Moving again…

New House Slideshow

We are unexpectedly moving again in 8 days! We are so incredibly excited. We were blessed with the opportunity to live in an amazing home at an incredibly affordable price. The home is on 2 acres out in the county and we are so excited to get settled there. I hope to finally be able to start a garden and am so happy to be moving out of the apartment. Here is a photo slideshow of the house. There are 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms (I forgot to take a picture of the 2nd bedroom). The house is 3600 square feet!

Garrett’s E.C. Progress (taking himself potty)

Garrett is 17 months old now and I’d say our Elimination Communication (E.C.) journey has been a pretty half-hearted one. I took the attitude of pottying Garrett with a grain of salt because I didn’t want any stress involved. I attempted to have the attitude of “it if works, great. If not, I’ve lost nothing.”

In the beginning I took him potty all the time and he did excellent and as a young baby he refused to poop in his diaper. As he got older he didn’t mind as much and would poop in his diaper if I didn’t get to him in time. Then around the time he started walking or thereabouts he started fighting the potty quite a bit. He was too busy and didn’t want to be bothered so I didn’t push it. I just let him go in his diaper but I would try to remember to take him when it crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago we picked up a Baby Bjorn Potty at a consignment shop and since then our potty success has skyrocketed. We all ready had a Baby Bjorn Little Potty (which is much smaller) and I like it but it’s size makes it difficult for Garrett to take himself to the potty without help because it’s so low to the ground. The blue potty we picked up is the perfect size. He backs up to it and goes.

Combining the new potty with keeping him naked from the waist down while we are at home has equated to him being “potty trained” during the day. He will completely initiate going to the potty and take himself without any assistance as long as he doesn’t have any clothes on. If he has underwear or a diaper on he will sometimes go in it without seeking me for help to get them off. I expect it will be another three to six months or so before he can reliably get his clothes off by himself to go potty. I have also noticed that since keeping him naked at home he has also started holding it better when he is in a diaper when we go out for the day or during nap.

Garrett mastering the potty has been just another reminder that my “baby” is quickly outgrowing his babyhood. So sad. But this is definitely a welcome change. He gets very excited when he goes potty and sometimes in his eagerness he tries to carry it to me (the little white part removes from the base) which has resulted in potty being dropped all over the carpet (yuck).

All though the concept and process of EC is very natural and makes total sense to me I am still sometimes baffled to watch a 17 month old stop in mid-play run over to the potty, go, and then resume playing as if nothing ever happened without any interference from me (except to wipe his bum after he’s gone poo). It’s a little amazing at times.

2009 Reid Review

ETA:  Sorry this is coming out so late. My laptop broke right before the new year and so I was not able to access our photo’s to finish the review.

In general, I would say that 2009 was a very tumultuous and hard year for us.

Camden started preschool at Loving Space in January and shortly thereafter began having serious health issues including unexplained fevers, joint and muscle pain, lethargy, stomachaches, chest pain, etc, etc. Garrett, too, began having health issues mostly centered around serious allergic reactions but also with chronic ear infections. We were in and out of doctors, chiropractors, allergists  and naturopath offices. I spent countless hours researching their ailments on the internet. In April, Mike was laid off from work (as an electrician apprentice for IBEW) and was out of work until October (almost 7 months of not working).  Also in April Garrett was rushed to the ER after having an unexplained anaphylactic reaction to something airborne in the doctors waiting room while in my arms. Summer came and both of the kids were sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital to try to get to the bottom of their health conditions. Garrett underwent an Upper GI Series and an Endoscopy where they were investigating something called Eosinophilic Esophagitus (EE). Testing came back inconclusive. The only thing we were able to determine with Camden was chronic constipation and we decided to halt further testing for the time being since her symptoms appeared to be improving. By the end of summer Camden was no longer complaining of joint or muslce pain and seemed to regain normal activity levels for her age and temperament.  Garrett had one more ear infection in early August and since then he has remained ear infection clear (crossing fingers).

Over the summer we enjoyed little getaways around Whatcom County and Seattle. The kids and I also enjoyed a trip to the Tri-Cities to visit friends. Garrett turned one in August and Mike and I celebrated our 7 year anniversary. In August I also took on the mission of losing weight. I looked at myself in Garrett’s 1st Birthday pictures and couldn’t stand it anymore. I decided to start running and also joined a local “Biggest Loser” contest. By November I lost 20 pounds. September brought Mikayla heading back to school and going into the 4th grade. In October the kids and I took a trip to Tri-Cities to be at a good friend, Emeth’s, birth. Mike also got a call to go back to work.

The end of 2009 has brought some peace and closure to the crazy and sometimes scary beginning. It actually feels like the beginning of this year was years ago. We are blessed that Mike was able to receive work again and that the kids are happy and healthy. So that is our year in a quick recap. Next, we’ll do some more specifics with pictures because the pictures are my favorite part.

Here is our yearly family pictures. Cheesy…yes. I wish Shilowe could have done them but we had to settle for Sears. Sorry for the quality of the Sears pictures, they are scanned from the originals. These were taken just before Christmas.

Jessica:

There were times in 2009 where I felt like I had entered the twilight zone. A very bizarre year. Truthfully, I am thankful it is over. I am typically a pretty easy going and laid back person but admittedly I became a high strung and jumpy mom while the kids were going through their health stuff. I am thankful, however, that this year has taught me to refocus on myself. I have spent so much time and energy on everyone else in my life and not enough time taking care of myself. Exercising and losing weight has been such a positive force in my life. I am really beginning to enjoy running and all though it’s been a few months since I’ve been able to do it regularly I look forward to resuming it again as we get more daylight in the evenings.

This is one of the pictures that reeeeeeaaaaally motivated me to lose weight and it is one of the better ones.

Mike:

I’m pretty sure he would appreciate me keeping this blank so I’ll keep it minimal. He discovered a new hobby in 2009 and that is guns and shooting. He got his concealed weapons permit and he has fun shooting at targets (so does Jessica but the kids make it hard for her to go). He is working down in Everett where they are building a new hospital and should be completing his apprenticeship sometime in 2010, if all goes well.

Mikayla:

It is hard to believe that Mikayla will be turning 10 in just a few short months (February). She resides in the tween limbo land where she is still part little girl that loves to play with dolls and toys and yet she is also gradually refining herself into the more grown up things in life. She is in 4th grade and her favorite subject is still math. She is definitely my “mom’s helper” and is Garrett’s 2nd mom. She loves to dote on him and he is always so excited to see her and sometimes cries when she leaves. Her hobbies/favorite things this year have included making jewelry with beads, Littlest Pet Shop, Hannah Montana and recently Origami. It does make me sad to realize that Mikayla’s moments as a “little girl” are quickly slipping away and that she is turning into a young lady on us. Where does the time go?

Camden

Camden began the year attending Loving Space preschool which she absolutely adored. Unfortunately, she had to stop attending when Mike was laid off from work. Camden continues to be our “princess girl”. She loves all things pink and princessy. She spent most of her allowance this year on the Disney Princess Polly Pockets. Her other love is Barbies, especially the Barbie movies. Her favorites are Diamond Castle, Princess and the Pauper and The Three Musketeers. She loves to sing and perform. She received a Barbie guitar for her Birthday and loves to put on concerts for us. In an ironic twist Camden also loved learning all about snakes this year, especially Boa’s. We read many books from the library about snakes … all on her own initiative. We also studied lizards, geckos and skunks. Camden’s writing continues to improve and we enjoyed writing several books together this year. She narrates and I write. She also loves writing out Birthday cards and has made a few grocery lists for me as well as her own sporadic creations. Her reading is constantly improving and she does some reading from the beginning readers. Our favorites this year were the Biscuit books. Like the rest of the Reid’s she is drawn to the computer. She loves to spend time on playhouse disney and starfall as well as play computer games that we have rented from the library. One of our favorite video series that we experienced this year from the library was a series called “Families Around The World.” Camden has now turned 5 and I definitely feel like we are in a time speed warp. I am enjoying all of the new experiences but would be lying if I denied that sometimes I just want to cradle her in my arms again as an infant. I know that I am going to blink and she is going to be 10 like Mikayla. She is still young enough, however, to crack us up with her still childish view of the world and her misunderstood lyrics.

Fell asleep at the computer…

Garrett:

Garrett is certainly doing his best to stake out his position in the family which he believes should be the “top dog”. He has no fear from his older sisters and truly terrorizes them on a regular basis. At the same time he is a sweet, cuddly little guy. He definitely goes back and forth between “Mr destructo” (as Camden appropriately nicknamed him) and our precious sweet boy “Mr Garrett”.  Unfortunately, Garrett has had a pretty rough year but is a trooper nonetheless. Despite illness, countless trips to doctors, allergists, chiropractors, ER visits and Seattle childrens hospital he still managed to keep a smile on his face and grow, grow, grow. So far this year we have discovered that he is IgE allergic to: wheat, dairy (casein and whey), goats milk, egg, peanut, sunflower, soy and dog. He has had numerous reactions to other things (some unknown) but those are his “true” allergies. We are working on healing his little body and hope that 2010 will bring some additional progress. Garrett is definitely a fireball of energy and just a silly, crazy boy. His favorite things are hammers, balls and anything of mom’s or dad’s that he shouldn’t have. He also has a love of baby dolls, polly pockets, singing barbie’s and pink girly clothes thanks to his two sisters. Garrett is also turning into a social ham and loves to make people laugh at him. He also LOVES music and instruments. His favorites are the guitar and the piano. When we are at Church he will “conduct” the hymns by moving his little fingers, it is precious. His language is coming along and he is talking more and more each month. Our favorite thing that Garrett does is a silly noise that he made up for what a “turtle” says.

Other miscellaneous pictures in no particular order:

Rethinking Praise and Self Esteem

I will be the first to admit that I have to consciously stop myself from dishing out unwarranted and undeserved praise to my children. Sometimes, it slips out anyway.  However, I understand on a very logical level that this doesn’t achieve what I want it to. This article was passed to me today and I think it is important to keep it going.

Interestingly, when reading this article I had constant flashbacks to my own childhood (specifically my experiences in public school)  and could remember instances when the praise and similar tactics failed for me as well. I remember what a shock college was because for the first time in my life I could not “get by” on effortless work. It was a shock and I remember being angry (not at myself) but at the “unfair” notion of having to actually put forth effort and hard laborious study to learn something. I will never forget a project that we had to do for a biology course in High School. We were supposed to work on it for the entire semester. I didn’t touch the  project until the night before and stayed up until the wee hours of the morning and skipped the first two classes before biology to finish the project. I turned it in and got an “A”. Meanwhile, a friend who worked on the project diligently and throughout the semester got a lower grade. This did little for me except to reinforce that public education is less about learning, being held accountable and diligently working towards something and more about figuring out which hoops to jump through. High School for me could be summarized as learning how to do the least amount of work for the desired outcome. I graduated Cum Laude without ever working hard. I could go on and on about public school and my distaste of the system and what it teaches but that is another subject.

I am looking forward to reading this book.

Here is the LINK to the article

Excerpt: NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Hardcover, 352 pages
Grand Central Publishing
List Price: $24.99

Chapter One: The Inverse Power of Praise

Sure, he’s special. But new research suggests if you tell him that, you’ll ruin him. It’s a neurobiological fact.

What do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas is one of them, and he likes belonging.

Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two — things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. “You’re so smart, Kiddo,” just seems to roll off the tongue.

“Early and often,” bragged one mom, of how often she praised. Another dad throws praise around “every chance I get.” I heard that kids are going to school with affirming handwritten notes in their lunchboxes— and when they come home — there are star charts on the refrigerator. Boys are earning baseball cards for clearing their plates after dinner, and girls are winning manicures for doing their homework. These kids are saturated with messages that they’re doing great — that they are great, innately so. They have what it takes.

The presumption is that if a child believes he’s smart (having been told so, repeatedly), he won’t be intimidated by new academic challenges. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research and a new study from the trenches of the New York City public school system — strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

Though Dr. Carol Dweck recently joined the faculty at Stanford, most of her life has been spent in New York; she was raised in Brooklyn, went to college at Barnard, and taught at Columbia for decades. This reluctant new Californian just got her first driver’s license — at age sixty. Other Stanford faculty have joked that she’ll soon be sporting bright colors in her couture, but so far Dweck sticks to New York black — black suede boots, black skirt, trim black jacket. All of which matches her hair and her big black eyebrows — of which is raised up, perpetually, as if in disbelief. Tiny as a bird, she uses her hands in elaborate gestures, almost as if she’s holding her idea in front of her, physically rotating it in three-dimensional space. Her speech pattern, though, is not at the impatient pace of most New Yorkers. She talks as if she’s reading a children’s lullaby, with gently punched-up moments of drama.

For the last ten years, Dweck and her team at Columbia have studied the effect of praise on students in twenty New York schools. Her seminal work — a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders — paints the picture most clearly. Prior to these experiments, praise for intelligence had been shown to boost children’s confidence. But Dweck suspected this would backfire the first moment kids experienced failure or difficulty.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles — puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done. They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ “Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score — by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized — it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls — the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweck’s research on praise, and she flatly wasn’t interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85 percent who think praising her children’s intelligence is important.

Jill explains that her family lives in a very competitive community a competition well under way by the time babies are a year and a half old and being interviewed for day care. “Children who don’t have a firm belief in themselves get pushed around not just in the playground, but the classroom as well.” So Jill wants to arm her children with a strong belief in their innate abilities. She praises them liberally. “I don’t care what the experts say,” Jill says defiantly. “I’m living it.”

Jill wasn’t the only one to express such scorn of these so-called “experts.” The consensus was that brief experiments in a controlled setting don’t compare to the wisdom of parents raising their kids day in and day out.

Even those who’ve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary school teacher with eleven years’ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck’s research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, “I like how you keep trying.” She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, “You’re good at math,” but she’ll never tell a child he’s bad at math.

But that’s at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her eight-year- old daughter and her five-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, “You’re great. You did it. You’re smart.” When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. “When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny.”

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they’ve seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior high students. Dweck and her protege, Dr. Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ’stupid.’” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

“These are very persuasive findings,” says Columbia’s Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in children’s sensitivity to rejection. “They show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works.” Downey’s comment is typical of what other scholars in the field are saying. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, “Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results.”

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self- esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self- esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects.

By 1984, the California legislature had created an official self-esteem task force, believing that improving citizens’ self- esteem would do everything from lower dependence on welfare to decrease teen pregnancy. Such arguments turned self- esteem into an unstoppable train, particularly when it came to children. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. (There’s even a school district in Massachusetts that has kids in gym class “jumping rope” without a rope — lest they suffer the embarrassment of tripping.)

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self- esteem and its relationship to everything from sex to career advancement. But the results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem research was polluted with awed science. Most of those 15,000 studies asked people to rate their self-esteem and then asked them to rate their own intelligence, career success, relationship skills, etc. These self-reports were extremely unreliable, since people with high self-esteem have an inflated perception of their abilities. Only 200 of the studies employed a scientifically-sound way to measure self-esteem and its outcomes.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.)

At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction. He recently published an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: the team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly, depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. According to Dweck, the biggest mistake parents make is assuming students aren’t sophisticated enough to see and feel our true intentions. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children under the age of seven take praise at face value: older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies during which children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of twelve, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well — it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. They’ve picked up the pattern: kids who are falling behind get drowned in praise. Teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism not praise at all that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue is one of credibility. “Praise is important, but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing, some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

Excessive praise also distorts children’s motivation; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of intrinsic enjoyment. Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” When they get to college, heavily-praised students commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major they’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.

One suburban New Jersey high school English teacher told me she can spot the kids who get overpraised at home. Their parents think they’re just being supportive, but the students sense their parents’ high expectations, and feel so much pressure they can’t concentrate on the subject, only the grade they will receive. “I had a mother say, ‘You are destroying my child’s self-esteem,’ because I’d given her son a C. I told her, ‘Your child is capable of better work.’ I’m not there to make them feel better. I’m there to make them do better.”

While we might imagine that overpraised kids grow up to be unmotivated softies, the researchers are reporting the opposite consequence. Dweck and others have found that frequently-praised children get more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. Image-maintenance becomes their primary concern. A raft of very alarming studies — again by Dweck — illustrates this.

In one study, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: they have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

In another study, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another school — they’ll never meet these students and won’t know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie.

When students transition into junior high, some who’d done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they’ve been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery increasing effort they view as just further proof of their failure. In interviews many confess they would “seriously consider cheating.”

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

Brushing aside failure, and just focusing on the positive, isn’t the norm all over the world. A young scholar at the University of Illinois, Dr. Florrie Ng, reproduced Dweck’s paradigm with fifth-graders both in Illinois and in Hong Kong. Ng added an interesting dimension to the experiment. Rather than having the kids take the short IQ tests at their school, the children’s mothers brought them to the scholars’ offices on campus (both in Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Hong Kong). While the moms sat in the waiting room, half the kids were randomly given the really hard test, where they could get only about half right inducing a sense of failure. At that point, the kids were given a five-minute break before the second test, and the moms were allowed into the testing room to talk with their child. On the way in, the moms were told their child’s actual raw score and were told a lie that this score represented a below average result. Hidden cameras recorded the five-minute interaction between mother and child.

The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the minutes were spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, “You didn’t concentrate when doing it,” and “Let’s look over your test.” The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance.

After the break, the Chinese kids’ scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans.

The trade-off here would seem to be that the Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel — but that stereotype may not reflect modern parenting in Hong Kong. Nor was it quite what Ng saw on the videotapes. While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices).

My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. He seems supersensitive to the potential judgment of his peers. Luke justifies it by saying, “I’m shy,” but he’s not really shy. He has no fear of strange cities or talking to strangers, and at his school, he has sung in front of large audiences. Rather, I’d say he’s proud and self-conscious. His school has simple uniforms (navy T-shirt, navy pants), and he loves that his choice of clothes can’t be ridiculed, “because then they’d be teasing themselves too.”

After reading Carol Dweck’s research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was that the mindset Dweck wants students to have a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder sounds awfully cliched: try, try again.

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort instead of simply giving up is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located this neural network running through the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. This circuit monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain's chemical reward for success] on the horizon.” While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

That sold me. I’d thought “praise junkie” was just an expression — but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son’s brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.

What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal, each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didn’t want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser.

Then I tried to use the specific-type praise that Dweck recommends. I praised Luke, but I attempted to praise his “process.” This was easier said than done. What are the processes that go on in a five-year-old’s mind? In my impression, 80 percent of his brain processes lengthy scenarios for his action figures.

But every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates, but he’s easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, “You played great.” And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied.

Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great, I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day — We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. For me, the duplicity became glaring.

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem — it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Can I really leave this up to him, at his age?

I’m still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: “What happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?”

“It gets bigger, like a muscle,” he responded, having aced this one before.

This excerpt from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is used by permission of Grand Central Publishing.

The Reid’s Went Over the Mountain

Normally, the kids and I go to Church on Sunday but because Camden was coughing and Garrett had a runny nose we had to stay home from Church. Mike decided we should go for a family adventure up into the mountains. We literally drove to the top of a mountain and it was wonderful. We didn’t go quite as high as we could have because of how long we’d been driving and the kids were getting restless but we got really, really high. I’d never been so high above the ground, except for when flying. I wasn’t able to get shots when we were at our highest elevation but looking down was very intimidating. Mike and I marveled that just one little slip of the car and we’d go tumbling down the mountain.

We followed various logging roads along the mountain and want to go back and do it again next summer. It is kind of weird to drive that far up into a mountain, into the middle of “nowhere” so to speak and to be driving on a maintained road. I kept chiding Mike that it would be like some horror movie and around the next bend would be some secret society or Government facility. But truly, I don’t think I’d be willing to drive up there at night. All of the woodsy horror movies I’d ever seen kept flashing before my eyes.

Here are some of pictures from our drive:

Cami took this shot

Enjoying a “rocket” donut on top of the mountain