle joking is good. E.g., “This room is a pig sty” is bad, but “Wow, you must be trying to build the world’s biggest pile of socks!” may be funny to your child, depending always on her age and preferred type of humor.
The rule of praise, in my opinion, is: If it’s a genuinely good job and/or your kid tried hard, try to recognize this in some way. For one kid, this may be when they score a goal.
For another kid, this may be getting up the courage to even join the team. Note that if you’re not very verbally expressive, even a smile or a high five is perfectly valid recognition. And don’t go over the top unless the activity truly merits it.
You don’t have to bring out a marching band or, worse, throw rewards at your kid, which can end up sapping their intrinsic motivation and make them work for treats instead of for the fun/excitement/challenge of it.
No matter how you decide to praise your child’s genuine efforts, try not to limit your child either emotionally or intellectually by telling him or her that any little thing they do is worthy of praise.
This isn’t how life will go for them, and you are doing them no favors. Your job is to be kind, loving, and truthful, and working toward this is a great goal for all parents.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.