Do we coddle our children with excessive praise? It’s a question that has attracted a lot of attention lately, especially since teacher David McCullough’s graduation speech (summarized here by Mrs. Cowgirl) made a splash on the web.

It’s also a question raised in the first chapter of “NurtureShock” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, a book that examines whether research backs up a lot of modern parenting methods, and one we’ll be taking a closer look at in series of posts. Short answer? Yes, we’re “praise junkies” – and all of our efforts to boost our children’s self-esteem are actually backfiring, the authors argue:

The presumption is that if a child believes he’s smart (having been told so, repeatedly), he won’t be intimidated by new academic challenges. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research … 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.

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The book describes a study by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck that examined how praise impacted more than 400 New York fifth-graders. After completing a series of easy puzzles, they were praised either for being smart or for showing effort. After that, the kids got to choose either another easy test or a more difficult one, but were told that the harder puzzles would help them learn more. Ultimately, the majority of the kids who were told they were smart took the easy way out with the simpler puzzles, while 90 percent of those praised for their effort chose the more difficult test. “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”

The experiment continued with harder puzzles for the students. All of them failed – but their reactions were quite different. The students who had simply been praised for their intelligence thought they’d failed because they weren’t smart enough; those who had been lauded for their effort figured they simply needed to refocus. Then, after a final round of tests, designed to be as easy as the first ones, students in the “effort” group scored higher than they did at the beginning by 30 percent; the “smart” group actually scored 20 percent worse.

But what of the large body of research on self-esteem? A review of the literature found that most of the studies were scientifically flawed, and those that used reliable measures actually found that self-esteem wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be:

… Having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.)

There’s also the risk that praise becomes the reward, training children to ignore whatever enjoyment they may derive from a task in favor of plaudits. Research has found that “praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy … When they get to college, heavily praised students commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major—they’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.”

Moreover, they often become obsessed with ensuring that others think they’re smart, even going to lengths such as lying and cheating:

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

So should we stop praising our kids altogether? Not necessarily, the authors say. Instead, we need to alter our delivery. Instead of general praise (“You’re so smart, you’re so special”) praise should be specific (“Great job sharing your ball with Jill”). As Dwyer’s research showed, it also helps to praise a child’s effort rather than their innate intelligence.

Praise also needs to be sincere, particularly when a child is older. As young as age 7, children begin to discern whether praise is the real deal. By 12, studies show kids actually interpret lavish praise as a transparent attempt to boost their ego when they’re actually doing poorly.

Our children are able to adapt to this change in thinking easier than parents, the authors say. Parents are the real “praise junkies,” and we indiscriminately lob kind words at our children to make up for working all day, or to take the edge off the pressure we’ve put on them by plunking them in the best schools or five kinds of extracurriculars.

What’s your take on “the inverse power of praise”? Is there such a thing as good or bad praise? And can we actually praise our children too much?