on not saying "great job!!!!!!"

I've already discussed the fact that I avoid saying "no" and other negative instructions to Greta. There's another side to that coin. I also avoid saying "Good job!" and clapping my hands and saying "Yea!" and "That's great!"

This is unusual. Most parents give out those verbal gold stars; many use "Good job!" in talking to kids the way that guy in your church uses "Father God" in prayers: almost as a comma. That's why, as many (including the education theorist Alfie Kohn) have noted, we have a generation of praise junkies on our hands.

In an article called "Hooked on Praise" that Kohn wrote for Parenting magazine, he writes about how researchers 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.

It's not just that by constantly (literally! I've seen it and so have you!) applauding your kids you are in fact creating their life as a performance, and that you're taking away the pleasure-in-the-thing-itself that is a prime experience of childhood: you're also making them less confident in the first place, the opposite of your goal.

Naturally, this gets guffaws from folks who believe that encouraging and positively reinforcing your kids' good behavior and accomplishments is a necessary part of their upbringing. But before you start thinking that I'm just some curmudgeon, or, worse, some withholding jerk who's raising a kid with no love from her daddy, stop to think that just about every good behavior or accomplishment can be acknowledged in a way that actually strengthens the experience of childhood.

Did you have fun doing that all by yourself? Did you like the sandwich you made? What was the ant doing? Hey, you started drawing trees with two colors of green! I bet that girl was very glad when you helped her. Which part was the hardest? Which part was the easiest? Which part was the funnest? ... It becomes second nature to buttress a kid's experience this way (or say nothing at all and just let them encounter life), and it's all part of unconditionally loving and supporting a person.

Recently, a kid we know asked me to watch and then did some thing or other, and then asked whether they'd done well. The same day, Greta did something by herself for the first time, didn't know I was watching, and then came over to me and said "Greta do it by self."