Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job!"
By Alfie Kohn
NOTE: This article was published in Young Children, September
2001; and, in abridged form (with the title "Hooked on Praise"), in
Parents
Magazine, May 2000.
Hang out at a playground, visit a school, or show up at a child’s birthday
party, and there’s one phrase you can count on hearing repeatedly: "Good
job!" Even tiny infants are praised for smacking their hands together ("Good
clapping!"). Many of us blurt out these judgments of our children to the
point that it has become almost a verbal tic.
Plenty of books and articles advise us against relying on punishment, from spanking
to forcible isolation ("time out"). Occasionally someone will even
ask us to rethink the practice of bribing children with stickers or food. But
you’ll have to look awfully hard to find a discouraging word about what
is euphemistically called positive reinforcement.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question
the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them
and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a
different story entirely. Here's why.
1. Manipulating children. Suppose you offer a verbal reward to reinforce the
behavior of a two-year-old who eats without spilling, or a five-year-old who
cleans up her art supplies. Who benefits from this? Is it possible that telling
kids they’ve done a good job may have less to do with their emotional needs
than with our convenience?
Rheta DeVries, a professor of education at the University of Northern Iowa, refers
to this as "sugar-coated control." Very much like tangible rewards – or,
for that matter, punishments – it’s a way of doing something to children
to get them to comply with our wishes. It may be effective at producing this
result (at least for a while), but it’s very different from working with
kids – for example, by engaging them in conversation about what makes a
classroom (or family) function smoothly, or how other people are affected by
what we have done -- or failed to do. The latter approach is not only more respectful
but more likely to help kids become thoughtful people.
The reason praise can work in the short run is that young children are hungry
for our approval. But we have a responsibility not to exploit that dependence
for our own convenience. A "Good job!" to reinforce something that
makes our lives a little easier can be an example of taking advantage of children’s
dependence. Kids may also come to feel manipulated by this, even if they can’t
quite explain why.
2. Creating praise junkies. To be sure, not every use of praise is a calculated
tactic to control children’s behavior. Sometimes we compliment kids just
because we’re genuinely pleased by what they’ve done. Even then,
however, it’s worth looking more closely. Rather than bolstering a child’s
self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us. The more we say, "I
like the way you…." or "Good ______ing," the more kids come
to rely on our evaluations, our decisions about what’s good and bad, rather
than learning to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth
in terms of what will lead us to smile and dole out some more approval.
Mary Budd Rowe, a researcher at the University of Florida, discovered that students
who were praised lavishly by their teachers were more tentative in their responses,
more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice ("Um, seven?"). They
tended to back off from an idea they had proposed as soon as an adult disagreed
with them. And they were less likely to persist with difficult tasks or share
their ideas with other students.
In short, "Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately,
it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that
the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise
them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue
to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they
did was OK. Surely this is not what we want for our daughters and sons.
3. Stealing a child’s pleasure. Apart from the issue of dependence, a child
deserves to take delight in her accomplishments, to feel pride in what she’s
learned how to do. She also deserves to decide when to feel that way. Every time
we say, "Good job!", though, we’re telling a child how to feel.
To be sure, there are times when our evaluations are appropriate and our guidance
is necessary -- especially with toddlers and preschoolers. But a constant stream
of value judgments is neither necessary nor useful for children’s development.
Unfortunately, we may not have realized that "Good job!" is just as
much an evaluation as "Bad job!" The most notable feature of a positive
judgment isn’t that it’s positive, but that it’s a judgment.
And people, including kids, don’t like being judged.
I cherish the occasions when my daughter manages to do something for the first
time, or does something better than she’s ever done it before. But I try
to resist the knee-jerk tendency to say, "Good job!" because I don’t
want to dilute her joy. I want her to share her pleasure with me, not look to
me for a verdict. I want her to exclaim, "I did it!" (which she often
does) instead of asking me uncertainly, "Was that good?"
4. Losing interest. "Good painting!" may get children to keep painting
for as long as we keep watching and praising. But, warns Lilian Katz, one of
the country’s leading authorities on early childhood education, "once
attention is withdrawn, many kids won’t touch the activity again." Indeed,
an impressive body of scientific research has shown that the more we reward people
for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had
to do to get the reward. Now the point isn’t to draw, to read, to think,
to create – the point is to get the goody, whether it’s an ice cream,
a sticker, or a "Good job!"
In a troubling study conducted by Joan Grusec at the University of Toronto, young
children who were frequently praised for displays of generosity tended to be
slightly less generous on an everyday basis than other children were. Every time
they had heard "Good sharing!" or "I’m so proud of you for
helping," they became a little less interested in sharing or helping. Those
actions came to be seen not as something valuable in their own right but as something
they had to do to get that reaction again from an adult. Generosity became a
means to an end.
Does praise motivate kids? Sure. It motivates kids to get praise. Alas, that’s
often at the expense of commitment to whatever they were doing that prompted
the praise.
5. Reducing achievement. As if it weren’t bad enough that "Good job!" can
undermine independence, pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how
good a job children actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised
for doing well at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and
they don’t do as well as children who weren’t praised to begin with.
Why does this happen? Partly because the praise creates pressure to "keep
up the good work" that gets in the way of doing so. Partly because their
interest in what they’re doing may have declined. Partly because they become
less likely to take risks – a prerequisite for creativity – once
they start thinking about how to keep those positive comments coming.
More generally, "Good job!" is a remnant of an approach to psychology
that reduces all of human life to behaviors that can be seen and measured. Unfortunately,
this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind behaviors. For
example, a child may share a snack with a friend as a way of attracting praise,
or as a way of making sure the other child has enough to eat. Praise for sharing
ignores these different motives. Worse, it actually promotes the less desirable
motive by making children more likely to fish for praise in the future.
*
Once you start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these
constant little evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect
as fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child
to give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around
to them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), "Good praising!"
Still, it’s not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at
first, to stop praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding
something. But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because
we need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s
true, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.
What kids do need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. That’s
not just different from praise – it’s the opposite of praise. "Good
job!" is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement
and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things that please us.
This point, you’ll notice, is very different from a criticism that some
people offer to the effect that we give kids too much approval, or give it too
easily. They recommend that we become more miserly with our praise and demand
that kids "earn" it. But the real problem isn’t that children
expect to be praised for everything they do these days. It’s that we’re
tempted to take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining
and helping them to develop needed skills and good values.
So what’s the alternative? That depends on the situation, but whatever
we decide to say instead has to be offered in the context of genuine affection
and love for who kids are rather than for what they’ve done. When unconditional
support is present, "Good job!" isn’t necessary; when it’s
absent, "Good job!" won’t help.
If we’re praising positive actions as a way of discouraging misbehavior,
this is unlikely to be effective for long. Even when it works, we can’t
really say the child is now "behaving himself"; it would be more accurate
to say the praise is behaving him. The alternative is to work with the child,
to figure out the reasons he’s acting that way. We may have to reconsider
our own requests rather than just looking for a way to get kids to obey. (Instead
of using "Good job!" to get a four-year-old to sit quietly through
a long class meeting or family dinner, perhaps we should ask whether it’s
reasonable to expect a child to do so.)
We also need to bring kids in on the process of making decisions. If a child
is doing something that disturbs others, then sitting down with her later and
asking, "What do you think we can do to solve this problem?" will likely
be more effective than bribes or threats. It also helps a child learn how to
solve problems and teaches that her ideas and feelings are important. Of course,
this process takes time and talent, care and courage. Tossing off a "Good
job!" when the child acts in the way we deem appropriate takes none of those
things, which helps to explain why "doing to" strategies are a lot
more popular than "working with" strategies.
And what can we say when kids just do something impressive? Consider three possible
responses:
* Say nothing. Some people insist a helpful act must be "reinforced" because,
secretly or unconsciously, they believe it was a fluke. If children are basically
evil, then they have to be given an artificial reason for being nice (namely,
to get a verbal reward). But if that cynicism is unfounded – and a lot
of research suggests that it is – then praise may not be necessary.
* Say what you saw. A simple, evaluation-free statement ("You put your shoes
on by yourself" or even just "You did it") tells your child that
you noticed. It also lets her take pride in what she did. In other cases, a more
elaborate description may make sense. If your child draws a picture, you might
provide feedback – not judgment – about what you noticed: "This
mountain is huge!" "Boy, you sure used a lot of purple today!"
If a child does something caring or generous, you might gently draw his attention
to the effect of his action on the other person: "Look at Abigail’s
face! She seems pretty happy now that you gave her some of your snack." This
is completely different from praise, where the emphasis is on how you feel about
her sharing.
* Talk less, ask more. Even better than descriptions are questions. Why tell
him what part of his drawing impressed you when you can ask him what he likes
best about it? Asking "What was the hardest part to draw?" or "How
did you figure out how to make the feet the right size?" is likely to nourish
his interest in drawing. Saying "Good job!", as we’ve seen, may
have exactly the opposite effect.
This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions
of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine
expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s
future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions
helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly
look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what
she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just
wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head?
It’s not a matter of memorizing a new script, but of keeping in mind our
long-term goals for our children and watching for the effects of what we say.
The bad news is that the use of positive reinforcement really isn’t so
positive. The good news is that you don’t have to evaluate in order to
encourage.
_________________________________________________
Copyright © 2001 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded,
reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes
this notice
along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally
appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained
in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it
for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact
page at www.alfiekohn.org.
Back to homeschooling resource page