How to Praise Your Kids (4)

You can see them on the sports filed or in a lesson. They are smart kids, but they need constant reminders of their abilities and reassurance that they are OK. I often wonder how come those kids are so good, so smart and so capable, no one else around them can compete with their skills and abilities, yet are still very competitive.

It is because over-praising can backfire.

An analysis of over 150 studies about praise discovered there is a risk in praising. Being praised caused students to be less persistent, to need more eye contact with the teacher and to be less confident when answering a question (you know those uncertain answers that sound like questions). Students who were praised a lot were less independent in their schoolwork.

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How to Praise Your Kids (3)

In 1969, Nathaniel Branden wrote that self-esteem is the single most important factor in people’s life and people need do all they can to achieve positive self-esteem. Later, as it happens sometimes in the psychology field, the self-esteem movement took this idea to the extreme. Every kind of feedback was suddenly considered as criticism and swapped with “rewards” to build self-esteem.

However, this sometimes created over-rewarding and achieved nothing, if not the opposite.

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How to Praise Your Kids (2)

Yesterday, I wrote about Prof. Carol Dweck’s research on the difference between praising effort vs. praising natural talent. I encourage you to read about this research (if you have not already), because it highlights some of the issues with the impact of praising on kids’ self-esteem.

One big question that came out this research was “What can parents and schools do to still build kids’ self-esteem and enhance their performance (possible after the “mistake” of telling the kids how smart they are)?

Dr. Lisa Blackwell, Dweck’s assistant, conducted a research to improve kids’ math scores using the knowledge and information gathered in her work with Dweck.

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How to Praise Your Kids (1)

A few weeks ago, when my 8-year-old daughter Noff brought her “Alien House” from school, we were all very impressed. It was a tall 3-story box house, with lights (because her alien was afraid of the dark) and she had planned and executed her plan at school and had received an A+ for the assignment. The masterpiece stood proudly on top of our fridge for over 3 weeks and during that time, everyone who passed next to it, including her older siblings, praised her and said, “Noff, your alien house is just wonderful”, “Well done”, “You’re so creative” and “You’re so smart”.

What do you think? Did we do the right thing? Should kids be praised? If so, how should kids be praised for best results?

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This is who I am

About a month ago, I was sitting with the kids somewhere and we listened to the radio. Then, a song started playing that sounded like Pink at first, but not quite, so I listened to it closely.

My kids started singing along (the little buggers already knew it, no idea where from) and enjoying the words. Their faces lit up as they sang “It’s alright to be myself” and “It’s OK to be just who I am”.

This got me thinking that if ever there was a song every child and teenager should hear, memorize and sing out loud, it is this one. Self-acceptance is a key message we must all deliver to our kids and bury it deep in their minds, where it cannot ever be taken out. Believing they are OK gives kids the foundation for a confident and happy life, which is our aim as parents, isn’t it?

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Rich Parent, Poor Parent

In many areas of life, we relive the same pattern over and over again, but we do not notice it. Just like riding a bike (the ultimate cliché about automatic habits), we pedal on, completely oblivious to each up and down movement.

Sometimes, circumstances make us take note of our patterns and we start thinking about them. Rarely, we change those ingrained ways of behavior and our life changes as a result, hopefully for the better.

Anthony Robbins compares human beings to thermostats. He says every person has a sense of where they feel comfortable and does many things subconsciously to stay in that place. Sure, everyone knows what would be better, but too good is also uncomfortable, because it does not fit our sense of identity and self worth.

So each of us lives within a certain range of “temperatures”. When it gets to “cold”, we take some action to “warm up”. When it gets to “hot”, we procrastinate for a while and even sabotage our previous efforts, until it is “nice and cozy” again.

One particular area in which this happens to us is our finances.

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Happy to Be Myself

Yesterday, when I drove with my daughter Noff to a “girls’ night out” at her school, she said to me, “I wish I had a baby sister or a baby brother”. That started a conversation about what is best to be – the youngest in the family (she is 8 years old and she is the youngest), the middle child (in our case, this is my 13-year-old son Tsoof) or the eldest (my 20-year-old daughter Eden).

Well, it was very interesting having a conversation like this with an 8-year-old, but she was mature enough to detach herself from her desires, stay in the conversation and examine all the advantages and disadvantages of each position. Here is how the conversation went:

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Make a list: Good Parenting Qualities

Every one of my parent coaching clients needs one important component of parenting – an appreciation of his or her qualities as a parent. They know very well what does not work and where they fall short, but cannot see what they already have that makes them good parents already.

If you think about it, realizing what they have is a problem for most people, but these qualities are the ingredients kids are made of.

My mom was a chef. She was a simple woman with limited academic education but with a lot of wisdom from years of working in big kitchens and making food for thousands of people.

She taught me it is impossible to go to the market with a list. You never know what the weekly specials are. “You do the best with what you have”, she told me. My mom has made an art out of it. If she went to the market and found a fruit of vegetable for next to nothing, she would buy a whole box of it (there were 7 people in our house). She was very proud of herself for making many different dishes with it and freezing some for a season when that fruit or vegetable was not available.

Parenting is the same – you do the best you can with what you have and when I say “what you have”, I mean the mix of who you are, who your kids are and what your circumstances are. In the Be Happy in LIFE parent coaching program, the parents’ skills, abilities and character traits are the basic ingredients for raising wonderful, happy kids.

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Make a list: Rules I Follow

Rules were meant to bring us some confidence in life. People without rules live life as if they have a very short memory span, let’s say 10 minutes, so they cannot make sense of what has happened to them in the past and they cannot predict what might happen to them in the future. If you ask me, this is a scary place to be. Rules form a useful survival mechanism. We do not need to bang our heads against the wall over and over again in order to re-discover it hurts, right?

Rules are limiting if they do not put order in your life and do not give you certainty and stability. Successful people are those who adopt good rules of success and stick to them. If you are looking for success in your life, in any area that is interesting for you, remember that your successful rules of living are the blueprint of that success.

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Eulogy by a Coach

It was Friday and many people gathered at the funeral home. I knew 3 people in the crowd – Nicole and her two kids, Jane and Russell. The hundreds of people in the crowd were all like me, pieces of the puzzle of the life of the person they were saying goodbye to.

I looked at Nicole and the kids. It is just an irony that when you feel you need lots of strength to survive the heartache in your life, worse things happen and change the whole picture. They stood there carrying a burden that I sometimes wonder if time can heal.

The dead are always at peace. It is the other people who remain to suffer their absence. The members of the Lance Family were left to suffer the shame, the guilt and the secret.

A week before, 45-year-old Bryan hung himself in his garage.

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