7 ms·

Some comments after reading the article and the thread as it stands. My kids are in their early thirties now and grew up right in the middle of the "self-estee

Some comments after reading the article and the thread as it stands. My kids are in their early thirties now and grew up right in the middle of the "self-esteem" boom. We jokingly called the grade school they attended "self-esteem central" and this was back in the late 80s, so we (as parents) were very aware of what was happening at the time. I think we knew even then that not everything about it felt quite right. My feeling around the absurdity of the 35 trophies for "trying real hard" at the time was that it diminished the very real accomplishment that actually winning something (for real) entailed. AND, the kids were never fooled. They knew exactly who had really won (as others in the thread have mentioned). So like all of these "reactionary" movements (as defined by a sharp deviation from what came before) they tend to pull too far in the other direction. Most important for me though is the feeling that the movement had the basic idea perfectly right! I think it is hard for non-parents to understand the feeling of helplessness that a parent feels when they send their kids into the mad hopper of public school. You have raised and loved this little being for 5 or so years and now you are sending them to a place where you can mostly only hope that they will not be treated poorly (berated, insulted, hurt physically). So if the self-esteem movement did anything, maybe it raised the bar for the reasonable treatment of kids as fallible human beings that respond better to the carrot than the stick? I think it feels right to me. As parents we are just looking for a safe place for our children to learn stuff. Is it so much to ask that this place actually not suck? As far as raising children with an eye towards "global competition," the argument can be made that there are diabolical ways involving mind-games, insults and cajoling that will breed more cutthroat competitors and that the adults raised this way are better equipped for the "real world". I say have at it. Parents can make that choice too if they want to. But I didn't want that for my kids, period. Make the "real world" the place you want it to be.

lr4444lr 9y ago
The devil does not deserve even the due you're giving it. Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself, but more importantly, praise that is relentlessly unconditional and unearned ignores everything researchers have found in operant conditioning concerning satiation, schedule, individualization, and zone of proximal development.
- tcfunk 9y ago
  All of which are points I carefully take into consideration before saying "Good job!"
- ky3 9y ago
  So many devils, so little time. "Operant conditioning"? For whom and for what purposes are our kids to be satiated, scheduled, individualized, and zoned?
  - scott00 9y ago
    That's your choice, as a parent. You're going to attempt to manipulate the child into certain behaviors whether you think of it in scientific terms or not. Might as well do it effectively.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself When I played rec sports as a kid, we weren't allowed to keep score because it might lead to bad feelings and competitiveness. Not just when we were too young to do it right, but up to around age 15. Everyone involved did keep score of course, we'd all signed up for a competitive sport outside of school. (Or been pushed in by parents, who nevertheless didn't want scorekeeping...) But anyone overheard mentioning the score got an angry lecture, so we had to do it when there were no (adult) witnesses. It didn't take long at all for kids to notice that we were 'protecting' the adults instead of the reverse. Score was still kept, kids were still being bullied to tears over losses, nothing had changed, but the rule worked perfectly at making sure parents and coaches didn't see it happen. I don't think participation ribbons hurt kids, because they have so little impact. At worst, aimless positivity is just a wasted opportunity for something better. But the more controlling side of self-esteem building is creepy and terrible - it has a horrible emphasis on changing kid's lives to allay their parents fears, no matter how unreasonable.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    Sure: using a participation trophy to teach what success feels like (e.g. when you're 3 years old in a gymnastics performance for the first time in front of an audience full of strange parents) has more defensible merits. Using it as an attempt to dispel unpleasant emotions and thereby assault or hamper development of well-adjusted task metacognition is something else entirely.
50CNT 9y ago
I think trophies for trying shows that the self-esteem movement didn't go far enough. Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy. Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy. And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".
le-mark 9y ago
I agree with this assessment. People who are vitriolically opposed to 'participation trophies' miss something very basic in my opinion, and that is, participation is optional. Meaning, you have to show up to get the trophy. This is a subtle distinction I didn't get until raising my own kids. Maybe this is obvious to others, but it was a real "aha" moment to me. To get your kids to act the way you want, you can't just focus on the negative all the time, you have to let them know when they're doing things right. If you just wait for them to screw up then yell at them, you end up doing a lot of yelling, and they're behavior sucks. But when they're sitting at the table eating their dinner, using their fork like they're supposed to, a comment that hey, you're doing a great job right now! really goes a long way in communicating what your expectations are of them. Before I had kids, if I'd heard this, I would think those parents are pandering and dumb. But it really does work.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Then don't lie about what you're praising, make it clear and focused on the actual positive. If you're going to have a ribbon or something, make sure that it's for seeing the task through, for "being there". Not something to try to artificially rival or nearly match 'being the best'.
  - kmonsen 9y ago
    Like most recreational sports like triathlon and marathon have finishing medals. It feels ok when you get it, but clearly people getting these don't think they are winning anything.
- crpatino 9y ago
  The thing that makes that one praise at the table meaningful at all is the fact that there had been dozens of times the kids behaved just as well, or mostly as well, but the parents choose to not make a big deal about it. The same argument works for negative reinforcement as well. The most convincing argument I have heard about avoiding harsh rising of children has nothing to do with the intrinsic rights o kids. Instead, it points out that one day, not that far away, you may find your teenager consuming drugs, or engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse, or commiting petty crime; and if by then you have not left yourself enough room to escalate short of corporal punishment (or not even that) then you might find yourself in a fight that you cannot win a hormone loaded young person that never learned to respect you and surely won't start today. So, I think this has a lot to do with signal to noise ratio. Whether you praise or you demean, the point is to make it rare enough to be noticed when it happens. I did not always do it that way, but I have got better results when I began following that advice.
dkarl 9y ago
the kids were never fooled. They knew exactly who had really won Yep, all that positive reinforcement only taught us not to trust praise. At least, that was my response. Praise just reinforced how I already felt about myself. If I felt I was doing well, praise felt like confirmation, and it felt great. If I didn't feel I had done something to deserve it, praise felt awful, like I had been called out as being especially pathetic. My knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected compliment is still to feel humiliated and angry. I've learned to think twice and sometimes realize, yeah, I did handle that well, or yeah, this is a nice outfit, but I still have that instant of feeling attacked before I control my reaction. I think that's a lesson to learn: you can't erase the difference between success and failure. If you try, you just end up confusing them. A kid who hears praise every time he fucks up learns to associate praise with failure and learns there's no way to deal with failure except to pretend it didn't happen.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  I am also uncomfortable with compliments. About the only praise I can stand now comes with a bonus check attached, because that confirms the [additional] value that person placed on my effort. Even if you're faking that enthusiasm, I still get to spend the money. Otherwise, if you valued my performance at the cost of printing up a certificate on paper that is slightly heavier and more cream-colored than normal copy paper, and with an injection-molded bit of plastic that has an engraved plaque glued to it, I would feel about $25 worth of honored. That crap works on my father, though. He likes everyone to know how great and interesting he is. For me, nothing is worse than getting a compliment when I don't think I deserve one, and if I already think I deserve one, I don't actually need to get any, because I'm already feeling great.
- Evolved 9y ago
  I agree and furthermore I think that excessive praise even when someone is just doing what's expected of them can be harmful. Anecdotal: My boss used to go around praising people in general for just doing their jobs. I was even on the receiving end of so many "have I told you how awesome you are" or "I hope you realize how valuable you are to the operation" canned responses that, although it was nice to hear, it lost its luster eventually. I ended up replying every time he'd do this with a motion of opening a beer can accompanied with a verbal "psshtt" sound and adding in a "thanks for the can of praise." It was meant in jest and he took it in stride and understood it wasn't meant with any malice. I was just poking a little fun at the observations he was making. The point is, when you do it to too many people, too often, and for doing nothing but what's expected of them, it starts to ring hollow eventually. Anecdotal: I observed something about myself which I found peculiar. A friend of a friend on Facebook, whom I observe to have quite intelligent DH4+ responses to comments even if the masses usually come back with a DH0 or DH1 response. I found myself observing his responses to other folks' comments and throwing in my own $.02. I discovered that the quality of my responses was greatly elevated when replying to him, clearly attempting to engage him at his level. This was sometimes rewarded with a 'like' from him, and sometimes not. When receiving a 'like' it resulted in a physiological response from me akin to a very light drug high.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
I'm simply not having children unless I have a reasonable plan for alternatives to age-segregated schooling. The entire system is deeply, fundamentally flawed, and definitively not in the best interest of the child.
- photojosh 9y ago
  I'd be fascinated to see another system that could work at scale. Nor has there been a historical system that was better AFAICT. I do have a few friends who home-school, and that's great if a parent can dedicate a significant amount of time to that. I do applaud your stance. The chance for me to even consider it is long gone. :)

lr4444lr 9y ago

The devil does not deserve even the due you're giving it. Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself, but more importantly, praise that is relentlessly unconditional and unearned ignores everything researchers have found in operant conditioning concerning satiation, schedule, individualization, and zone of proximal development.

tcfunk 9y ago
All of which are points I carefully take into consideration before saying "Good job!"
ky3 9y ago
So many devils, so little time. "Operant conditioning"? For whom and for what purposes are our kids to be satiated, scheduled, individualized, and zoned?
- scott00 9y ago
  That's your choice, as a parent. You're going to attempt to manipulate the child into certain behaviors whether you think of it in scientific terms or not. Might as well do it effectively.
Bartweiss 9y ago
> Imposing a dysfunctional self-concept on children to satisfy the parents' anxiety is at best morally dubious in and of itself When I played rec sports as a kid, we weren't allowed to keep score because it might lead to bad feelings and competitiveness. Not just when we were too young to do it right, but up to around age 15. Everyone involved did keep score of course, we'd all signed up for a competitive sport outside of school. (Or been pushed in by parents, who nevertheless didn't want scorekeeping...) But anyone overheard mentioning the score got an angry lecture, so we had to do it when there were no (adult) witnesses. It didn't take long at all for kids to notice that we were 'protecting' the adults instead of the reverse. Score was still kept, kids were still being bullied to tears over losses, nothing had changed, but the rule worked perfectly at making sure parents and coaches didn't see it happen. I don't think participation ribbons hurt kids, because they have so little impact. At worst, aimless positivity is just a wasted opportunity for something better. But the more controlling side of self-esteem building is creepy and terrible - it has a horrible emphasis on changing kid's lives to allay their parents fears, no matter how unreasonable.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Sure: using a participation trophy to teach what success feels like (e.g. when you're 3 years old in a gymnastics performance for the first time in front of an audience full of strange parents) has more defensible merits. Using it as an attempt to dispel unpleasant emotions and thereby assault or hamper development of well-adjusted task metacognition is something else entirely.

50CNT 9y ago

I think trophies for trying shows that the self-esteem movement didn't go far enough. Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy. Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy. And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".

le-mark 9y ago

I agree with this assessment. People who are vitriolically opposed to 'participation trophies' miss something very basic in my opinion, and that is, participation is optional. Meaning, you have to show up to get the trophy. This is a subtle distinction I didn't get until raising my own kids. Maybe this is obvious to others, but it was a real "aha" moment to me. To get your kids to act the way you want, you can't just focus on the negative all the time, you have to let them know when they're doing things right. If you just wait for them to screw up then yell at them, you end up doing a lot of yelling, and they're behavior sucks. But when they're sitting at the table eating their dinner, using their fork like they're supposed to, a comment that hey, you're doing a great job right now! really goes a long way in communicating what your expectations are of them. Before I had kids, if I'd heard this, I would think those parents are pandering and dumb. But it really does work.

mjevans 9y ago
Then don't lie about what you're praising, make it clear and focused on the actual positive. If you're going to have a ribbon or something, make sure that it's for seeing the task through, for "being there". Not something to try to artificially rival or nearly match 'being the best'.
- kmonsen 9y ago
  Like most recreational sports like triathlon and marathon have finishing medals. It feels ok when you get it, but clearly people getting these don't think they are winning anything.
crpatino 9y ago
The thing that makes that one praise at the table meaningful at all is the fact that there had been dozens of times the kids behaved just as well, or mostly as well, but the parents choose to not make a big deal about it. The same argument works for negative reinforcement as well. The most convincing argument I have heard about avoiding harsh rising of children has nothing to do with the intrinsic rights o kids. Instead, it points out that one day, not that far away, you may find your teenager consuming drugs, or engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse, or commiting petty crime; and if by then you have not left yourself enough room to escalate short of corporal punishment (or not even that) then you might find yourself in a fight that you cannot win a hormone loaded young person that never learned to respect you and surely won't start today. So, I think this has a lot to do with signal to noise ratio. Whether you praise or you demean, the point is to make it rare enough to be noticed when it happens. I did not always do it that way, but I have got better results when I began following that advice.

dkarl 9y ago

the kids were never fooled. They knew exactly who had really won Yep, all that positive reinforcement only taught us not to trust praise. At least, that was my response. Praise just reinforced how I already felt about myself. If I felt I was doing well, praise felt like confirmation, and it felt great. If I didn't feel I had done something to deserve it, praise felt awful, like I had been called out as being especially pathetic. My knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected compliment is still to feel humiliated and angry. I've learned to think twice and sometimes realize, yeah, I did handle that well, or yeah, this is a nice outfit, but I still have that instant of feeling attacked before I control my reaction. I think that's a lesson to learn: you can't erase the difference between success and failure. If you try, you just end up confusing them. A kid who hears praise every time he fucks up learns to associate praise with failure and learns there's no way to deal with failure except to pretend it didn't happen.

logfromblammo 9y ago
I am also uncomfortable with compliments. About the only praise I can stand now comes with a bonus check attached, because that confirms the [additional] value that person placed on my effort. Even if you're faking that enthusiasm, I still get to spend the money. Otherwise, if you valued my performance at the cost of printing up a certificate on paper that is slightly heavier and more cream-colored than normal copy paper, and with an injection-molded bit of plastic that has an engraved plaque glued to it, I would feel about $25 worth of honored. That crap works on my father, though. He likes everyone to know how great and interesting he is. For me, nothing is worse than getting a compliment when I don't think I deserve one, and if I already think I deserve one, I don't actually need to get any, because I'm already feeling great.
Evolved 9y ago
I agree and furthermore I think that excessive praise even when someone is just doing what's expected of them can be harmful. Anecdotal: My boss used to go around praising people in general for just doing their jobs. I was even on the receiving end of so many "have I told you how awesome you are" or "I hope you realize how valuable you are to the operation" canned responses that, although it was nice to hear, it lost its luster eventually. I ended up replying every time he'd do this with a motion of opening a beer can accompanied with a verbal "psshtt" sound and adding in a "thanks for the can of praise." It was meant in jest and he took it in stride and understood it wasn't meant with any malice. I was just poking a little fun at the observations he was making. The point is, when you do it to too many people, too often, and for doing nothing but what's expected of them, it starts to ring hollow eventually. Anecdotal: I observed something about myself which I found peculiar. A friend of a friend on Facebook, whom I observe to have quite intelligent DH4+ responses to comments even if the masses usually come back with a DH0 or DH1 response. I found myself observing his responses to other folks' comments and throwing in my own $.02. I discovered that the quality of my responses was greatly elevated when replying to him, clearly attempting to engage him at his level. This was sometimes rewarded with a 'like' from him, and sometimes not. When receiving a 'like' it resulted in a physiological response from me akin to a very light drug high.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

I'm simply not having children unless I have a reasonable plan for alternatives to age-segregated schooling. The entire system is deeply, fundamentally flawed, and definitively not in the best interest of the child.

photojosh 9y ago
I'd be fascinated to see another system that could work at scale. Nor has there been a historical system that was better AFAICT. I do have a few friends who home-school, and that's great if a parent can dedicate a significant amount of time to that. I do applaud your stance. The chance for me to even consider it is long gone. :)