Challenge #2: stop over-praising our kid

It’s been a couple of weeks since my first attempt to create a habit – I needed some time to think it all through, see how it all turns out in a longer term. I’m still mostly single-tasking and I still notice myself multi-task every now and then which I think is Okay as long as I notice it.

Now that some time has passed, me and my wife- we decided to go for a common habit, as we both have this one problem. It is not a new idea that praising a child could spoil him in a long-term and I’m not going to go into details as to why and how this can happen but you can find many articles both trying to prove and deny that online. We believe it is okay to let him know we’re excited about something remarkable he has done or to encourage him in the process of doing something good, but to a certain level. We must be careful not to overdo it. Now we are both praising him like crazy every time we see him, just to mention how cute, beautiful, smart and fine he is. Sure, he’s just a little over 6 months now but time flies while we’re having fun and we don’t want to end up where we are now when he is two.

It’s not just black and white with praising- for instance instead of applauding for sharing a toy with a friend it may be a good idea to explain how his friend is feeling now that he was so generous. You can also tell what you like about the drawing your littie-guy has just made, but don’t just blindly compliment every step he makes. Is he THAT good for crawling to and tasting the vacuum-cleaner he was staring at for the whole fifteen seconds?

Now the technical details. First of, instead of 30 days, we decided to run this for 15 days – mainly because he is always on our mind and we do have plenty of time to practice our habit (of course, the other reason being- it is very important for us). Moreover, we were already trying to live that way for more than a week- and quite successfully, actually. As with single-tasking, I will be reporting on the progress daily here on my blog, or my wife will do it (and I guess sometimes we both will).

The Goal

Our goal is to make us think before we speak when it comes to our kid’s little achievements (and ordinary deeds), think about long-term impact to his life. The goal will be achieved when we’ll have none (or at least much less) of these “Outch, I should not have said that!”

Timing

It is different for both of us, but it does overlap and in general it’s whenever we spend time with our kid- so it’s like 3-4 hours for me and probably about 10-12 hours for my wife.

The trigger

For me the trigger is my late morning when I come to the living room right after brushing my teeth and showering- that’s when I start praising him the most. For my wife that’s I guess the first time baby makes her laugh (she wakes up at 5-6am with him and I’m not sure she’s up for praising that early), or when he’s drinking his D-vitamin. Other triggers are such as:

• every time he is smiling.
• every time he has done something cool.
• every time he is kind enough to eat a spoon of mash.
• every time he is sooo cute.

So you see, that’s pretty much all the time, when we’re spending it with him, but I think that’s good because we’ll have more time to focus on the habit.

Reporting

We will report to you, right here on this blog. By the way, most likely it will be new posts rather than comments this time. Let’s see if that will be more convenient. And let me know if that is more or less convenient for you.