Praise, Asian-American Parenting, Self-Esteem, Behavior Change

This will be a rambling post that touches on Asian-American approaches to education, then takes a turn into foster care adoption world.

Following a link from the Process blog, I read this article about the negative effects of too much praise of innate ability. This excerpt sums up the argument:

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

The article doesn't make any mention of Asian-American parents. I know this isn't true of all Asian parents, but the general tendency, especially among first-generation immigrant parents, is to give little to no praise. In fact, insults are common.

I think my dad was extreme even for a Japanese father. The best compliment he's ever given me is "I guess you're not hopelessly stupid". My mother was the complete opposite. She also maintained high standards, but gave me unconditional support and constant praise.

The effective part of the general Asian approach to parenting is the focus on effort. The idea is that children start off stupid by default... but if they work really, really, hard, they might become a little less stupid. If you get a 99% on a test, it's because you didn't work hard enough to get 100%. That's the amazingly simple secret to why Asians tend to score higher on tests than other American ethnicities. There's no biological component whatsoever. It's just hard work from the parents and hard work from the kids. And if Asian families lack resources to do this hard work because of extreme poverty or family breakdown, then the model falls apart.

In adulthood, someone raised by this method doesn't need a lot of praise to stay motivated. I notice this a little bit in myself. When other people praise me it often feels weird and insincere. I'll expect it after I accomplish something really major, but otherwise, I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not two years old, I was just doing my job because it's my job, I'm not looking for a freaking cookie and a pat on the head." I have to remind myself that other people often expect this kind of praise and find it much more meaningful than I do.

The dark side is obvious: issues with self-esteem and identity. Someone raised by a hardcore version of this method often doesn't know why they're do so well in school, they just have to. It's like someone reached inside them and wound a spring very tightly then released it. Work, work, work. If they deviate from the course of hard work and excellence, they'll start to break down. They don't know what they really want to do in life or what they really enjoy.

Thank goodness my mother ameliorated most of the aftershocks of my dad's approach to education. Otherwise I'd probably be completely nuts by now. I don't want to go into any details, but I've accomplished a lot of things in my education and done very well in some competitive efforts, especially when I was in my teens. I've also been through some fairly spectacular failures. No one really taught me how to deal with failure when was a kid (my mother just minimized it, then redirected) and I consider that lesson the most important one I taught myself.

Getting to adoption, the article mirrors a lot of things we've been reading about in older child and foster care adoption. Some of our classes touched on it as well. The goal is not to create excellence, but to try and compensate for earlier trauma by building self-esteem. We might be adopting children who blame themselves for being taken into foster care; children who've been through years of emotional abuse and neglect.

From everything we've read, you cannot build self-esteem just by telling the child "you're good". Like "you're smart", it relies too much on innate qualities. It doesn't encourage the child to take action or change behavior. When the child does something they know is not good, the failure is all the worse. The child may even stop believing "you're good" statements.

Instead, we're supposed to concentrate on more sophisticated behavior change techniques. At Baggage's blog she has some great examples of those at work. Of course they're not magic, but I totally trust in the logic behind this kind of advice. I just hope I can follow through on it when we get a placement.

We're also supposed to make sure children don't associate love and belonging 100% with good behavior. Love should be unconditional, and we need to reinforce that even if they behave badly, we still love them, we just don't like the behavior and we believe they have the power and responsibility to improve that behavior.

The goal is wildly optimistic. Children build back damaged self-esteem if we can encourage them to work hard enough? I've always hated the saying "failure is not an option" but in this case, it might be appropriate.