Praise: Part One – Unintended Consequences

A boy comes home from school with a certificate that his teacher had awarded him.
“What was it for?” asks his mother.
“Having a good idea and sharing it,” he replies.
“So, what was the good idea?”
“I don’t know!”

That is a true story.
Rewards, awards, certificates and verbal praise are given freely to children.
In some schools, teachers have been instructed to give every child an award each term – regardless of worth.

Of course, children need support and encouragement and to feel good about themselves.
But praise without thought or value can backfire and be negative in the long term.

An overabundance of rewards and praise has strange effects on not just children, but all of us. The many recent studies in this field have revealed unseen effects of too much, or misplaced praise.

Suppose you give praise to a child to reinforce behaviour such as putting away the things they have been using. The person who benefits from this praise is not the child.

This sort of praise is a way of controlling the child and making your own life easier – referred to as … ‘sugar coated control.’ It is working on the child to get them to behave in a particular way.

This appears to be sensible and effective until you look at long term effects.

Children can come to feel manipulated by this praise, even if they can’t say why.
It has been discovered that rather than helping children feel successful and positive about themselves, praise can actually make them more dependent on us.

When you tell a child…

“Well done” or “I really like the way you drew that tree” you are handing down an evaluation, or judgment,rather than allowing them to form their ownjudgments.

University of Florida studies showed that students who are praised lavishly by their teachers become more tentative in their responses, back off as soon as an adult disagrees with them, and are less likely to persist with difficult tasks, or share ideas with other students.

There is a great danger of creating a vicious circle here.
The more praise we give, the more is needed and so we give more.

Where will it end?
In the recent past, some large secondary schools in the UK were spending up to £30 000 a year on rewards to cut truancy and keep order in classrooms.

Rewards included TV’s, iPods, laptops and flights abroad for turning up on time and working hard.

As recently as 2023 a school was giving out vouchers in daily prize draws. They were aimed at encouraging good attendance.

As well as a growing number of adults whose constant cry is ‘What’s in it for me?’ there are more and more adults who demand constant praise for just turning up to do the work they are paid to do.

60 years ago,at the end of the year assembly, an eleven-year-old girl was given her one and only certificate from school.

She received this because she had never been absent from the day she first started school.

While she happily accepted it, she never regarded it as an exceptional achievement and certainly hadn’t expected to get any acknowledgment for simply going to school.