You're so smart. You're the best hockey player on your team. Your colouring is genius.
All are self-esteem boosters that parents lavish on their children to make them feel good about themselves and prepare them for success.
And all are wrong.
A growing body of research is finding that praise based on talent and intelligence - as opposed to effort - not only doesn't help kids achieve success, it actually backfires.
Children who are praised as smart, special and talented stumble at school when faced with challenges that don't immediately reinforce the mantras they hear at home. They're also more likely to avoid tasks at which they may fail than children who are praised instead for their hard work. And they are more apt to lie and cheat well into their university years. Psychologist Polly Young-Eisendrath calls it the self-esteem trap.
"It's the expectation of being exceptional and the pressure on oneself to be exceptional which creates a kind of restlessness and sense of self-consciousness," says Dr. Young-Eisendrath, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Vermont.
What's more, according to her new book, The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance, overpraised children don't outgrow these setbacks.
So, she and others propose a brave new model for praise that closes the door on the self-esteem movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Job one: Focus on a child's effort and on how they tackle tasks. Above all, let your kids know just how ordinary they are.
"There's a kind of wisdom in ordinariness that we seem to have forgotten," Dr. Young-Eisendrath says. "It's uplifting to know everyone struggles."
Otherwise, children may end up with many of the same problems Dr. Young-Eisendrath now sees regularly in the young adults whom she treats in her practice. She noticed that many of their woes stem back to being told how special they were by their boomer parents throughout their childhoods.
"To me it's the most ironic kind of blind spot that we've ever had as parents," she says, including herself in the overpraising demographic. "A whole generation of parents did something all at once. We shifted the viewpoint of parenting from raising a citizen and a member of a family to being overly focused on the self."
Carol Dweck, a psychology professor and researcher at Stanford University, says she sees the burgeoning area of academic research in which she's been working for 10 years finally breaking through to a civilian audience.
"Praising intelligence and talent feels so intuitive to people," she says. "But the minute parents think about it, they realize it hasn't worked."
Her provocative study last year of 400 New York fifth graders compared two groups of children who wrote an IQ test involving relatively easy puzzles.
One group of children was praised as intelligent and the other for making a good effort. In subsequent testing, the "smart" kids backed away from a potentially difficult assignment when an easier one was offered.
They took their failure at another very difficult test as a sign they weren't smart at all. And in a final test, which was exactly the same as the first one, the children who were tagged as intelligent did about 20 per cent worse than they had at the outset. The kids praised for their effort improved their score by 30 per cent.
"Telling a child they're special and different from other children - the implication is 'better than' - makes them feel they deserve things that they haven't necessarily earned," Dr. Dweck says. "They can be really bitter when these things don't come their way."
