Perils of over-praise

Don't over-praise your child

Too much of every thing is bad.

Even if you love ice ream, you can’t live eating ice creams alone. Very soon you’ll be fed with it. Same is true with praise also.

Instead of helping, over praising leads to serious side effects. Here's how:

• It makes the child immune against it. It stops working soon.
• Over praising an average performance sends a message to the child that he has reached the limit of best of his ability and no further improvement is needed. It blocks child’s mind and prevents him from exploring further improvement. He doen’t make any efforts to improve further.
• Children doubt your sincerity. They tell themselves, “I haven’t actually done that good. Why are they praising me that much? What’s the matter? What do they want from me?”
• When we praise our child too much in front of others, the child starts identifying that we are doing it for our own show off and not sincerely praising the child for his good works.
• If we always keep praising a child and never discuss about his mistakes, the child doesn’t learn anything from mistakes and keeps repeating them.
• The child makes an ever rosy picture of life in his mind, which is not so in reality. Anything not so rosy disturbs him easily. The child becomes too sensitive to adversities.
• A child who grows up getting too frequent praises and rewards will not have persistence. He ’ll not make any efforts and quit when he doesn’t get praise or rewards.
• When over-praised children go outside home and find people better than them, they realize that their abilities were merely fictions created or exaggerated by their parents. This may depress them and make them suspect your praises.
• Over praised children feel that they are entitled to praise no matter what they do. They are so used to being praised that they do nothing unless praised and become fond of flattery. It takes them away from the ground realities and always keeps them unprepared to face adversities.
• If we habitually over-praise our child for every kind of performance in same way, we send a message to the child that making too much efforts is worthless, because he gets same kind of praise even for an average performance.
• If we praise our children too much for everything, they’ll have a very poor opinion of our personality. They’ll dismiss our praise out-rightly saying, "you always say that."

Once the child realizes that your praise is not sincere and genuine, he’ll dismiss your genuine praises as well.

Criticism is bad. But if you do it constructively for good reason, it is sometimes better than praise. Kids never forget them, which helps them improve their behavior.

Return from Perils of over-praise to Words of encouragement.

How to praise and encourage a child.

Praise the child for his efforts not for his intelligence or talent.

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