Why You Shouldn't Over Praise Your Child?

Praising a child is important. But, knowing the limit of praising is even more important! You should know how to differentiate between healthy praising and over praising as this can have some serious effects on your child’s mental health and development.

Praising a child will encourage them and will make them feel good about themselves. On the other hand, over praising has its own negative effects on children.

Praising kids is often an ideal way to boost their self-esteem. This is also helpful to promote their performance in school. Children with special needs when praised have always shown better results. To understand the reasons why we should not over praise children, we should first understand when you need to praise your child.

Why You Shouldn't Over Praise Your Child?

Remember to praise the behaviour and effort of the child. You will also need to pay positive attention to appropriate behaviour. Avoid praising for low-challenging activities. Your praise must be sincere and should be in a limited amount. The basic idea is that you need to keep your child motivated and help him embrace challenges wholeheartedly. It will help them go a long way in life.

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The following are a few effects of over praising kids. You need to understand it and work accordingly.

Manipulates Children
Praise is a way that can get the child to comply to your wishes. This will be effective only for a short term when the kid looks for adult’s approval. But over praise can make the children depend on them every time. It will be not good for their mental well-being.

Creates a praise junkies
When you are over praising kids, there is no doubt that they will look up to you in every situation when they expect your approval and praise. This will result in a drastic effect as they won't be able to form their own judgments. This will mould them into people with poor or zero self-confidence.

Stealing a child’s pleasure
Children should be rewarded for their accomplishments and not judged on it. Many a times there have been debates that a praise like a ‘good job’ has the same intonations to that of a ‘bad job’. This makes ‘good job’ a judgment rather than a praise and it also steals the child’s simple pleasure of being happy of his accomplishments. This is one of the reasons why you should not over praise children.

Decreases Interest
Studies have shown that when a person is praised for something he has done, he is sure to lose interest in that. The same applies for kids. When over praising kids, you need to be aware that the child will not do more than what is required or will not push himself in the same field.

Reduce Achievement
Recent studies have shown that when a child is praised for a task, most of the time he tends to stumble in the next. One of the reason being that he is under pressure to continue his good performance. Children who are praised are less likely to take risks. This is one of the reasons why you should not over praise children.

Story first published: Monday, November 24, 2014, 17:55 [IST]
Read more about: parenting tips