When something doesn’t work on the first try, what does your child do? Does she stop and figure out what might work better? Or does she give up or ask for help?

And what do you do, when your child attempts challenging tasks but then struggles? Are you quick to step in to complete the task for him? Do you even avoid letting your child try tasks that might be difficult, because you want to avoid the frustration?

Here’s the thing: everything we know how to do we learned the hard way, through trying and failing and then trying again. That’s really the definition of learning, to figure out something we didn’t know before we started. So when we only let children do things we know they’ll be successful at or when we step in to do things for them once they encounter a setback, we derail the very thing we’re supposed to be all about. We derail learning.

Carol Dweck, the noted expert on children’s motivation and learning, studied fifth grade children’s reactions to tricky math problems. She found that some children acted helplessly and quickly quit trying but that other children seemed to relish the challenge and enjoyed applying their thinking to working out a solution. The two different approaches to hard tasks didn’t seem to depend on what we might call “intelligence.” Kids in both groups were equally smart.

What seemed to matter was children’s expectations for their own learning. Kids who think things should be easy for them and who are praised for getting the right answer to easy questions balk at even trying to work out answers to hard questions. This makes sense: if your belief in your ability depends on always getting the right answer, even trying to answer a hard question has the potential to reveal you’re not so smart as you thought you were. But if your belief in your ability depends on your resourcefulness and persistence and dogged determination to solve problems, then the harder the problem, the smarter you feel.

The question for us, then, is how do fifth graders get this way? What went wrong in their past experience to convince them that trying is dangerous? I may not be able to tell you what happened, precisely, but I can tell you when: in their preschool and early elementary school years. Children form their ideas about themselves and their abilities long before we think they do. And we’re the ones who influence those ideas, for good and for bad.

So take a look at the tasks you let your kids take on. Look at their reaction – and your reaction – to struggle and frustration and failure. Make certain you support effort and persistence. Try not to be too quick to step in to help.

At the same time, avoid praising right answers and easy successes. When children think our opinions of them depend on their always being right, they’ll be less daring in tackling challenging problems. Congratulate your child on a good try. Help him to try again.

Do your children love a challenge? I hope they do.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

A little praise goes a long way.

In fact, a new study found that praise that’s “inflated” actually causes kids to try less. Surprised? Here’s what Dutch researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. 

First, 500 children aged 8 to 13 and their parents were videotaped during play sessions. Parents’ comments about their children’s play was rated as absent (no praise), simple (non-inflated) and excessive (inflated). The taping lasted about five minutes for each families. On average, parents praised their children about six times during those five minutes and one-quarter of their comments (one to two instances per taping session) were inflated.

Counted as inflated were comments like, “You answered very fast!” and “Super good!” Comments rated as simple praise included saying, “That’s a beautiful painting,” and “You did well with that.” The difference between inflated and non-inflated praise was often just the inclusion of a word like “incredible” or “amazing.” An “incredibly beautiful painting” was rated by researchers to be more inflated than just “A beautiful painting.”

The reason for inflating praise seemed clear to the researchers. They had first determined that some of the children lacked confidence. Researchers asked them how confident they usually feel and the children said something along the lines of “not so much.” They then noticed that the parents most likely to use inflated praise were parents of children with low self-esteem. Clearly, parents seemed to be trying to buck up their kids, doing this either consciously or unconsciously.

This didn’t work. The kids were next asked to draw either a simple picture or a complicated one. Children who had self-identified as lacking self-confidence chose to draw the simple picture if their parents had given them inflated praise during the play session. Other un-confident children whose parents had given them simple praise were more likely to choose the more difficult drawing task. (Children who said at the beginning that they have a lot of self-confidence were interested in the difficult task without regard to the sort of praise they had got from their parents.)

So what happened here? According to the researchers, children who were told they performed “incredibly well” seemed to think want to maintain that level of amazingness, and so chose the task that would be easier to be “incredible” on. Inflated praise had the actually encouraged children to play small. Instead of encouraging achievement, too much praise may inhibit it.

Lead researcher, Eddie Brummelman said, “It’s good to become aware of the messages you send to a child – even when the message is well intended, it might have unintended consequences.”

We all want our children to have high self-esteem. We know that children who feel good about themselves do better in school and have more friends. But we can’t just talk our kids into being more confident. Confidence comes from trying hard tasks and feeling good inside.

Give your child real, important tasks to do, tasks that are not too easy but also not excessively difficult. Give advice if it’s needed. And make your praise simple. Smile at your child and say, “I like that!”

When it comes to praise, less is more.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Parenting on the rebound from traditional, autocratic styles, whether it was how we were brought up or how many others we know were, most of us want the opposite for our children. The problem is, the opposite doesn’t serve our children either.

When we react to children’s behavior, we often compensate and go to extremes. For example, if I think my spouse is too hard on our kids, I will compensate for his parenting by being more permissive. He’s doing the same thing and compensating for my permissiveness. The interesting thing is that alone with the kids, neither of us is as tough or as soft as when we are all together.

Our parenting is in a state of compensation. If we don’t want to hit and shame our kids to get them to obey, we may fall victim to praising them to death. “You’re the best”, “You are so smart”, and “Good job” are easy to slip into when our little darlings are tiny and development is taking them along that wondrous trajectory. But this is the time habits start forming. These seemingly harmless expressions of pride we feel when our infants and toddlers are engaging in normally expected behavior can be the slippery slope into empty praise, cynical children, and entitled teens.

We live in the culture of “good jobbing” our children. “Good job” has become the new automatic whenever a child does something at all positive. Therein lies the problem. It is an evaluation, a judgment, a reward. It is conditional on the child doing something pleasing. Harmless when responding to a toddler learning to walk or pile up blocks but detrimental as time goes on when the child comes to either expect the praise, depend on it, demand it, or distrust and doubt it. A child needs concentrated, undisturbed time to discover the attributes of the blocks. “Good jobbing” him distracts him from his work and keeps him focused on his parent’s vigilance.

It also gets parents in the habit of praise leading the parent into a dependency on it and belief that the child requires it to do well. The truth is that many studies have shown that praise actually inhibits a child’s motivation to try harder and accomplish more. Praise is the proverbial carrot that children either reach for and grab (“I’m the best”) or miss (“I’m a loser”) or dismiss and grow cynical about (“I don’t trust you”). Never does it encourage self-evaluation, self-motivation, and self-esteem. That comes from an internal source developed best when a parent neither praises nor criticizes, but acts as a sounding board for whatever the child presents–being there, listening, accepting, encouraging.

Can we trust our children’s development enough to know that they will progress without our praise? Without stickers, gold stars and As in every subject? Praise and rewards foster children who either need it, look for it, and demand it—“Do you like this mommy? Is it good? Are you happy? Aren’t I special?”—or distrust it, dismiss it, or deny it—“What are you talking about? It sucks.”

Be aware of your language, put more thought into your responses, and stay away from the “good jobbing” slippery slope. Pay attention to what will develop your child’s internal moderator—right from the beginning.

Instead of “good job” try:

• Saying nothing; simply watch (most of the time).
• “You can balance on those boards.”
• “I know you can figure that out.”
• “You helped your sister when she needed a hand.”
• “I appreciate your help when I have so much to do.”
• “This is a hard project and I believe you can do it when you put your mind to it.”
• “This is a tough lesson to swallow.”
• “You walked from that chair over to the table!”