Why Parents Who Want To Raise Confident Kids Never Tell Them ‘Good Job’
It's not like "good job" is going to harm them. But it doesn't get to the core of what they need.
AlessandroBiascioli | Shutterstock Most parents these days have one overarching goal: To raise kids who are confident, secure, and mentally healthy. Heaping kids with praise is a natural response to this. Showing your support and approval instills confidence and pride, right? But one parenting guru said there's a better way to achieve this, that simply giving praise doesn't quite get at.
Dr. Becky Kennedy said to avoid saying 'good job' if you want to raise confident kids.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy has become known as "the millennial parenting whisperer" for her boundary-breaking parenting advice that focuses not just on developing healthy, confident kids but also on helping parents work through their own impediments to being the best possible parents they can be.
Kennedy recently appeared on self-improvement and productivity guru Tim Ferriss's podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show" to discuss all things parenting and mental health. During their talk, the two got into an interesting discussion about praising kids with the go-to phrase most of us think of when it comes to showing approval: "Good job."
Many of us are adults who would have killed to hear "good job" from our parents once in a while, and nowadays, praising kids is commonplace, to the point that people worry it's making them "soft" from too many "participation trophies." Kennedy doesn't take that view, but she does want parents to stop saying "good job" — or at least to go much deeper than this simple phrase. Because what kids actually need, she said, is so much more than just praise.
Dr. Kennedy said that praising kids with 'good job' does not give them a chance to consider their internal motivations and feelings.
Now, before you get your hackles up, this is not yet another one of those everyday things we thought were innocuous but are actually ruining your kids. We're not in impossible-parenting-standards territory here. Kennedy is emphatic that "'good job' does not damage kids."
But it doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter of what they need, either. Kennedy wants parents to go deeper than just results to get their kids thinking internally about how they arrived at those results. To illustrate this, Kennedy used the example of a painting her child gave her.
"I’m a horrible artist, so anything she does is amazing," Kennedy said. But rather than praise her, she asked questions instead. "'Tell me about the painting. What made you pick red there?'" And it opened something up in her little girl. "She told me this whole story, this whole story about how she hasn’t ever really seen a red police car… she shared her story with me."
To further illustrate this, she put it in an adult perspective for Ferriss. "Let’s say, Tim, you redid your house, and I visited, and you really worked hard on it," she told him. "And… I go, 'Oh, I love your house. Good job.' It’s actually a conversation-ender." You just say "thank you," and that's… kind of the end of it.
But if instead I said, 'How did you pick that color wall with that couch?' You would [say], 'Oh, okay, well let me tell you and let me show you my Pinterest board,” or whatever it was," she went on to say. "And even if I never said 'good job,' I bet you would feel more lit up inside and almost better than if I had just ended the conversation that way."
Focusing only on praise teaches kids to look outward, not inward, for approval and guidance.
"We want as parents to double down on building our kid’s confidence," Kennedy said. "And the thing that really builds kids' confidence is learning to gaze in before you gaze out." We live in a culture that is frankly obsessed with "gazing out," which is the entire purpose of social media, for just one example — to get external validation.
Dr. Kennedy said constantly praising kids with phrases like 'good job' "is priming us to gaze out before we gaze in — 'look what I’ve done and can someone in the world tell me it/I am good enough?... It makes you very empty and very fragile, very, very anxious."
It also teaches kids that the point of doing basically anything is to get external rewards. "Then they go into the world unable to give themselves that type of validation and searching for someone to say they’re good enough." Engaging them in a conversation about the effort instead of the result teaches them how to dig into themselves rather than "gaze outward."
Kennedy said this has very real implications for the future, too. "Down the road... being able to give yourself some estimation before others do is very helpful to your whole self-concept and protective of anxiety and depression," she said.
This creates an adult who can say, "I think I did a good job in this project. It’s true I haven’t heard back from my boss yet, and I’m a little anxious about what my boss is going to say. But the fact that someone didn’t tell me something isn’t going to spiral me."
So, instead of just praising kids and being done with it, Kennedy said to get them talking about the effort first. "Anything that helps your kid share more about themself actually ends up feeling better to your kid," she said. And that's the whole point in the end.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.