Victoria Talwar, one of the world's leading experts on children's lying behavior. Most classic strategies to promote truthfulness just encourage kids to be better liars.Īshley and I went to Montreal to visit the lab and operations of Dr. We may treasure honesty, but the research is clear. Instead of offering praise indiscriminately, Bronson focused on saying things that the kids would perceive as sincere. He says he first became aware of the issue of overpraise as the coach of his son's kindergarten soccer team: "Until that point, I was telling the kids constantly, 'You're great, you're doing well' - even when they were dribbling the wrong way on the field."īut once he read the research on the praise, Bronson says, he decided to change the way he spoke to kids. "When kids fail and all we do is praise them, there's a lot of duplicity in that, and kids begin to hear 'Nothing matters to my parents more than me doing great or me being smart,' and failure becomes almost a taboo subject."īronson expands on the subject of praise - and other child-rearing issues - in his new book NurtureShock, which he co-authored with Ashley Merryman. "Children today hear so much praise that they have decoded its real meaning," he explains to Robert Siegel. A couple of years ago, he wrote an article for New York Magazine on the subject, detailing how praise does not, in fact, lead to self-esteem and achievement as many parents seem to believe. Author Po Bronson believes that kids today hear too much praise - much of it unearned.
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