A compliment that made a boy respect his father less

Cline and Fay describe watching a father in a park with his young son, who is flying a model airplane. The plane keeps crashing, and each flight gets shorter than the last. Every time it hits the ground, the father calls out, with obviously manufactured enthusiasm, what a great flight. Watching the boy's face, the authors could see exactly what he was thinking: is Dad blind, is Dad lying, doesn't Dad know what a good flight actually looks like, does Dad think I'm blind too.

This is the trap of ordinary praise, and Cline and Fay argue that false praise like this almost always leads to disrespect rather than confidence, because it doesn't match what the child already knows to be true. Effective praise, they say, depends on two things being in place: a decent relationship between the person praising and the person being praised, and the praiser actually being in a position to judge the thing fairly. When either is missing, praise falls flat or backfires.

Compare two versions of the same exchange over a child's painting. In one, an adult says what a beautiful painting, the child says I don't think so, the adult asks why not, the child points out the nose is too big, and the adult disagrees, at which point the two of them are suddenly arguing about whose judgment of the painting is correct. In the other version, the adult simply asks, with a warm and curious voice, what do you think of your picture. The child says the nose is too big. The adult asks how that happened. The child explains, and then adds that it's going to turn out fine because they're practicing noses and getting better. No argument occurs, because nobody's judgment was ever put up against the child's own.

Encouragement works because it assumes children can judge their own output and always accepts that judgment, even when it's harsher than an adult would offer. This, alongside feeling unconditionally loved and feeling genuinely capable through what they've watched modeled, forms one of what Cline and Fay call the three legs of a child's self-concept. Weaken any one leg, including this one, and the whole table wobbles, no matter how much praise gets piled on top of it.

Before you offer your usual burst of praise, try asking your child what they think of what they just did, and then actually let their answer stand, even if it's more critical than you expected. Resist the pull to talk them out of a harsh self-judgment; instead, follow up with a genuinely curious question about how it happened or what they might try differently next time. Keep your strongest, most enthusiastic praise for moments when you can honestly back your own judgment of the work. What tends to shift, once you do this consistently, is that your child starts trusting their own read on their efforts, rather than performing for a reaction from you.