14 DAY TRIAL // Ohio State University (OSU) researchers determined in a new investigation that children who suffer from low self-esteem do not benefit from excessive praising from their parents. A lot of adults with such children tend to heap praises on them to encourage them and boost their morale, but this may not be the best route to take.
Inflated praises work best with kids who already have high self-esteem, the scientists say, but they do not have the same effect on children who do not think too highly of themselves. The new study was authored by former OSU visiting scholar Eddie Brummelman, who is now a PhD student at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands.
For the purposes of this research, excessive or inflated praises were defined as containing adverbs and adjectives describing very positive evaluations or assessments. These included words such as incredibly and perfect, which parents often use to boost the morale and self-esteem of their children.
For example, when an adult told a kid that he was good at something, this was considered normal praise, while telling the little one that he was incredibly good at doing the same thing was inflated praise. The team led by Brummelman conducted a total of three related studies on this issue.
In one research, the group found that children with low self-esteem received twice as many inflated praises as children who did not have this problem. In a second study, scientists observed 114 parents as they were praising their children after giving them math exercises to complete.
Low self-esteem children were found to receive twice the amount of inflated praises their high self-esteem peers did. The third research demonstrated that over-the-top praising put too much pressure on children, a fact that hindered their overall performance, PsychCentral reports.
“Parents seemed to think that the children with low self-esteem needed to get extra praise to make them feel better. It’s understandable why adults would do that, but we found in another experiment that this inflated praise can backfire in these children,” scientist Brad Bushman, PhD, says.
Bushman holds an appointment as a professor of communication and psychology at OSU, and was also a coauthor of the new study. Details of the work appear in a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.
“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,” Brummelman concludes.