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The Problem with Praise

By Alina Tugend

“You’re brilliant!” “What a smart boy (girl)!” “Look how smart you are!” What parent hasn’t used such praise to encourage her child? It seems innocuous, if not flat-out positive. But social scientists are now saying we should stop complimenting the intelligence of our children. Why? Because we’re inadvertently teaching those children to shy away from taking risks.

 

Evidence of this unintended consequence comes from Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford. Dweck and her grad students asked 400 New York fifth graders to participate in an experiment. The children were given an easy test. When they did well, half were praised for being “really smart,” while half were praised for “working hard.” Dweck then asked the stu­dents to take another test; they could choose an easy one or a hard one. The majority of those praised for being smart selected the easy test; that way they could continue looking smart. But 90 percent of those compli­mented for working hard chose the more challenging test.

“Kids are exquisitely attuned to the real message and the real message is, ‘Be smart,’” Dweck explains. “It’s not, ‘We love it when you make mistakes and learn.’”

This phenomenon is especially prevalent in afflu­ent areas, where parents are proud of being high-achievers and expect their children to excel. Time and again, wealthy parents give the message that what’s important is not the process but the outcome—accomplishing tasks excel­lently and effortlessly.

Wendy Mogel, in her new book The Blessing of a B Minus, writes that privileged children who have every advantage—including parents who rush in to fix every failure—are often deprived of the satisfaction of resolving mistakes on their own. Even worse, those parents send the message that they think their child is too fragile to handle challenges. Eventually, that child agrees.

Many educators bemoan that high-performing students are so terrified of criticism they won’t admit a mistake, and many par­ents have forgotten that school is supposed to be a place of learning, not perfect test scores. I have to admit, I’ve fallen into this parent trap. Not long ago, my 10th grade son brought home a paper he’d written on Mao Tse-Tung for which he re­ceived a B+. He had worked hard and done a good job, and I was disappointed by the grade.

Then I read the teacher’s thoughtful, insightful com­ments and discussed the paper with my son. This, I realized, was exactly how the process is supposed to work. The goal shouldn’t be the attainment of perfection—impossible any­way—but the development of a child’s ability to learn from experience.

Alfie Kohn, an author and lecturer who has long been critical of what he sees as the excessive praise and rewards that the American education system bestows on students, writes that “researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task—and they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with.”

Kohn advocates abolishing virtually all praise, including the ubiquitous “Good job!” Instead, he says, parents should ask questions. “Why did you make the sky purple?” or “What’s your favorite part?” Declara­tive statements—“You put your shoes on by yourself!”—are another option. Such open-ended interaction encourages the child to continue engaging with the material.

Most experts—in both child development and in the busi­ness world—say that among people with comparable smarts and talent, what most distinguishes those who suc­ceed from those who don’t is resilience—the commitment to try again after a setback. In her book Mindset: The New Psychol­ogy of Success, Dweck notes that NASA, when soliciting applica­tions for astronauts, rejected people with unblemished histo­ries of success in favor of people who had experienced failure and bounced back.

Kids who get the message that they should be perfect never learn to bounce back because they’re too scared to fail. That’s the wrong lesson to teach.