I have a cute magnet on my refrigerator that offers 100 different phrases for praising children. I didn't think I was being a good mom just because I had the magnet; I thought I was parenting well because I actually use praise-intentionally, abundantly, frequently, but also (I thought) appropriately.
So, imagine my surprise when I read that "praise is highly detrimental to a perfectionist." First of all, where did I go wrong? How did I push my daughter to become a perfectionist? I am the Queen of "that's good enough" and the first to encourage my daughter to put down her eraser and be satisfied with the shape of her lowercase letter "e" no matter where the curves fall on the Zaner-Bloser dotted lines (parents of second-graders, you recognize the struggle, right?)
But I digress. Berating myself for parenting my daughter toward perfectionism is...well, sort of perfectionistic, huh? Lightbulb moment. This article is not about me, though. I am only involved insofar as what I have learned about how praise can be used to help my children, rather than increase pressure on them. So, back to my reading.
This past summer, my daughter tested and was placed into the gifted program at her school. My heart was full of pride. "How wonderful," I thought. I felt so fortunate that her teachers recognized her intelligence and creativity and I looked forward to new opportunities for her to feel challenged and inspired in elementary school.
Then, somewhere mid-Fall, I began noticing certain behaviors in my seven-year old that I had never seen before: tears over handwriting (darn Zaner-Bloser paper-who hand writes anymore, anyway?), berating herself over a Model Magic panda sculpture gone awry, and deciding to "never read again" when she realized she was not winning the reading contest in her classroom.
Panic ensued in my heart. What was going on in my little girl's emotional world? Bullying was my first thought. (Isn't it every parent's go-to concern now?) "It's my fault" was my next immediate thought. "I've put too much pressure on her." But like I said, I have a staunch "good enough" philosophy when it comes to school work and am a liberal praiser, so I racked my brain for the next possible source of my daughter's angst. Like every other practical adult, I turned to the internet.
Funny how I never researched "parenting gifted children" before I picked up on my child's emotional struggles. Afterall, I thought her gifted abilities could only mean good things for her. Once I began to search for more information about the "big picture" of being gifted, however, I found all sorts of information that seems to explain my daughter-and her struggles this school year-to a "T." In a nutshell, I learned that gifted children often have a "fixed mindset" (Dweck, 2006) or, in other words, engage in rigid, all-or-nothing thought patterns that cause them to feel unsatisfied with "good enough." Dichotomous thinking leads many gifted children-my daughter included--to believe that if they are not the "best," at something, then they must not be good at all, if they can't do something effortlessly and immediately, then they must be dumb, and if they don't score a 100%, then they might as well give up entirely.
The interesting thing for me was that these perfectionistic qualities seemed to come on overnight in my daughter. A normal part of her development and evolving personality, I suppose. It seems like just yesterday that my little-er girl was entirely carefree about wins and losses and scores and sculpture shapes. It's heart-wrenching to see her develop the self-imposed pressures of perfectionism and dichotomous thinking, along with harsh self-criticism.
Thankfully, along with shining the light on what is going on inside my daughter's gifted emotional world, my online research has also guided me toward some key ways that I can help my daughter challenge her fixed mindset and nurture a "growth mindset" instead. Here's where psychologists and the now-notorious "Tiger Mom" agree: when it comes to children, it is more effective to encourage efforts, rather than actual performance or ability.
By fostering a growth mindset, parents help children strive to be the best they can be-rather than the "very best of the best in the whole wide world." A growth mindset frees children from the burden of unachievable goals by emphasizing hard work over final outcome, personal excellence over perfection, and improvement over exactness. Parents and teachers can work together to nurture a growth mindset in children by doing things like:
1. Playing up personal strengths and playing down competitions
2. Providing opportunities to try out new things without the pressure of having to be good at them right away
3. Encouraging practice of new skills
4. Highlighting mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow
5. Focusing on incremental improvements and personal bests over ultimate goals
6. Praising hard work and effort over accomplishment and perfection
7. Emphasizing the journey over the destination
What a lesson! In all my years of being a parent, I have used praise liberally as a way of verbalizing affection, approval, and acceptance. Praise was my go-to tool for building self-esteem and encouraging desirable behavior. It never in a million years occurred to me that praise could take any kind of negative toll on my daughter.
As they say, I guess no good deed goes unpunished. In other clichés appropriate for my learning moment, I won't completely throw the baby out with the bath water; I still believe that praise is still an essential ingredient for parenting. But I have learned an invaluable lesson about re-tooling my use of praise in such a way as to champion hard work, growth, effort and personal achievements and I will take pleasure in helping my daughter enjoy the journey of her childhood over the destination of her gifts.
