Build Confidence Through Praise
The Apostle Paul’s encouragement to young Christians provides a good model for how to build up our children: We instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now, we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. Paul’s strategy to stimulate further growth was to build on their successes. They had made a good start in pleasing God, but he wanted them to do so more and more.
The same principle should be used in praising our child athletes. If your daughter lacks some aggressiveness on the basketball court, don’t whine about her lack of intensity. Commend her for the time she battled for and snared a rebound. If your son made an error in a baseball game, talk about a good defensive play that he made—“You did a great job gauging the wind on that pop fly that you caught in the 2nd inning. Not many fifth-graders could make that play!”
Some parents withhold praise because they think it will give their child a “big head”. But most often, the braggart’s self-praise is a vain attempt to fill his need for approval. If you don’t praise him, he will praise himself.
But be careful--you can praise your child too much. Such “junk praise” is not worth much and it may seriously mislead him—which seems to be the case with many contestants on American Idol: "The less-than-skilled singers auditioning for American Idol is as staggering as it is sad. Simon Cowell, one of the judges on the show, has gained a reputation as being the “mean old bad guy” because he tells people the truth: some of them simply can’t sing. The fact that they’ve never been told this for fear of hurting their feelings is a troubling commentary on what we value today. "
When your child plays poorly, don’t falsely praise him by slapping him on the back and saying: “Good job!” He knows better and will resent your good-willed lie. At some point, your child may need to hear: “Tom, you’re a better basketball player than soccer player. Maybe you would like to put more time into developing your basketball skills.” Or, when a child moans about a poor performance, it might be appropriate to say, “I think you’re not improving because you have slacked off on your practice.”
For a child to be successful in the adult world, he needs to be able to discern his strengths and weaknesses, where he is gifted and not gifted. When parents offer too much approval and enthusiasm for anything and everything their child does, it disrupts the child’s growing ability to discern the truth about himself.
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