Parenting with a Focus on Effort, not Outcome

Parenting your teen or adolescent presents unique challenges. Not only does 14 look and feel very different than 17, but sometimes even when we think we’re doing the right thing, it can backfire on us. For example, when we think of praise, we think that that will be helpful to our teen, however, infective praising could be causing more harm than good. When it comes to intrinsic motivation, research is showing that ineffective praising could undermine a child’s confidence. This is because our young friends might then start to base their value and worth based on outcomes of performance, i.e. “I won that game so I’m valuable” or “I got an A on my paper so I’m a good person”. Children aim to please, and respond to the responses they get. You might have heard of negative attention seeking behavior and this occurs when a child realizes that they are not getting the best results in what they set out to accomplish, and lose their motivation and might start to not care, or rebel and then live off of negative attention- because attention is still attention and attention is proof that I exist.

I am going to outline some tips on giving praise:

1. Hold back from praising unless it is warranted.
2. Praise effort, concentration, persistence and good strategies because these are choices the child can make at any time for anything.
3. Hold back from praising talent, ability or intelligence- these are fluid states (can grow) and we run the risk of comparison and in this mode, there is always someone better, and someone worse at something. Also, there are many talented individuals out there who do not follow through on their commitments.
4. Be specific so the child can learn.
5. Don’t go over the top with praise- it raises the potential for anxiety should the child feel like they might disappoint you in the future.

The ability to learn is not fixed, it is instead based on a growth mindset. Failure is not a permanent condition, it is a lesson learned with an ability to fail, to fall down and get back up because when our young friends reach adulthood, they will know that they have resilience and can adapt.

If you are interested in learning more about effective parenting tools, don’t hesitate to reach out to me: [email protected] or 201.308.3987.