Don't Over-Praise Your Kids -- It Hurts Some
My husband and I argue about this all the time. He disdains coaches who give everyone on the team a trophy, no matter how they played. But I'm grateful. It's the only way our (non-athletic) child will ever get one. But a new study has found that " Parents and other adults heap the highest praise on children who are most likely to be hurt by the compliments," according to newswise.com. The reasoning behind this is that adults seem to give more praise to kids with low self-esteem. " But while children with high self-esteem seem to thrive with inflated praise, those with low self-esteem actually shrink from new challenges when adults go overboard on praising them." “Inflated praise can backfire with those kids who seem to need it the most – kids with low self-esteem,” the Web site quotes Eddie Brummelman, lead author of the study and a visiting scholar at The Ohio State University in autumn 2013. Now, we're not talking about a "that-a-boy...