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Showing posts with the label self esteem

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...

Hey! You're More Beautiful Than You Think

Lord knows, I've done it enough.  Look in the mirror and see the wrinkles under my eyes, like scratches in sand; the chin no longer quite as firm as before; the parentheses on either side of my nose. But a new Dove commercial says a friend would describe me very differently.  According to Tanzina Vega at The New York Times, women describe their faces much more unattractively than their friends would. This was figured out when an artist asked women to describe themselves while he sketched a face that matched what they said. Then he would ask a friend to do the same about that particular women.  Every time the friend's description was much more attractive than the woman's herself. What does this say about us?  Vega ruminated about it, to, but when we're constantly exposed to women who eat one meal a month (as Charlie Sheen once said about a girlfriend before he was blown off "Two and a Half Men"), have plastic surgery for rounder butts, o...