More years ago than I care to remember, when I was basking in the glory of first-time motherhood, an older (and in retrospect, a wiser) friend brought me down to earth. “Motherhood is a wonderful thing,” she said, “as long as you remember that a mother is always in the wrong”. At that time, I was rather taken aback. It’s just her brand of humour, I thought to myself, and put her acerbic remarks out of my mind. But over the years, I have wondered whether there isn’t a little more than a nugget of truth in what she said. Her words of wisdom, however, need some modification. My own version, tempered by the psychobabble of this day and age, would be “Parenting is a wonderful thing, as long as you remember that a parent is always in the wrong!”
I was reminded of this the other day when a young friend of mine was told that, since self-esteem was the order of the day, what she needed to do was to pat her daughter on the back whenever she did something praiseworthy. She herself felt that as a child she had had very little praise from her parents and she was determined that her children would not suffer the same lack. So she’d praise her daughter whenever she could.
To praise a child when he or she has done something noteworthy seems an innocuous and thoroughly desirable exercise. After all, how can a child but benefit from such parental approbation? Right? Wrong. If the psychologists are to be believed, this is not the way it works. Where this mother was concerned, it turned out that she was just encouraging her daughter to have very high expectations, which would dry up unless she could continue to prove that she was worthy of praise. And this, the mother discovered when she was summoned to school by a worried teacher. Her daughter, she was told, was in a constant state of anxiety about her performance. Was she doing her work correctly? Is this how she should do it? If she didn’t get the praise, she wondered what she had done wrong!
We are now told that when parents continually praise their children, reserving their warm approving words for something ‘good’ a child has said or done, a powerful conditional ‘if’ gets written into the child’s self -esteem. “If I do this,” reasons the child, “I will be loved.” Though nothing could be further from the truth, such children believe that their parents’ love is attendant on them winning approval.
“Children,” I read in an article recently, “who grow up dependent on praise live their lives doing what they think others want. Praise becomes the reward they need to motivate them to do anything. In the huge effort to please, they lose their instinctive knowledge about whether they have done something worthwhile or well. They rely on others to tell them. Their self-esteem has to be propped up because the solid foundation —‘I feel good about me’ — is no longer there.”
But wasn’t it precisely to prop up her daughter’s self-esteem that her mother praised her? What, I wonder, would the psychologists have said if she hadn’t praised her daughter when she deserved it? I have little doubt that their criticism would have been copious. But as I said at the outset, parenting is wonderful as long as you accept the fact that parents are always in the wrong!
