Loose praise sinks kids

Mitchell Kalman of Fairfax County coaches a select team of 11-and-younger basketball players. When the season ends, he does not hand out trophies rewarding the boys for participating. After all, by that age, young athletes — Mr. Kalman’s son included — have shelves full of certificates, ribbons and other awards that say, “Good job.”

Instead, Mr. Kalman gives each boy a copy of the book “Values of the Game” by basketball great and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley. Ideally, the boys have gained confidence and a self-esteem boost by playing the season, winning and losing, cooperating and improving. Handing out another trophy isn’t going to mean all that much, Mr. Kalman says.

“Up until about the third grade, I think it is OK to give out participation awards,” he says. “After that, I think they should get something, but not necessarily another trophy. A book, I think, is going to mean more than a drawer full of ribbons, which after a while doesn’t mean anything.”

Mr. Kalman and many other coaches, parents and teachers are catching on to the idea that too much praise can do as much harm as good. In the past several decades, the effort to respect, protect and even puff up children’s self-esteem has resulted in a generation of children who expect to win, whose feelings are never hurt and who believe they are the best.

Examples are all around. The school gives out stickers that say, “I am special.” Some children get “big brother” presents on their siblings’ birthdays.

Such sayings as “You’re all winners” and “There are no losers” are not only misleading, they are making children feel worse instead of better, says Charles H. Elliott, a New Mexico psychologist and co-author of the book “Hollow Kids: Recapturing the Soul of a Generation Lost to the Self-Esteem Myth.”

“When you try to pump kids up to feel good all the time, you are teaching them to become self-absorbed,” Mr. Elliott says. “It is the antithesis of what you are trying to accomplish. Praising a behavior you would like to see repeated is different from lavishing praise and attention on kids no matter what they do in the name of boosting their self-esteem.

“As with everything else in life, you can overdo a good thing,” he says. “Praise loses its meaning when it is tossed around like confetti. Some parents virtually follow their kids around the playground, complimenting them on their teeter-tottering.”

How did we get here?

The self-esteem movement has been an evolving process over the past few decades. It began with good intentions as researchers in the late 1960s deduced that a host of social and educational problems — from poor grades to violence to eating disorders — were a result of poor self-esteem. Schools began working self-esteem exercises into the curriculum.

Research was done by many groups, resulting in a gamut of opinions on what exactly self-esteem is and who might benefit from an increased dose of it. In 1984, California passed legislation and earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the Task Force on Self Esteem. The task force studied whether high self-esteem would protect children from some of those social ills. In the end, the group found a non-relationship between low self-esteem and social problems.

These days, self-esteem has become a misunderstood and misapplied concept, says Robert Reasoner, a former school superintendent in California and the president of the International Council for Self-Esteem, an organization that promotes self-esteem materials and workshops.

“As educators, we have a responsibility for growing effective human beings, not just achieving test results,” Mr. Reasoner says. “We are losing about one-third of our kids to drug abuse, dropping out, suicide and violence. So many practices in schools used to destroy kids’ motivation, so what we were trying to do is create an emotionally and physically safe place for them. We knew that rewards worked better than punishment, but that didn’t mean we shouldn’t make them accountable.”

Mr. Reasoner says the self-esteem movement became watered down into one of happy-face stickers and “I love me” jingles. He says that was not what he and the other educators intended.

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