"Smart" or "hard working" How should parents praise their children

　　In recent years, under the influence of the concept of positive evaluation education, praise as a positive evaluation has attracted much attention in family education.

Ability and effort are the two most important factors affecting academic performance. Therefore, ability praise (such as "you are so smart") and effort praise (such as "you work hard") are also the most important factors in people's daily life. A commonly used form of praise.

So, should the praise point to the child's intelligence or hard work?

This is an educational question worth pondering.

　　According to a large-scale survey of American mothers, 85% of mothers believe that ability praise can increase children's motivation and self-efficacy.

But in family education, parents often encounter such confusion: why the more you praise your child for being smart, the more afraid the child is of challenging tasks, and the easier it is to give up in the face of failure?

　　In the past 20 years, Professor Carol S. Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University in the United States, has done a large number of psychological experiments, proving that ability praise has an impact on children's cognitive, emotional and behavioral development. A series of negative effects.

Under the cultural background of our country, the author and the research group have further verified the negative impact of ability praise on children's psychological and behavioral development.

　　Competence praise reduces children's interest in the task itself.

Psychologists Randy Sitz and Amy Dresscoll say children are born with an innate desire to learn, and that praise for their ability can only stifle their natural drive and push them to learn rote ways, or produce outright defiance and contempt for authority.

When parents use ability praise to induce children to participate in an activity or develop a certain skill, the praise will become an explicit reason for behavior, and the so-called excessive justification effect occurs, that is, when the external reason for the behavior is very obvious, the internal reason The effect will be greatly reduced.

　　Competence praise can promote children to form bad attributional styles.

Competence praise guides children to attribute their success to competency factors, such as "I get good grades because I'm smart."

However, when these children encounter failures, they also make reverse attributions of ability, such as "I didn't get good grades because I was stupid."

Psychological empirical studies have found that children who attribute failure to ability will show negative self-cognition, negative emotion, and lower levels of persistence in subsequent tasks, accompanied by continuous decline in performance, leading to learned helplessness reaction.

　　Competence praise can shape children's perception of intellectual persistence.

The concept of implicit intelligence refers to children's internal concept of "whether intelligence can be changed", which is divided into the concept of intellectual persistence and the concept of intellectual development.

Among them, children who hold the concept of intelligence persistence think that intelligence is innate and fixed, and children who hold the concept of intelligence development think that intelligence can be developed through their own efforts.

The concept of implicit intelligence is a very important belief system for children, which subtly affects children's behavior.

Psychological research has found that continuous ability praise tends to make children hold a persistent view of intelligence, and they will pay special attention to the judgment of their own abilities to show that they are "smart".

　　Competence praise increases children's self-limitation.

Self-worth theory believes that what humans fear most is not failure, but having to attribute failure to their own low abilities after failure.

To avoid attributing possible failure to their own low abilities, people resort to prepared reasons, which psychologists call "self-limiting."

Competence praise will increase children's self-limitation, often adopting "low effort" self-defense strategies.

　　Since the "ability praise" widely praised by parents may have a series of negative effects on children, how should parents properly implement praise?

　　Praise should be appropriate "quantity" and "degree".

When there is too much praise, its value will be reduced, and its strengthening effect on children will also be weakened, so parents should give their children an appropriate amount of praise.

At the same time, parents should not exaggerate their praise.

If the children obviously do not behave well, but the parents want to give them praise, then on the one hand, such praise will cause psychological pressure on the children, feel that they are not worthy of being praised, and cause uneasiness; The illusion that you are the best, so that you cannot see yourself objectively and rationally.

　　Praise for dealing with "things" and not "people".

The basic principles of praise and criticism are the same, and both should deal with "things" and not "people".

In the process of praise, parents should point to the child's effort or the strategies used in completing the task, rather than the child's own ability and personality traits.

Praise should be as specific as possible. There is less possibility of gaps and conflicts between specific praise and the child's self-evaluation and beliefs, and it is more instructive to the child's development.

　　Praise avoids setting up a competitive situation.

Parents in our country often talk about "other people's children", trying to motivate their children to do better with the exemplary role of their peers.

With the liberalization of the two-child and three-child policies in our country, the number of families with more children continues to increase, and parents often make comparisons among multiple children when implementing praise in the family.

In comparative and competitive situations, children will have a strong sense of insecurity, resistance, and even cannot accept that siblings are better than themselves, which will have an extremely adverse impact on children's growth.

　　Praise should avoid the inference of "low ability".

Parents should emphasize children's efforts in praise, but hard work praise is not always applicable. Parents should use praise carefully in the following situations, including hard work praise: First, when children succeed in simple tasks.

Second, when children try hard and fail.

In such a situation, the positive impact of hard work on children is very limited. Developmental psychology studies have shown that children around the age of 10 can clearly recognize that hard work is not positively related to ability. Low ability cues.