Save your child from Cowell

An article by Alexander Chancellor of The Guardian crossed my desk this week and it talked about how children these days are hampered rather than helped by parents who 'over praise' them.

My first instinct was to dismiss it out of hand. After all, like most parents of my generation, we've grown up believing that you can achieve more through positive reinforcement than by constant nagging but then I stopped to think about it a little more and realised that the man might have a point.

We all know there's nothing easy about being a parent but is it possible that in trying to be good parents and constantly praising our young, we're in fact being bad parents by misleading them and giving them a false sense of security that will blow up in their faces when we send them out into the cold hard world?

It's one thing to tell a child that's singing away to his or her favourite song that they sound lovely but if you tell them that they have the voice of an angel when, in fact, they've got as much tone as a sputtering car engine then when they decide they want to make a career out of singing, they're in for a serious let down when Simon Cowell let's loose on them with his particular brand of vitriol.

Quite aside from putting ideas into their heads that they can't possibly live up to, there is also the danger of doing more harm to their development than good. If a child thinks that they're already fantastic at something, it takes away their need to try harder.

We're so busy telling our children how funny/good looking/talented they are, in order to boost their confidence, that we're not always as truthful as we should be.

There aren't many parents out there that are going to tell their child that they're not as good looking than their friends or that they're thicker than a stack of bricks - to do so would be cruel and hurtful and wouldn't serve any purpose.

But, just because we're not telling them the cold hard truth doesn't mean that we should go to the other extreme either.

Yes it's important to praise a child but if we want to help them the most, we need to learn to do it properly.

Schoolfamily.com suggests that keeping praise specific is a good way to start. For example, by pointing out a particular section of a school essay that you think is good instead of telling them that they're destined to be the youngest winner of the Booker Prize.

Just like the rest of us, the young need to know that they're doing something right in order to stop them from giving up altogether but being unrealistic just gives them a false sense of achievement and entitlement.

Another thing to bear in mind is being selective in your praise. That doesn't mean setting yourself a limit on how much you can tell them they've done well, it just means not telling them every time they repeat the same action - unless of course it's a particular action they've had trouble with.

It's important to also teach the young to deal with set backs.

Failure is a part of learning and pretending that they did brilliantly at something when they didn't isn't going to help them.

Instead point out that yes, such and such is hard to do but that they've achieved other hard things before and with a little more work they'll be able to conquer this too.

If they've tried to do something and failed, it's all too easy for them to decide they're no good and give up but if you give them hope that they can indeed do it, it will help them to keep pushing themselves that little bit more until they succeed.

It's worth bearing in mind that over-praising your child is likely to give them an over inflated sense of who they are and what they're capable of and can serve to isolate them from the other children around them.

Nobody likes a know-it-all and if your child is under the impression that they're far more intelligent than the other children around them, they're likely to behave accordingly and alienate themselves from the others who don't like constantly being shown up or put down.

With that said, there are children that really are geniuses and no amount of praise can do justice to their actual talent. If that's the case then nurture it all you can but with it teach them the quality of being modest.

Having a child that's exceptionally talented is something to be proud of but as they say: 'pride comes before the fall' and that's as true when it comes to bringing up your children as it is in every other meaning of the phrase.