Transcriber: Agostina Peirano Reviewer: David DeRuwe
What do you most want for your child?
I ask this question to parents, and I most often hear happiness.
I’m going to push back a little bit on that answer.
I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes
and imagine a moment where you experienced deep joy.
If you have kids, or if you’re a coach or a teacher,
if you have a child in your life,
imagine deep joy that you’ve experienced with them.
Deep joy is whenever we are living out our values,
whenever we’re making contact with people that we love,
even in messy situations.
You already have the tool in your back pocket
to create deep joy for your child,
and that tool is praise.
By praise,
I mean, describing the behaviors that your child is doing well,
celebrating the big and small successes,
and recognizing efforts
even when they don’t lead to the desired outcomes.
How do I know that praise works?
I know it works because across the past 10 years,
I’ve trained and practiced in pediatric behavioral psychology.
What this allows me to do is to link praise
to help parents shift their attention
to the successes their child is doing.
Then the parents are doing the same thing for the child.
It’s a concrete skill they can use to link it to character traits
and values that the family holds.
And even further,
you can use little praise statements
even when you don’t think there’s a behavior there to praise.
We’re going to talk about three different ways to praise:
Even though there’s dozens and dozens of ways to praise,
I’ll be using content from “Applied Behavior Analysis”
written by Cooper, Heron, and Heward.
The three ways we’re going to talk about are praising the opposite,
praising the next step, and praising better form.
So, we’re going to get started with praising the opposite.
Here we see Sarah,
and she is sneaking an egg and cracking it into a bowl
behind her mom’s back.
She’s having a fun morning of baking cookies.
So, in this situation, which many of us have been in,
the usual response is to say, “Whoa, wait, Sarah, don’t do that.”
I’m going to encourage you in that moment, though,
to just take a deep breath.
(Deep Breath)
That’s called ignoring.
When you ignore inappropriate but safe behavior,
it’s the marriage partner to praise.
Instead, I want you to praise the opposite behavior.
When do we think a four-year-old is going to wait?
It seems pretty hard, right? Even five to 10 seconds.
But actually, what we find is that children are doing these behaviors
in very short durations and usually throughout the day.
In this instance, we actually see...
Sarah waiting here.
When she grabs the egg, Mom gives her a command.
The difficulty is that Mom forgot to praise
whenever Sarah complied with the command.
Now, this primes both Sarah and Mom
to think that Sarah is having difficulty with waiting.
Now, whenever they go to the next moment and Mom’s back is turned,
Sarah might grab the egg.
She hasn’t really learned to be patient.
I want you to compare that to if you gave a salient detailed praise.
So in this moment when she grabs the egg and she listens and she does put it back,
if Mom says, “Thank you for being patient, I love that you waited.”
Now, Sarah and Mom are thinking,
“Hey, I’m patient. I know how to wait.”
So then, whenever Mom turns her back and Sarah says,
“Ah, I want to crack that egg,”
(Laughter)
she’s saying in her mind, “But I’m patient. I know how to wait.
And Mom’s giving me really good attention,“ right?
So, praising the opposite shifts our attention, not from mistakes,
but over to successes
and it tells the child what to do in order to be successful.
It also helps maintain the parent-child relationship.
Let’s look at praising the next step.
So, here, Sarah wants to pour a full jug of milk into the measuring cup,
but she’s just too little.
We've all had those children, right? They are ready to tackle everything.
So Mom breaks it into two steps.
By doing this, Sarah is able to participate successfully.
When we break jobs down into multiple steps,
it’s helping the child to learn the full activity
so they’re cognitively able to start grasping it,
and they’re also able to pick up on new steps
as they’re developmentally able to grasp it.
Now, Mom might say,
“Thank you, Sarah, for helping me pour the milk.”
Now for our stubborn little ones,
she might say, “Thank you for letting me help you pour the milk.
We’re a great team.”
And that way we’re now linking the praise statements
over to these characteristics
that we really want Sarah to start internalizing.
Now, we’re going to look at praising better form.
(Laughter)
Sarah is enthusiastically stirring the cookie batter
and Mom’s predicting very accurately a likely future spill.
So, Sarah can approximate stirring the cookie batter,
but she needs to work on her form.
So, similar to a coach giving feedback to an Olympic gymnast about their form,
that’s what we’re going to do for Sarah.
What we’re going to do is start
by finding the tiniest behavior that Sarah is doing correctly.
In this example, she’s holding the spoon.
That’s correct. Right?
We start with what we have.
You praise that.
That gets Sarah listening to you, and then as you’re moving forward,
anything she’s doing correctly, either then or in the future,
you’re going to praise.
This keeps her motivated, it keeps her frustration low,
and it really keeps the parent’s frustration low too.
We call this shaping.
The shaping will slowly over time, sometimes quickly,
become the full form that we want for our child
whenever they’ve reached mastery of this skill.
Now, praising better form is helpful
whenever your child developmentally is not able to do the task.
It’s also helpful whenever your child gets frustrated with criticism.
So if you really want your child to not have a perfectionistic response
to a new task,
then you can try praising better form.
Now, what about that spill?
What if we just ignore it?
So, going back to ignoring inappropriate but safe behavior,
I want you to think about what do you want for your child.
Do you prefer that your child make a mistake, learn from it,
learn some new tools,
managing frustration,
how to clean up,
or do you better prefer that your child stands back from these hard skills
and not do them until they think they can be perfect?
You have hundreds of these types of decisions every day.
You get the opportunity to teach the lesson that you planned,
and you get the opportunity to teach the lesson
that’s presented to you.
So, what does this mean for your child as they grow up?
One, they have a less frustrated parent
because they have a very clear tool to use to teach skills,
to teach those types of intrinsic motivation
and other characteristics that they really want their child to have.
And two, it takes a lot of pressure off of you
because you don’t have to create this moment-to-moment happiness childhood.
They have resiliency.
When they make a mistake, they know they can handle it.
They have the creativity and the problem-solving.
They know how to ask for help.
They know how to use teamwork.
Praising isn’t just for little children.
It works really well with teens.
I’ve seen it, you’d be surprised.
It works well with marriages too.
I’ve done that one.
And the workplace. Pretty much with everybody.
So, as you see your child start to connect the dots
between their behavior
and their inner voice is developing, and they’re saying,
“Oh yeah, I work really hard.
And whenever I’m making a mistake,
I just do it differently.
Try it a different way. I keep going.”
A lot of that frustration they might experience goes down,
but also the joy will be automatic.
Thank you.
(Applause)