We'll be featuring weekly videos from JuiceBoxJungle, which offers multifaceted (if irreverent) takes on issues facing parents that raise a lot of interesting questions for us as "tranquil parents."

This week's episode, the startup's first of thirteen planned for this season, raises the issue of when our instinct to praise our children can take a turn for the worse.


More parenting videos on JuiceBoxJungle

For our own parenting, we've taken a lot of direction on this subject from Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting, which fleshes out the position brought up midway through the above segment - that we do our children the best service by relieving them of the pressure to always "succeed." In this view, overpraising is less an issue of allowing children to ignore the "harsh realities" of their true chances of becoming a sports hero. (Nothing wrong with big dreams, if you ask us.) But when we overpraise, we run the risk of robbing our children of their innate ability to appreciate their small achievements for their own sake, and of understanding that we love them for who they are, not for what they achieve. As Kohn wrote in an article for Young Children magazine:

What kids do need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. That's not just different from praise - it's the opposite of praise. "Good job!" is conditional. It means we're offering attention and acknowledgment and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things that please us.

This point, you'll notice, is very different from a criticism that some people offer to the effect that we give kids too much approval, or give it too easily. They recommend that we become more miserly with our praise and demand that kids "earn" it. But the real problem isn't that children expect to be praised for everything they do these days. It's that we're tempted to take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining and helping them to develop needed skills and good values.

Rather than offering praise all the time, Kohn suggests that you "say nothing," "say what you saw," and "talk less, ask more." For more details and examples of how to employ these techniques see his excellent article here. I won't tell you that it's easy to break the habit of excessive praise, but we do notice differences in Z's behavior when our responses are less praise-focused.