When Praise is More Harmful than Helpful: Children with Low Self-Esteem Suffer

"Good job!" "Way to go!" and "Awesome!" are all typical praise you might tell your child when he or she has done a good job at school or a home activity. Yet a recent study shows that for children with low self-esteem, high praise may be more harmful than helpful.

"Inflated praise can backfire with those kids who seem to need it the most--kids with low self-esteem," said Eddie Brummelman, lead author of the study and a visiting scholar at The Ohio State university in autumn 2013, via a press release.

As many studies have looked at how praise affects children, Brummelman, who is a doctoral student in psychology at Utrecht University, notes how this is the first to address the impact of inflated praise-otherwise known as the addition of one new word to a positive comment.

In one of three related studies, Brummelman and colleagues found that adults gave twice as much inflated praise to children who were identified as having low self-esteem instead of those with high self-esteem.

Another study that involved 114 parents (88 percent mothers) who participated with their child, completed a measure to determine their level of self-esteem over the span of several days before the experiment. During the observation period at home, parents administered 12 timed math exercises to their child(ren). Following, parents scored how well their children did on tests. Researchers also videotaped sessions, in which the they counted how many times the parent praised the child. Praises were classified as inflated or non-inflated.

Results showed that parents praised their children approximately 6 times during the session and approximately 25 percent of the praise was inflated. And unfortunately, the study showed that parents tended to give more inflated praise to children with low self-esteem.

"Parents seemed to think that children with low self-esteem needed to get extra praise to make them feel better," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State, via the release. "It's understandable why adults would do that, but we found in another experiment that this inflated praise can backfire in these children."

And it did! Another experiment was comprised of 240 children who were asked to draw a famous van Gogh painting and then received inflated or non-inflated praise from someone identified as a "professional painter." For the study, children had the option to choose between drawing a more difficult picture and an easier option. Children with low self-esteem who were given inflated praise were more likely to opt for the easier choice than those who received regular praise or those with higher self-esteem. 

"If you tell a child with low self-esteem that they did incredibly well, they may think they always need to do incredibly well. They may worry about meeting those high standards and decide not to take on any new challenges."

Of course this sounds odds, yet Bushman concludes that it "really isn't helpful to give inflated praise to children who already feel bad about themselves."

What do you think? 

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Psychological Science.