teaching children right from wrong
Descriptive Praise
When we teach positive parenting skills to parents we often start with a skill called Descriptive Praise. Almost every article on parenting skills written will include parenting tips, or parenting advice amongst which will be statements like ‘focus on the positive’. How is this achieved in reality?
Modern parents are often hard wired to ‘focus on the negative’. When our children are being quiet/sitting still/playing quietly parents will often take the opportunity to leave the children while they get on with other chores around the house, or putting it bluntly, ignore the children. As soon as the children start bickering/fighting or whining however the parent will often come running. What do these actions tell our children? We are inadvertently teaching them that to get Mum/Dads attention the best thing to do is bicker/whine/fight or just ‘misbehave’ By giving this behaviour our attention we are also creating more of the same since the child gets what they want -our attention–and the vicious cycle has begun.
How do we break this cycle? Easy – notice AND TELL YOUR CHILDREN what they are doing right ALL THE TIME rather than either telling them what is wrong or only noticing them when they are ‘misbehaving’. Sounds obvious and indeed in principle it is – but we are so used to noticing the negatives that it takes real practice for us, the parents, to shift our focus from the negative to the positive. One skill that is invaluable in achieving this is Descriptive Praise.
Descriptive praise is praise – but not the sort of praise that sound like ‘good boy/girl’,’ well done’, ‘wonderful’,’ marvellous’, ‘super’ and the like. This sort of praise we will call ‘evaluative’ praise and there is nothing in principle wrong with it. The problem with evaluative praise is that it is not particularly effective and doesn’t provide the child with enough information about what they are doing to deserve praise so they can repeat it in the future.
Descriptive praise is praise through description of what you are seeing a child doing and can often be linked to a characteristic that you want to (i) identify for a child so the can learn what that characteristic is and (ii) that the child learns that this characteristic is desirable and will earn praise. So for example a child is sitting quietly and drawing. Rather than ignore this ‘good’ behaviour a parent might say ‘Thank you for sitting so quietly at the table, it is really great that you are able to amuse yourself by drawing and it is really helpful to mummy because I can do the washing up’.
Descriptive Praise is effective because (i) it is genuine – you are only praising what is really happening, (ii) it requires the parent to be noticing the child – you can throw a ‘good boy’ over your shoulder but to use descriptive praise you need to be noticing your child and (iii) it gives the child useful information. In the above example the child was being ‘helpful’ and they are learning both what it means to be helpful and also that helpful is something that mummy appreciates –thus the child will want to be helpful again and as long as the parent is using his/her parenting skills they will notice, descriptively praise and thus get more helpfulness – the vicious circle is replaced by a virtuous one!
Descriptive praise takes practice. Many parents faced with a child misbehaving can be so overwhelmed by the misbehaviour they do not know how to start praising –and this does take time and training because the way to diffuse misbehaviour is to identify what is going right first however small.
A very simple example of this might be with a boy coming home from school and the rule is that he has to hang up his coat and bag and put his shoes on the shoe rack when he gets home. On the day in question the boy arrives home the bag gets dumped in the hall – the shoes flung off BUT the coat is hung up….what do parents tends to focus on first? In the vast majority of cases the first words out of our mouths will be about the shoes and bag – and it will be all negative! ‘Pick up your shoes!’ , ‘your bag doesn’t go there’ etc etc. The real skill in parenting is to notice the coat first and praise what was done right – ‘Thank you for hanging up your coats – you remembered the rules and when you hang up your coat mum doesn’t have to do it/remind you’. At this point the child may without any further words look at his bag and shoes and sort them out (which you will also praise). If not the parent can say something like ‘So you have sorted out your coat what else do you need to do before you have your snack?’
Descriptive praise is an incredibly powerful parenting skill and with practice can make every household a much more positive place.
To learn more about Descriptive Praise and other parenting skills contact The Parent Practice. The Parent Practice is an organisation based in SW London that has been teaching positive parenting skills to parents for the last 10 years. The Parent Practice produces parenting guides in the form of short publications, books and CDs but our main work is done face-to-face via parenting courses.
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