and social relationships. A continuing problem for those of us who try to help people change and thus lead happier lives is that a good but relatively complex idea, if taken up enthusiastically but uncritically by people seeking fame and fortune, becomes oversimplified and is applied lavishly without any careful thought. The Freudian psychoanalytic idea that sexual repression can lead in complex ways to neurotic misery, when taken up enthusiastically and uncritically by advocates of free love, became the source of fame and wealth for a few and the source of great misery for many, with an immense increase in the number of people suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. Similarly the idea that children should be praised for right responses was linked to the idea that adults should treat children with respect, and together they were turned into one oversimplified notion called ‘self-esteem’. A person was deemed to have, or not to have, self-esteem, in the same way that a person might have, or not have, a car. Or a person was deemed to have high or low self-esteem, in the same way that a car might have a nearly full or nearly empty petrol tank. What followed was competition between therapists in a scramble to win fame and fortune out of ‘self-esteem’ and its spin-offs, like ‘the inner child’. In the USA, where self-confidence is usually ranked as the highest virtue (being sure that God is actively engaged in supervising your welfare is a mark of supreme self-confidence), parents began praising their children as enthusiastically and uncritically as they used to beat them.
Fashions have their day. Now some psychologists in the USA are saying that too much praise lowers children’s motivation and can turn them into ‘praise junkies’. Nikki Sheehan, writing in the parents section of the Guardian, said:
Dr Ron Taffel, author of Nurturing Good Children Now, described watching children sledding in Central Park. ‘Their parents were screaming, “Great job! Phenomenal sledding! That’s the best I’ve ever seen,’ “said Taffel in the New York Times. As he points out, the children were being praised for obeying the laws of gravity. ‘It cheapens the praise, and children may become dependent.’
Lilian Katz, from the University of Illinois, claims that saying, ‘good painting’ will keep children at task while you are watching, but, once adult attention is withdrawn, many lose interest in the task. She believes that demotivation may occur as the child’s focus moves from enjoyment of the task in hand to the search for more praise: the more we reward, the more likely the child is to lose intrinsic interest in whatever they were doing to get the reward…
Research in the classroom by Mary Bud Rowe, at the University of Florida, found that students who were praised lavishly were more hesitant in their responses, less likely to persist with difficult tasks and did not share their ideas with fellow students. Creativity may also be affected as they take fewer risks with their work.
One explanation for the loss of confidence and motivation is that over-praised children feel under pressure to keep it up. ‘What kids need is unconditional support,’ avers Alfie Kohn, author of Hooked on Praise. ‘That’s not just different from praise - it’s the opposite of praise. “Good job!” is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops.’ Kohn suggests instead that a simple, evaluation-free description of what the child is doing tells them that you have noticed, and lets them take pride in their actions.30
Unconditional support means that the parent is on the child’s side even when the child get things wrong. Occasionally the parent does praise, but, in deciding when to do this, the parent discriminates between what the child is well capable of doing and what requires some special, new effort by the child. Just as a parent needs to separate the act from the actor in correcting the child (‘That was a bad thing you did’, instead of ‘You are a bad child’) so the parent needs to separate the act from the actor in praising the child. ‘That was a clever thing you did’ allows the child to conceive of cleverness as a choice of how to behave, say, cleverly or stupidly, whereas ‘You are a clever child’ could lead the child to make one of three unhelpful assumptions. The child could overestimate his innate ability and thus come to feel that he need not try to make an effort in anything he does; he could doubt that he is as clever as his parent says he is because he doubts the veracity of his parent’s praise, and so come to feel that he is an impostor who will one day be found out; he could worry that he might not always be able to demonstrate his cleverness as his parent expects, and so come to feel that he will often disappoint his parent.
Life is never as simple as an examination with mutually exclusive right and wrong answers. Most of the things we do are both right and wrong. Everything we do has good and bad consequences. Parents need to think carefully about what they should praise in a child’s behaviour and when and where they should offer praise.
What an adult chooses to praise in a child’s behaviour reveals as much about the adult as it does about the child. Here is a fictional incident which has the hallmarks of being taken from real life. Anna is the protagonist in Sarah Harris’s novel Closure, which is about a group of middle-class thirty-year-olds in London in the 1990s. Roo is Anna’s long-time friend.
Anna agreed to drive over to Roo’s house, although she was not in the mood for Roo’s five-year-old daughter, Daisy, who, last week, had laughed at Anna’s shoes.
‘They’re ridiculous,’ she had said, as if trying out a new word for size. ‘Mummy says you dress like you’re a teenager and if you leave it much longer you won’t have any children.’ She had paused, as if to allow Anna to reflect on her words, before saying, with horrified indignation, ‘Why is your hair all straggly?’
Roo had praised Daisy for the proper use of the word ‘straggly’.31
Closure is not a deep psychological novel but Sarah Harris does show how her heroine Anna is still struggling with the questions of who she is and to what degree she should value and accept herself. A five-year-old child could threaten her with annihilation. She had tried to deny her fear by indulging herself in foolish, romantic fantasies about a man, a radio agony uncle, whom her commonsense should have told her was a poseur.
Sexual activity and sexual fantasies are an extremely popular defence against the fear of annihilation, but they are a defence which wounds us because in childhood our experiences relating to our sexuality gave us much that we had to deny.
I have often felt envious of women younger than myself, simply because they were born, as I see it, into an easier age than I was. I envied the young girls of the sixties who did not have to struggle, and fail, as I did, with the inappropriate and sophisticated clothes of the fifties. I envied the choices which the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies gave to young women. Yet, as I watch what happens to girls and women nowadays, even the educated women who handle work, children, husbands and lovers with such flair and competence, I can see that the same sacrifices are demanded of girls as have always been demanded if they are to join the group called women. Boys too are still sent down a path which leads to a truncated, inadequate manhood, the man denying so much of himself that he becomes much less than he might have been.
Life in the second half of the twentieth century offered people in the developed world many more opportunities for satisfaction, enjoyment and progress, yet from 1946 there was a steady rise in the number of young people killing themselves. In recent years the suicide rate for young men has continued to rise while that for young women has levelled out.
The problem is that boys are still being educated for a society which no longer exists. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century created a society in which a young man who conformed to society’s rules had a place. He could secure an apprenticeship in an industry and rise steadily through the ranks. If better educated, he could join a bank, go into trade, or join a profession. Whichever, he had a job for life and the respect of the society that had created a place for him. The end of the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 ended the old certainties.