Praise your kids in the right manner

When it comes to praising your kids, quality may actually matter more over the quantity. Along with what kind of praises are showered over your children, the way these praises are communicated are of key importance.

It is often a dilemma for the parents as to what's the most appropriate way to praise their children. How much should the kids be praised? How to praise them? What will communicate to the children that something they did was great and something else was not that great? And while doing all this also keep in mind that as parents our comments should help boost the child's self-esteem.

   

Too much or too little of anything is bad and same goes for the praises we offer our kids. Praising your child without much attention or overpraising is likely to backfire. It may lead to children internalising feelings that they are supposed to live up to a standard at all times thus pressurising the child. It may also lead to children becoming praise hungry and always competing with siblings or peers. Sincerity in what you are saying to your child is crucial as a casual or misplaced praise can raise the child's doubts over himself and his abilities.

Praises can be offered verbally, for e.g., That is a good piece of drawing by you OR by means of something tangible, i.e., physical praises, for e.g., Your daughter gets the best dressed character in a fancy dress competition. You take her out for an ice-cream to celebrate her achievement.

We as parents can follow a few basic guidelines while praising our children:

* Be specific: So for example your son has drawn a landscape painting. Instead of merely saying that's a good drawing, you can go further and choose to say 'The use of that colour blue is done very nicely.' This will suggest to the child that you have truly paid attention to his work and will give him a sense of accomplishment.

* Acknowledge any new accomplishment: Your child learns to bake a cup cake and gets you taste it. Now the cupcake happens to be too sweet for your taste buds. What would you do? You can tell your child how the cupcake is too sweet and better luck next time. Or you can say something like, 'Well done, you baked a yummy cupcake and encourage him /her to follow their passions. Remember that the first time of learning something new is not necessarily the time that you need to be critical with your children.

* Praise the effort: It is important that along with praising our children for their achievements we also praise them for their efforts. In today's competitive world we as parents often become too competitive and stress only on coming first, rather being the best. However, it's important to communicate to the children, that what's more important is to try new things, keep trying, and take pride in our efforts however big or small.

*Encourage new activities: Praise your child while they are learning something new for e.g., learning to ride a bicycle, and encourage them to learn from their mistakes. Yes, it's ok to make mistakes so don't be too harsh with your child when he falls off that bicycle the first time, rather tell him that everybody does, so that he keeps trying till he succeeds.

*Don't praise the obvious: Try to avoid praising the child's attributes. Too much of praises like "You are so smart, beautiful, talented" is bound to make the children either over confident of themselves and thus face problems in later life. An excess of such comments may also make the child feel that these are empty comments and you as a parent don't really mean anything by it.

To conclude it can be said that praising is all about telling our children that we see and we recognise all their efforts and all their work and all their struggles to be better.  Therefore to praise in a meaningful way, we need to set aside time to observe and to watch and know our children. We can’t praise what we don’t see.

(Article first published in Evescape: October 2013)