Source: The Independent >> Read Full Article and Comment
Too much praise is bad. Smacking could be good. And lying is a sign of intelligence. So says a controversial new book on raising children. Clint Witchalls reports
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
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Family fortunes: today’s parents’ methods of child-rearing are often polluted by moralistic bias, fads and disproven psychology, the new book claims
My nine-year-old daughter, Abby, came back from art club with a large cardboard box full of the beautiful things she’d made. She slowly unpacked each item to gasps of admiration from me and my wife. We had to turn our backs while Abby unpacked the chef d’oeuvre.
“You can turn around now,” Abby said. On the floor was a magnificent sculpture of an Indian elephant. It was painted red and on its back was a blue howdah, covered in sequins.
“Abby, that’s amazing,” I said. “What a beautiful elephant.”
“What did you expect?” Abby replied.
It wasn’t a cocky: “What did you expect?” and it wasn’t a rhetorical question either. Abby really wanted to know what I expected. After all, had she not always produced great art? Her self-esteem in this particular field is as high as it can go, and I believe, justly so. And that’s great, isn’t it?
Well, not necessarily. According to a book that is taking the US by storm, Nurtureshock: Why Everything We Think About Raising Our Children is Wrong (published in the UK on 4 February), too much self esteem can be a bad thing. The authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, point to research that shows that high self-esteem does not increase a person’s prospects of getting good grades or having a stellar career. People with high self-esteem are no less likely to drink and be violent than their self-doubting peers. In fact, highly aggressive people tend to have high self-esteem.
Praising children can be a poisoned chalice, too. Research at New York City state schools shows that telling kids they’re “smart” all the time makes them anxious and causes them to underperform. You can see the kids thinking: “If I’m so smart, how come I can’t figure out the answer to this question?” which leads to anxiety, which leads to not trying … Continue Reading
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