re praise

How Not to Talk to Your Kids. A friend posted this article on FaceBook yesterday. I read it and initially thought, "huh. this is interesting." The article has stayed on my mind, I'm finding my self thinking of all the people I think would find this interesting- the psychology student, the mom of a toddler, the friend teaching 4th grade.

The primis of the article is that you are hurting your kids with endless encouragement, telling them they are smart, that they played great. What has been found is that kids who are told endlessly that they are smart tend to give up faster on subjects they are not naturally good at, dont develop good study skills and dont know how to handle failure.

What does seem to work is rewording the praise. Tell them that you could see how they worked to get the ball, or look for the right pass.

"But a growing body of research and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of smart does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control, she explains. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."

I would like to see this studied in work places and college campuses.

This really struck me as probably the most defining reason people play WOW. There are people who do nothing else with their life, some one supports them somewhat, they dont work, didnt finish school and rarely leave their computer. Things are strait forward with lots of instant success in WOW.

"It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family."

This solidifies a lot about the game that bothers me.

I'm not sure I agree with everything in it, mostly things that were found in polls, that I felt deferently about, in regards to myself.

For example, the article states that teenagers often see positive compliments from a teacher as being the opposite. Also that children under 5 are the only people who take compliments at face value. It depends on who I hear the compliment from- a teacher, i take it at face value, a coworker that I am wary of and probably don't like, mostly likely not at face value.

Read it. Its interesting.