EducationWorld is pleased to present this article contributed by
Kumar Sathy, educator and author of Attack of the Chicken Nugget
Man: A National Test Prep Adventure. “You are so good at that!”
you announce to the child, firmly believing that this warm
praise is going to boost the child’s self-esteem and increase
performance. But in study after study, and book after book, the
widely accepted consensus is that complimenting kids can cause
lifelong problems and actually decrease performance, especially
if you are dishing out the wrong type of praise. The compliments
that the majority of us are accustomed to blurting out when a
child does something notable are precisely the type of
compliments that can have unintended negative side effects.
Studies suggest that complimenting children in this way can lead
to a mindset that intelligence and certain admirable qualities
are innate, or fixed (i.e., kids either have them or they
don’t). One study demonstrated that kids who performed well on
an easy test and were told,