Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

on. You should look at exactly why your children did something well and specifically praise those areas. For example, “You worked so hard preparing for this test,” “You were so focused during the chess match,” or “You were so generous about sharing with your sister.”
    Here’s a revolutionary idea: You don’t need to praise children at all. The best thing you can do is simply highlight what they did. For example, if your toddler just climbed a playground ladder for the first time, just say, “You climbed that ladder by yourself!” with enthusiasm and a smile on your face. Their own smile of pride for accomplishing what was for them an Everest-like challenge lets you know loud and clear that they got the message you wanted them to get, namely, “You did it!” Nothing more needs to be said.
    As another alternative to praise, just ask your children questions. You can find out what your children thought and felt about their achievement; for example, “What enabled you to hit the T-ball?” and “What was most fun about your soccer game?” When you allow your children to decide for themselves how they feel about their accomplishments and enable them to reward themselves for their own good actions, you help them to understand how they weresuccessful and encourage them to own those successes. The result: Your children send and receive their own messages of competence which carries a huge “wallop” when it comes to instilling a sense of competence.
    Or really go out on a limb and don’t say anything at all to your children. As I just mentioned, kids usually know when they “done good.” By letting them come to this realization on their own, they learn to reinforce themselves, and they don’t become praise junkies dependent on you for how they feel about their efforts and accomplishments.
    Here are my challenges to you. First, next time you’re at a playground or a youth sports competition, take note of what parents say to their children. I’ll bet you hear “Good job!” (or some variation) constantly. Next, monitor what you say to your children in the same situations. Then, erase “Good job!” from your vocabulary; we’ve already established how useless it is. Finally, start to praise your children in the healthy ways I just described. When you have broken yourself of the “Good job!” habit, you can then pat yourself on the back and tell yourself, “Good job!”
LET YOUR CHILDREN DO WHAT YOU DO
     
    Children love to contribute, and they love to do adult things. Why? Perhaps they are hardwired to want to do what adults do, the value of which is that it teaches them the skills they will need to survive as adults. Regardless of the reasons, even if they aren’t actually doing anything of consequence, just “being in the game” gives them a great sense of accomplishment and competence. For example, whenever I am carrying or moving something around the house, Catie and Gracie want to help, even if that means just placing their hand on the side of a box I am carrying. From an adult perspective, they aren’t doing anything of consequence because they aren’t bearing any of the weight. But through their eyes, they aredoing the same thing as I and they are helping. For young children, that is a very big deal!
    Perhaps the greatest obstacle to providing these naturally occurring opportunities to develop competence is time, or the lack thereof. It’s just easier and quicker (and often less messy) for you to do it yourself. From your perspective, allowing your children to help you prepare dinner, repair something, clean up the living room, or do the laundry is often more trouble than it’s worth; it takes time, it’s harder, and it may not turn out as well as if you just did it yourself. But for your children, these experiences, and the sense of competence that emerges from them, open a world of possibilities from which they can learn and benefit. When you deprive your children of these opportunities, you are not only preventing them from gaining very positive messages about their competence, but, more detrimentally, you are sending them unhealthy messages and meta-messages. First, you don’t think they are competent, and second, you don’t have time to act in their best interests—both truly harmful messages to be sure.
RESIST THE “EDUCATIONAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX”
     
    There is such emphasis these days on fast-forwarding children’s development to prepare them for the rigors of