Occasionally I meet someone else who’s weathered the extravagant praise of a parent, like the writer who published six books of poetry but whose dad brags that she’s won a Guggenheim. That would certainly be miraculous and worth bragging about, because she’s never applied. This kind of praise misconstrues facts “accidentally on purpose,” and a parent has plausible deniability (“I must have misheard you”) until a pattern sets in; though, from their point of view, they really don’t know what the problem is. If praise masquerades as an objective assessment that really conveys the subjective feeling of their love — that boundless, intoxicating feeling — why not sacrifice a few details? Heck, why not sacrifice them all?
A sense of truth — the difference between potential and accomplishment, dream and fact — can be the first casualty in families like this. Growing up I felt like a private eye tracking down unseemly rumors about me, adapting a private eye’s worldview along the way: dark, noirish and suspicious of anyone who claimed to “know” what “happened” about “anything.” I was desperate for praise but paranoid about its ability to manipulate. If you paid me a compliment I’d love you for a second, then squint suspiciously, spit out an imaginary cigar and ask “What do you want, anyway?”
As my girlfriend and I became serious, she spent time with my mom and heard some of the extravagant stories of my childhood. I was concerned if she rolled her eyes any harder she might injure them. Was I really so verbal and wise — and jaded — at age two, after my father died, that I offered my mom irrefutable proof that Santa was a fake? Did I really teach myself to read music at age five? Become a concert-grade pianist without practicing? My girlfriend called bullshit on the highlight reel of my childhood. I didn’t believe half this stuff either, but I believed some of it. That is, I wanted the option in my early 20s of believing it some nights, to lie in bed after a lame day as a secretary and revel in my secret specialness that had not yet been recognized by the world. Doubting the myths of your childhood can be more destabilizing than reading you’re a finalist for a prize you didn’t apply for. Our parents are the historians of our lives. We want to think we have a coherent identity that stretches back to birth, and for the first time I stared back and saw what looked an awful lot like nothing.
Careless praise and exaggerated stories are just a quirky part of growing up in some families, but they can be damaging when they amplify the weird romance kids already have about themselves — the secret identities and magical powers they know they have that adults around them can’t see. I can’t walk five minutes in Prospect Park without seeing some girl spin around, sprinkle herself with magic pixie dust and chant I am the princess, I am the princess, I am the princess. I needed no prompting myself to think I was the next Ron Guidry. I had a natural slider that was unhittable — and uncontrollable — and stayed up each night before I pitched imagining how I’d record 18 straight strikeouts, end the game by myself, and set a record. Onlookers would gasp as they saw a small thing of perfection in a fallen world, or the evening would be a tough slog.
You can guess which one it was.
Our first task as children is to dream ourselves into being and, oddly enough, we pretend to be other people to do that, as if life were a drama filled with larger-than-life characters first glimpsed from afar. We try on identities, just as I assigned one to my dad and was given one by my mom, until we find one that fits, but then face the task of insinuating ourselves into a world that’s indifferent or hostile to us or just more complicated than we imagined. That, of course, is the day childhood starts to end, when we may start to suspect that the praise echoing in our ears sounds an awful lot like lying.
I had no idea there might be a cultural component to all this, that the fantasies families weave around their children might have changed over time, until I was expecting a son myself and read some parenting books. Apparently I grew up at the height of the self-esteem movement, and well-intentioned but excessive praise has harmed a number of children. That, at least, is the claim of Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Nurture Shock. In the first chapter they trace the self-esteem movement back to Nathaniel Branden, who asserted in 1969 that self-esteem is our most important attribute. California even created a self-esteem task force, thinking if it could raise the self-esteem of its citizens, they’d “do everything from lower dependence on welfare to decrease teenage pregnancy.” Soon we were handing out medals to every participant at sporting events and not keeping score. Competition is too competitive —our children’s egos are at stake.
But can self-esteem be pinned on someone like a ribbon? Is it an effect or a cause of competence? Does telling children to feel good about themselves actually make them feel good about themselves? The authors, citing research from Carol Dweck, suggest that constant, overly general praise can have the opposite of the intended effect. Their parenting advice, to treat the mind like a muscle that needs exercise, echoes Seneca, our oldest self-help guru, who insisted that the mind be exercised “day and night.” (All of these writers value effort above all; for Seneca, it is the one way we surpass even the gods.) Constant praise makes children both fragile and risk averse. Since they aren’t praised for their effort, the one thing they control, children take failure as a sign that they were never intelligent to begin with. I got a sense of how far off the deep end we’d gone when an NYU psychiatry professor was trotted out late in the chapter to stress what should have been obvious. Praise, she says, “has to be based on a real thing.”
Well, what has praise been based on? (...)
For the parents interviewed in Nurture Shock, praise is a practical attempt to bolster their children’s confidence before they go out to battle the world, so any amount of affirmation can be justified as long as it works. You might call this the Bluster Theory of Praise. At first it doesn’t sound unreasonable. We all know people whose self-promotion allows them to achieve what their capabilities wouldn’t on their own. The downside — in addition to having irritating children — is that their confidence won’t be based on something that should inspire confidence. They get their way not through their ability but through their aggression and can mistake one thing for the other. It can also start an arms race in which every child is inevitably considered a genius.
A sense of truth — the difference between potential and accomplishment, dream and fact — can be the first casualty in families like this. Growing up I felt like a private eye tracking down unseemly rumors about me, adapting a private eye’s worldview along the way: dark, noirish and suspicious of anyone who claimed to “know” what “happened” about “anything.” I was desperate for praise but paranoid about its ability to manipulate. If you paid me a compliment I’d love you for a second, then squint suspiciously, spit out an imaginary cigar and ask “What do you want, anyway?”As my girlfriend and I became serious, she spent time with my mom and heard some of the extravagant stories of my childhood. I was concerned if she rolled her eyes any harder she might injure them. Was I really so verbal and wise — and jaded — at age two, after my father died, that I offered my mom irrefutable proof that Santa was a fake? Did I really teach myself to read music at age five? Become a concert-grade pianist without practicing? My girlfriend called bullshit on the highlight reel of my childhood. I didn’t believe half this stuff either, but I believed some of it. That is, I wanted the option in my early 20s of believing it some nights, to lie in bed after a lame day as a secretary and revel in my secret specialness that had not yet been recognized by the world. Doubting the myths of your childhood can be more destabilizing than reading you’re a finalist for a prize you didn’t apply for. Our parents are the historians of our lives. We want to think we have a coherent identity that stretches back to birth, and for the first time I stared back and saw what looked an awful lot like nothing.
Careless praise and exaggerated stories are just a quirky part of growing up in some families, but they can be damaging when they amplify the weird romance kids already have about themselves — the secret identities and magical powers they know they have that adults around them can’t see. I can’t walk five minutes in Prospect Park without seeing some girl spin around, sprinkle herself with magic pixie dust and chant I am the princess, I am the princess, I am the princess. I needed no prompting myself to think I was the next Ron Guidry. I had a natural slider that was unhittable — and uncontrollable — and stayed up each night before I pitched imagining how I’d record 18 straight strikeouts, end the game by myself, and set a record. Onlookers would gasp as they saw a small thing of perfection in a fallen world, or the evening would be a tough slog.
You can guess which one it was.
Our first task as children is to dream ourselves into being and, oddly enough, we pretend to be other people to do that, as if life were a drama filled with larger-than-life characters first glimpsed from afar. We try on identities, just as I assigned one to my dad and was given one by my mom, until we find one that fits, but then face the task of insinuating ourselves into a world that’s indifferent or hostile to us or just more complicated than we imagined. That, of course, is the day childhood starts to end, when we may start to suspect that the praise echoing in our ears sounds an awful lot like lying.
I had no idea there might be a cultural component to all this, that the fantasies families weave around their children might have changed over time, until I was expecting a son myself and read some parenting books. Apparently I grew up at the height of the self-esteem movement, and well-intentioned but excessive praise has harmed a number of children. That, at least, is the claim of Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Nurture Shock. In the first chapter they trace the self-esteem movement back to Nathaniel Branden, who asserted in 1969 that self-esteem is our most important attribute. California even created a self-esteem task force, thinking if it could raise the self-esteem of its citizens, they’d “do everything from lower dependence on welfare to decrease teenage pregnancy.” Soon we were handing out medals to every participant at sporting events and not keeping score. Competition is too competitive —our children’s egos are at stake.
But can self-esteem be pinned on someone like a ribbon? Is it an effect or a cause of competence? Does telling children to feel good about themselves actually make them feel good about themselves? The authors, citing research from Carol Dweck, suggest that constant, overly general praise can have the opposite of the intended effect. Their parenting advice, to treat the mind like a muscle that needs exercise, echoes Seneca, our oldest self-help guru, who insisted that the mind be exercised “day and night.” (All of these writers value effort above all; for Seneca, it is the one way we surpass even the gods.) Constant praise makes children both fragile and risk averse. Since they aren’t praised for their effort, the one thing they control, children take failure as a sign that they were never intelligent to begin with. I got a sense of how far off the deep end we’d gone when an NYU psychiatry professor was trotted out late in the chapter to stress what should have been obvious. Praise, she says, “has to be based on a real thing.”
Well, what has praise been based on? (...)
For the parents interviewed in Nurture Shock, praise is a practical attempt to bolster their children’s confidence before they go out to battle the world, so any amount of affirmation can be justified as long as it works. You might call this the Bluster Theory of Praise. At first it doesn’t sound unreasonable. We all know people whose self-promotion allows them to achieve what their capabilities wouldn’t on their own. The downside — in addition to having irritating children — is that their confidence won’t be based on something that should inspire confidence. They get their way not through their ability but through their aggression and can mistake one thing for the other. It can also start an arms race in which every child is inevitably considered a genius.
by Christopher Wall, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
