09/10/2025
Parents are often told to praise their children. ‘Catch them behaving well!’ they’re told. ‘Tell them how proud you are of their good choices!’.
It sounds innocuous – who could argue with praise? Positive, reinforcing, feel-good – surely an all-round nice thing?
So it’s a mystery to parents when children come along whose response to praise is the opposite to what they expected.
‘Well done!’ the parents say and ‘I’m not doing it anymore’ say the children.
The parents then sometimes increase the praise or even add physical rewards, stickers or certificates – and that’s enough to entrench the child in their position. Previously enjoyed activities are abandoned, never to be picked up again.
What’s going on? All the books say that children want to please their parents and that praise encourages them – but they rarely talk about those for whom it doesn’t work. They assume that praise has no downside. But some children are super-sensitive to control – and they have noticed what many of us never see.
Praise can be another way to control children.
Just as much as punishments, praise can be used to manipulate. Praise shifts the emphasis from the child doing something for their own purposes, to the child doing something to please adults. It introduces evaluation – why is this picture worth of praise, whilst the last picture wasn’t? Why do they get praised for their piano practice, but not for practicing their skills on Geometry Dash?
For some children, that’s enough to taint the activity. It’s no longer something they can just enjoy, it’s something that adults want them to do well at and that the adults are assessing. And it brings in anxiety – what if their next effort doesn’t get a ‘Good job’? What then? What will that mean about them?
What do you do when your child responds very badly to mainstream parenting methods - do you have have to do nothing and accept it? As always, Eliza Fricker (Missing The Mark) and I are informal and chatty but be based on psychological insight, personal experience and theory. All the Low Demand Parenting talks are on sale until Sunday.
https://courses.naomifisher.co.uk/art-of-low-demand-parenting
Illustration from The Naughty Step, published by Jessica Kingsley 2024.
