6 ms·

I grew up in a house where abundant praise was given for completion of the most mundane of tasks. Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause that

by edw519 14y ago

I grew up in a house where abundant praise was given for completion of the most mundane of tasks. Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause that absolved me of any wrongdoing. Exactly the opposite of my experience. My father never praised us. Ever. My mother rarely did. We were routinely punished for anything less than perfection: homework, grades, even washing the dishes (Do them again! Not clean enough!) And yet they must have been doing something else so subtly that none of us ever noticed. Everything about the way they treated us led each of us to believe that we could accomplish anything, as long as we worked hard enough and didn't expect anything given to us. We were special but not entitled. I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential. There both gone now and I think about them every day. Even more so after posts like this one. Thank you, OP.

marknutter 14y ago
I remember hearing recently (I think it was from the book Outliers) that children whose parents tell them their achievements are due to natural ability fair far worse in life than children whose parents tell them their achievements are the result of hard work.
- gcheong 14y ago
  Carol Dweck developed the theory called mindset that shows that how children are praised (for effort, or intelligence) can determine how they approach problems, how long they persist at trying to solve problems, and even whether they will tend to choose to solve new, harder problems or choose to re-solve ones they already know. http://mindsetonline.com/ http://mindsetonline.com/
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  This was probably taken from the work of Carol Dweck[0]. I recently read a book she wrote (Mindset[1]) that was recommended on a thread here. The book title sounds like some corny self-help book, and honestly some of the stories in it seemed a bit sappy to me, but I think the underlying idea is solid and I definitely see it myself a lot in my day to day life (full disclosure: recovering fixed mindset person :)). The basic premise is there are two types of mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Those with the fixed mindset are those that believe that intelligence, ability, etc.. is basically fixed. You have some certain amount and that's that. The growth mindset believes the general range of these things may be strongly influenced ('fixed') by things like genetics, life circumstances, etc... but improvement within this range is definitely possible and the key to that is hard work and honest assessment of where you are relative to where you want to be. This relates to the achievement vs. hard work thing because she claims children who are praised for 'being smart' or 'being good at X' tend to gravitate towards the fixed mindset (i.e. 'I get praised because I am smart, I am smart because I can do X well/X comes easily to me, if something doesn't come easily to me it must mean I am not smart/talented'). This causes them to not put in effort when the going gets tough and in fact to avoid challenges because if they fail they view it as a judgement on their core self/competency (not simply an indication of an area for growth). The growth mindset folks (children praised for doing well because they worked hard at it as opposed to some natural talent or 'smarts') tend to seek challenges as they view them as the engine of growth/improvement. Using these frameworks as a lens on which to view human behavior can be interesting. I have definitely seen both mindsets in action (in myself and others). I definitely , consciously, try to stay in a growth mindset now, but I think our culture heavily pushes a fixed mindset where someone either has 'it' or they don't, they are smart or they are not, they are talented or they are not. We prefer the 'instant success due to massive talent/smarts' story over the 'worked their ass off for years to build amazing talent and then succeeded due to that hard work'. The book Talent Is Overrated[2] also touches on this and points out most people that we generally consider 'naturals' at things, if you interview them/study them/look at their past, all have something in common, a tremendous amount of effort in learning/training, above and beyond what most people put in. This also veers towards the 10,000 hour theory of Anders Ericsson[3] EDIT: Fixed a bunch typos/misspelling I saw in re-reading. Originally typed in IE with no spell check. Area for improvement: spelling. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck [1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/0345472322/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357405796&sr=8-1&keywords=mindset+the+new+psychology+of+success http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842948/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357406433&sr=1-1&keywords=talent+is+overrated http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson
  - ScottBurson 14y ago
    The problem I have with this is that in real life, it doesn't matter how hard you work on something; what matters is the quality of the result. While I understand that praising kids for being smart causes problems, as Dweck suggests, I'm concerned that the approach she recommends will encourage the belief, already widespread, that effort alone is deserving of reward. This belief encourages struggle and mediocrity.
    - rdtsc 14y ago
      I think the hidden assumption is that "hard work" is also applied to learning not just pure rote doubling of effort to pick twice as many apples in a day. Rather the key is "persistence" and even more saw "persistence in learning". This can make a huge difference if a breakthrough occurs on a meta-level and eventually you get better at learning, by repeatedly trying to learn something, you learn how to learn better, then learning anything is easier.
    - hosh 14y ago
      How is the quality of results what matters? When you focus exclusively on the quality of results, you stop growing. It's not about "effort", so much as the deliberateness in which you go about things. (The word "effort" is weighed down with a number of baggage and connotation). Or to put in different words, how mindful are you as you are doing whatever it is you are doing?
    - ryanmolden 14y ago
      Yes, I likely oversimplified her message, sorry. She never advocates praising effort in isolation from outcome. She advocates praising effort as the key factor in successful outcomes, and analyzing failures to understand what caused them and how you can grow your skillset to avoid them in the future. Her concern with a fixed mindset is that a loss/setback simply means someone else was better/smarter than you and there isn't much you can do about it. That or, to protect your ego, perhaps they cheated or the judges liked them better, or they were born to wealthy parents and had advantages you didn't or whatever other excuse people come up to explain a loss when they feel a loss labels them as a loser for all time. If you have the mindset that you can learn/improve from these experiences then a loss/failure isn't something to be hidden in shame, but something to be analyzed and used to make yourself better. She has a story about a parent whose daughter was competing in gymnastics and at the local level always did pretty well without much practice. She went to a regional meet and did well relative to her skills but was outperformed by others and ended up not winning any medals/ribbons. On the way home the dad basically told her she didn't win because she didn't deserve to, i.e. the other competitors had put in more practice than she had and it showed in their performance. He didn't say 'they beat you because they are more talented' or 'they beat you because they are superior athletes', those are the kinds of statements that imply there is some core quality that the winners had that his daughter didn't have and thus she could never be better than them. Instead he basically said 'they buckled down and put in the long hours, if you did that you would have had a better chance'. Dweck pointed out that he wasn't saying this to be a dick, and of course feedback like this much be couched correctly for people to hear it, but he wanted his daughter to know that to compete you have to put in the effort to learn/practice. If others put in more effort than you then they deserve to win, all else being equal. The story ended with her doubling down on her effort/practice (since she realized her local competitors which she could easily beat were only indicative of her talent vis-a-vis them, not some absolute barometer for her skills) and going on to compete successfully at a national level. You are right that if I try and deliver some project at work and it fails I can't tell my boss 'but I tried really hard!' :) That said, if you look at most successful projects/people you see a LOT of hard work at some point to deliver on things. Some people make it look easy, but that is likely because they have done all the hard work years earlier building their skillsets. If they have done more of that than you then it shouldn't be surprising that their skills seem so superior to yours. They weren't born being masters of anything (hell, babies can't even manage to not shit themselves for a few years :)), but they put in time and effort even when there was little/no reward for that investment (in the immediate here and now, obviously there is reward later when you are able to do seemingly super-human things easily).
- tdfx 14y ago
  I read a very interesting question on Quora that relates to this: http://www.quora.com/Psychology/Why-are-some-people-more-resilient-than-others http://www.quora.com/Psychology/Why-are-some-people-more-res... "People can also learn these self-theories from the kind of praise they receive (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Ironically, when students are praised for their intelligence, they move toward a ﬁxed theory. Far from raising their self-esteem, this praise makes them challenge-avoidant and vulnerable, such that when they hit obstacles their conﬁdence, enjoyment, and performance decline. When students are praised for their effort or strategies (their process), they instead take on a more malleable theory— they are eager to learn and highly resilient in the face of difﬁculty."
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    And when they are not praised at all, they grow up grumpy and miserable.
dos1 14y ago
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential. This is the best line I've read in a comment here in some time. I had this same epiphany once I went to college. My father and I had never really gotten along. I had tremendous respect for him (and a mild bit of fear), but I never really "liked" him. He preached personal responsibility and hard work. Over and over. When I was in karate as a 10 year old, we would work in the basement for hours every night. Perfecting every move, learning all the forms. He would sit there and critique. I hated it. I won a lot of trophies in competitions as a child, but I never cared. There was no praise for winning. I hated the constant practice, the drilling, the ceaseless work. As I got older I realized the message he instilled. If you want to excel at something, this is what it takes. This is the amount of effort required to be competitive. And you do things because you want to be good at them, not because someone will praise you for it. Every day of my life I'm glad he taught me that lesson. I get so tired of self-entitled whiners like the author of this article. It's not fair of course, the author never had a parent that taught them what hard work and success really looks like. The real shame is that he's probably more the rule than the exception these days.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  This is suboptimal. You ought to have some internal motivation. Someone screaming at you isn't a good way to motivate yourself. Should probably be illegal.
  - shantanubala 14y ago
    What's the optimal solution, and what is "internal motivation" except a sense of discipline?
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Internal motivation is doing things that you like. And then: doing things that you don't really like that much, but that allow you to progress in doing things that you do really like. This is the optimal solution.
bitcartel 14y ago
Low fertility rates, high cost of child-rearing, families starting later... it's probably quite normal for parents to give their only child the Royal treatment.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
"I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential." That's a pity. You should not do that. Please don't do that to your children or they will become miserable and angry too, and their children too, and so on. This is an awful way to live a life. A man is born for happiness like a bird for flight. Sacrificing large part of your life to misery for the questionable future success is a very bad deal. Not suggesting anyone take it.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > That's a pity. You should not do that. I agree that is rather harsh. Children most of all need love and affection that is a solid base for everything else to grow on. The response to avoid excessive pointless praises for every simple task it not constant harshness and lack of affection. There is a balance, but rather it is praise for hard work. My parents never told me I was gifted or smart instead they always praised my hard work, and taught by example -- for example, never to half-ass a job, always try to do the best you can. In the end I don't think I am gifted or better than anyone by some genetic fluke or something. However I am persistent and will never give up until I reach my goals.
  - hosh 14y ago
    Praise is not the same as love and affection. Praise is an expression, and it may or may not express love. Love and affection are emotions. It is entirely possible to love and feel affection without expressing it through words, or even actions. As an example: simply paying attention and listening, without having your own thoughts, preconceptions block you from actually receiving what that other person is saying. Love is a state of being, not something you do. So yes, children need love and affection; that may or may not have anything to do with praise. PS. It is far easier to tackle challenges when you love yourself, and have fun with what you are doing. Failures don't feel like the end of the world, and you can acknowledge and examine them with the same neutrality as you would with successes. At that point, it is no longer a matter of success or failure -- you feel loved anyways. There's this big fallacy that desire and punishment are necessary, otherwise someone will become lazy, apathetic, and won't have the "drive". This is a big fat lie. The lie comes from the notion of having to trade success for affection.
fatjokes 14y ago
Asian?
rjzzleep 14y ago
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential. I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet. For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth. One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.
latinohere 14y ago
My parents never forced me to do my hw. I never did chores. Almost no praise and no punishment. All in all they were pretty hands-off. I'm from a low income family and lived in a crappy neighborhood in NYC, went to some crappy schools. And yet, I managed to get a Bachelors in Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science. I have a very strong work ethic. What worked? Who knows.
brianchu 14y ago
I could not disagree more strongly. I believe that for every one case in which what you experienced is true, there are nine cases in which a childhood that consists of a general lack of praise and constant punishment for lack of perfection results in adults with low self-esteem, low confidence, a lack of discipline, and a general hatred of their parents' culture and of doing the things that they were pushed to do. I think what the article's author posted and your experience are two extremes of parenting. It just so happened that the article shows the "failure case" of excessive and unmerited praise; there are undoubtedly many well-adjusted adults who were constantly praised for mundane tasks and told they would achieve great things as a child, just like there are adults who turned out to be well-adjusted despite the other extreme of parenting. Like others have stated here, I believe that the right balance is a childhood in which parents praise effort and not talent and where the enforcement of discipline is firm but not rigid.
Tichy 14y ago
I think going against one's feelings in parenting can't be a good thing. Glad it worked out for you, though.

by edw519 14y ago

marknutter 14y ago

I remember hearing recently (I think it was from the book Outliers) that children whose parents tell them their achievements are due to natural ability fair far worse in life than children whose parents tell them their achievements are the result of hard work.

gcheong 14y ago
Carol Dweck developed the theory called mindset that shows that how children are praised (for effort, or intelligence) can determine how they approach problems, how long they persist at trying to solve problems, and even whether they will tend to choose to solve new, harder problems or choose to re-solve ones they already know. http://mindsetonline.com/ http://mindsetonline.com/
ryanmolden 14y ago
This was probably taken from the work of Carol Dweck[0]. I recently read a book she wrote (Mindset[1]) that was recommended on a thread here. The book title sounds like some corny self-help book, and honestly some of the stories in it seemed a bit sappy to me, but I think the underlying idea is solid and I definitely see it myself a lot in my day to day life (full disclosure: recovering fixed mindset person :)). The basic premise is there are two types of mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Those with the fixed mindset are those that believe that intelligence, ability, etc.. is basically fixed. You have some certain amount and that's that. The growth mindset believes the general range of these things may be strongly influenced ('fixed') by things like genetics, life circumstances, etc... but improvement within this range is definitely possible and the key to that is hard work and honest assessment of where you are relative to where you want to be. This relates to the achievement vs. hard work thing because she claims children who are praised for 'being smart' or 'being good at X' tend to gravitate towards the fixed mindset (i.e. 'I get praised because I am smart, I am smart because I can do X well/X comes easily to me, if something doesn't come easily to me it must mean I am not smart/talented'). This causes them to not put in effort when the going gets tough and in fact to avoid challenges because if they fail they view it as a judgement on their core self/competency (not simply an indication of an area for growth). The growth mindset folks (children praised for doing well because they worked hard at it as opposed to some natural talent or 'smarts') tend to seek challenges as they view them as the engine of growth/improvement. Using these frameworks as a lens on which to view human behavior can be interesting. I have definitely seen both mindsets in action (in myself and others). I definitely , consciously, try to stay in a growth mindset now, but I think our culture heavily pushes a fixed mindset where someone either has 'it' or they don't, they are smart or they are not, they are talented or they are not. We prefer the 'instant success due to massive talent/smarts' story over the 'worked their ass off for years to build amazing talent and then succeeded due to that hard work'. The book Talent Is Overrated[2] also touches on this and points out most people that we generally consider 'naturals' at things, if you interview them/study them/look at their past, all have something in common, a tremendous amount of effort in learning/training, above and beyond what most people put in. This also veers towards the 10,000 hour theory of Anders Ericsson[3] EDIT: Fixed a bunch typos/misspelling I saw in re-reading. Originally typed in IE with no spell check. Area for improvement: spelling. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck [1] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/0345472322/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357405796&sr=8-1&keywords=mindset+the+new+psychology+of+success http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842948/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357406433&sr=1-1&keywords=talent+is+overrated http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Anders_Ericsson
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  The problem I have with this is that in real life, it doesn't matter how hard you work on something; what matters is the quality of the result. While I understand that praising kids for being smart causes problems, as Dweck suggests, I'm concerned that the approach she recommends will encourage the belief, already widespread, that effort alone is deserving of reward. This belief encourages struggle and mediocrity.
  - rdtsc 14y ago
    I think the hidden assumption is that "hard work" is also applied to learning not just pure rote doubling of effort to pick twice as many apples in a day. Rather the key is "persistence" and even more saw "persistence in learning". This can make a huge difference if a breakthrough occurs on a meta-level and eventually you get better at learning, by repeatedly trying to learn something, you learn how to learn better, then learning anything is easier.
  - hosh 14y ago
    How is the quality of results what matters? When you focus exclusively on the quality of results, you stop growing. It's not about "effort", so much as the deliberateness in which you go about things. (The word "effort" is weighed down with a number of baggage and connotation). Or to put in different words, how mindful are you as you are doing whatever it is you are doing?
  - ryanmolden 14y ago
    Yes, I likely oversimplified her message, sorry. She never advocates praising effort in isolation from outcome. She advocates praising effort as the key factor in successful outcomes, and analyzing failures to understand what caused them and how you can grow your skillset to avoid them in the future. Her concern with a fixed mindset is that a loss/setback simply means someone else was better/smarter than you and there isn't much you can do about it. That or, to protect your ego, perhaps they cheated or the judges liked them better, or they were born to wealthy parents and had advantages you didn't or whatever other excuse people come up to explain a loss when they feel a loss labels them as a loser for all time. If you have the mindset that you can learn/improve from these experiences then a loss/failure isn't something to be hidden in shame, but something to be analyzed and used to make yourself better. She has a story about a parent whose daughter was competing in gymnastics and at the local level always did pretty well without much practice. She went to a regional meet and did well relative to her skills but was outperformed by others and ended up not winning any medals/ribbons. On the way home the dad basically told her she didn't win because she didn't deserve to, i.e. the other competitors had put in more practice than she had and it showed in their performance. He didn't say 'they beat you because they are more talented' or 'they beat you because they are superior athletes', those are the kinds of statements that imply there is some core quality that the winners had that his daughter didn't have and thus she could never be better than them. Instead he basically said 'they buckled down and put in the long hours, if you did that you would have had a better chance'. Dweck pointed out that he wasn't saying this to be a dick, and of course feedback like this much be couched correctly for people to hear it, but he wanted his daughter to know that to compete you have to put in the effort to learn/practice. If others put in more effort than you then they deserve to win, all else being equal. The story ended with her doubling down on her effort/practice (since she realized her local competitors which she could easily beat were only indicative of her talent vis-a-vis them, not some absolute barometer for her skills) and going on to compete successfully at a national level. You are right that if I try and deliver some project at work and it fails I can't tell my boss 'but I tried really hard!' :) That said, if you look at most successful projects/people you see a LOT of hard work at some point to deliver on things. Some people make it look easy, but that is likely because they have done all the hard work years earlier building their skillsets. If they have done more of that than you then it shouldn't be surprising that their skills seem so superior to yours. They weren't born being masters of anything (hell, babies can't even manage to not shit themselves for a few years :)), but they put in time and effort even when there was little/no reward for that investment (in the immediate here and now, obviously there is reward later when you are able to do seemingly super-human things easily).
tdfx 14y ago
I read a very interesting question on Quora that relates to this: http://www.quora.com/Psychology/Why-are-some-people-more-resilient-than-others http://www.quora.com/Psychology/Why-are-some-people-more-res... "People can also learn these self-theories from the kind of praise they receive (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Ironically, when students are praised for their intelligence, they move toward a ﬁxed theory. Far from raising their self-esteem, this praise makes them challenge-avoidant and vulnerable, such that when they hit obstacles their conﬁdence, enjoyment, and performance decline. When students are praised for their effort or strategies (their process), they instead take on a more malleable theory— they are eager to learn and highly resilient in the face of difﬁculty."
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  And when they are not praised at all, they grow up grumpy and miserable.

dos1 14y ago

> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential. This is the best line I've read in a comment here in some time. I had this same epiphany once I went to college. My father and I had never really gotten along. I had tremendous respect for him (and a mild bit of fear), but I never really "liked" him. He preached personal responsibility and hard work. Over and over. When I was in karate as a 10 year old, we would work in the basement for hours every night. Perfecting every move, learning all the forms. He would sit there and critique. I hated it. I won a lot of trophies in competitions as a child, but I never cared. There was no praise for winning. I hated the constant practice, the drilling, the ceaseless work. As I got older I realized the message he instilled. If you want to excel at something, this is what it takes. This is the amount of effort required to be competitive. And you do things because you want to be good at them, not because someone will praise you for it. Every day of my life I'm glad he taught me that lesson. I get so tired of self-entitled whiners like the author of this article. It's not fair of course, the author never had a parent that taught them what hard work and success really looks like. The real shame is that he's probably more the rule than the exception these days.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
This is suboptimal. You ought to have some internal motivation. Someone screaming at you isn't a good way to motivate yourself. Should probably be illegal.
- shantanubala 14y ago
  What's the optimal solution, and what is "internal motivation" except a sense of discipline?
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    Internal motivation is doing things that you like. And then: doing things that you don't really like that much, but that allow you to progress in doing things that you do really like. This is the optimal solution.

bitcartel 14y ago

Low fertility rates, high cost of child-rearing, families starting later... it's probably quite normal for parents to give their only child the Royal treatment.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

"I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential." That's a pity. You should not do that. Please don't do that to your children or they will become miserable and angry too, and their children too, and so on. This is an awful way to live a life. A man is born for happiness like a bird for flight. Sacrificing large part of your life to misery for the questionable future success is a very bad deal. Not suggesting anyone take it.

rdtsc 14y ago
> That's a pity. You should not do that. I agree that is rather harsh. Children most of all need love and affection that is a solid base for everything else to grow on. The response to avoid excessive pointless praises for every simple task it not constant harshness and lack of affection. There is a balance, but rather it is praise for hard work. My parents never told me I was gifted or smart instead they always praised my hard work, and taught by example -- for example, never to half-ass a job, always try to do the best you can. In the end I don't think I am gifted or better than anyone by some genetic fluke or something. However I am persistent and will never give up until I reach my goals.
- hosh 14y ago
  Praise is not the same as love and affection. Praise is an expression, and it may or may not express love. Love and affection are emotions. It is entirely possible to love and feel affection without expressing it through words, or even actions. As an example: simply paying attention and listening, without having your own thoughts, preconceptions block you from actually receiving what that other person is saying. Love is a state of being, not something you do. So yes, children need love and affection; that may or may not have anything to do with praise. PS. It is far easier to tackle challenges when you love yourself, and have fun with what you are doing. Failures don't feel like the end of the world, and you can acknowledge and examine them with the same neutrality as you would with successes. At that point, it is no longer a matter of success or failure -- you feel loved anyways. There's this big fallacy that desire and punishment are necessary, otherwise someone will become lazy, apathetic, and won't have the "drive". This is a big fat lie. The lie comes from the notion of having to trade success for affection.

fatjokes 14y ago

Asian?

rjzzleep 14y ago

> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential. I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet. For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth. One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.

latinohere 14y ago

My parents never forced me to do my hw. I never did chores. Almost no praise and no punishment. All in all they were pretty hands-off. I'm from a low income family and lived in a crappy neighborhood in NYC, went to some crappy schools. And yet, I managed to get a Bachelors in Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science. I have a very strong work ethic. What worked? Who knows.

brianchu 14y ago

I could not disagree more strongly. I believe that for every one case in which what you experienced is true, there are nine cases in which a childhood that consists of a general lack of praise and constant punishment for lack of perfection results in adults with low self-esteem, low confidence, a lack of discipline, and a general hatred of their parents' culture and of doing the things that they were pushed to do. I think what the article's author posted and your experience are two extremes of parenting. It just so happened that the article shows the "failure case" of excessive and unmerited praise; there are undoubtedly many well-adjusted adults who were constantly praised for mundane tasks and told they would achieve great things as a child, just like there are adults who turned out to be well-adjusted despite the other extreme of parenting. Like others have stated here, I believe that the right balance is a childhood in which parents praise effort and not talent and where the enforcement of discipline is firm but not rigid.

Tichy 14y ago

I think going against one's feelings in parenting can't be a good thing. Glad it worked out for you, though.