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All About Me

By Charles Rush

September 20, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 7.2Mb) ]

e Wilson, heckling the President of the United States on national television… Serena with the cameras rolling and the mike on… Kanye on live TV…

I'm sure I'm wrong but I was wondering to myself, What if we are all increasingly becoming self-involved little bubbles walking and driving near unto one another but really plugged into our iPods, our cell phones, completely oblivious to the fact that we are blathering loudly on our cell phones about the intimate thoughts of our inner lives, so they are overheard by total strangers on the corner of Lexington and 53rd because we forget that they are actually there. What if our world is actually imperceptibly morphing towards a great group of discrete individuals whose principal occupation is ‘all about me?'

Perhaps you saw the political cartoon a week ago that featured a teacher in front of her 4th grade class, putting the writing assignment on the board. The essay to be written was ‘What I did last summer', the classic 1st essay of school since Adam and Eve were teaching. In our era, some kid shouts out from the back row, “Teacher didn't you keep up with me all summer on Twitter?”

I'm standing in Penn station next to a woman that is looking at her Blackberry, shaking her head in utter annoyance. She leans over to me and asks rhetorically, ‘why should I care that you are really enjoying your corn dog just now?' She was reviewing her lamentably banal comments on Facebook.

She continues another post out loud, “Dear Fall, I love you so very much. Please stay here as long as you can. I promise to jump in your leaves and play in your breeze”… Throws her hands up, walks away.

Our scripture this morning has a wonderful little line at the end ‘Each of us is an original'. We each have intrinsic value and we each have a wonderfully personal impact on the world that comes into being when we realize the unique potential that is resident in us. We are only asked to become ourselves, but are profoundly asked, to become who we are authentically meant to be.

How does that rather deep observation slide over into a world where it is all about me?

One important strand of it for our generation has to do with praise and how we praise our children when we are raising them. It is a bit of a touchy subject for my generation. That is largely because when Nathaniel Branden published his volume in 1969 on the centrality of ‘self-esteem' it caught cultural attention right away and became the unspoken mantra of the era.[i]

Prior to the 70's praise was under-utilized. Ask people my age and older a memory about being praised, they will recall something specific. It only happened a few times in their youth.

After the 70's we grew up on a literature and the media reporting on the great social benefits that will come positive self-regard that would curb the wide-spread drug addiction of the era, teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, violence, and the marginalization felt by minorities (remember ‘Black is beautiful, the Women's Liberation movement, Gay Pride). It was one of those movements that fairly quickly became common sense across the board.

Mine was the generation that started putting little positive notes in our children's lunches, ‘warm fuzzies', my wife used to call them. We are the generation that started giving everyone on the team a trophy. We had our kids watch Sesame street from day one where they learned from Kermit the Frog that it is okay being green and from Ms. Piggy that porcine is precious. On the whole, it was a great leap forward on so many fronts. And we almost universally agreed on the great virtues of encouraging positive self-regard.

…So much so that I recently read a remark from a journalist that “Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting.” Whatever else we may do or not do, we know that our role as parents is one of encourager and builder of confidence.

Meanwhile, under the media radar, researchers have been testing praise and their findings are significant. Professor Carol Dweck, now at Stanford, did most of her research on 5th grade students in Manhattan at twenty different schools. She had a hunch that what kind of praise we offer might be more important than the general admonition to praise itself.[ii]

She had the students take a fairly easy IQ test so that all of them would do well. After the test was over, the students were told their scores which were all high. Now she randomly divided the students into two groups. Both groups were given a single line of praise but for different things. She wanted to see what difference it would make.

The first group were told, “Wow, you did really well on this test, you must be smart”.

The second group were told, “Wow, you did really well on this test, you must have worked really hard.” What kind of difference do you think that made?

This is how they tested for the difference. They gave the children a second round of testing but they gave them all a choice. They said, “you can A) take a harder test but you will learn more from trying to answer the puzzles or B) you can take another easy test just like the first one.

The kids that were praised for their intelligence? The majority took the easy test.

The kids that were praised for their effort? 90% took the harder test.

Moreover, there was a fairly distinct ethos between the groups as well. By and large, the kids that were praised for their intelligence were anxious and miserable. But the majority of kids praised for their effort would go out of their way to comment about the harder test like ‘This is my favorite test yet.'

I recognize that most of you are ‘gulping a big gulp' right now because almost all of us routinely explain to our children when no one is around, ‘that is very good Jill that you added your change, you are so smart.' So what is the difference?

Praising people for their intelligence is a mixed blessing. That is because intelligence is something we are just given by nature and not for us to shape. If we can't control it, it makes us anxious, especially the prospect of a daunting challenge that might expose us. If we fail, then we aren't as smart as everyone else believes us to be. Unconsciously, it encourages us to avoid challenges to our image. More than that, if we attempt to face the intellectual challenge and we fail, then the impact of that failure is so much the greater if this is integral to our self-image. Professor Dweck says that what even 5th graders have already internalized from this combination of signals: “Look smart, don't risk making mistakes”

How does that actually manifest itself in your kids that age? Especially around the middle school years when they are hormonal and tentative already for reasons of maturation, if they try something new and are not immediately successful at it, their image maintenance control signals them to instantly shy away from a new challenge and protest right up front, “Eh, I'm just not any good at that.” They need to be instantly adroit in order to feel confident enough to get involved.

And this internal dynamic comes right at the same time that the vast majority of New York parents are starting to talk seriously about academics and communicating to our kids in ways spoken and silent that they are responsible for grades and maybe sports – limiting the focus of their responsibilities and also their re-creational activity.

Interestingly, this focus on praising intelligence has another unintended consequence internalized by children, according to the literature. It actually mitigates how much effort they are willing to expend. When we remind them continually how smart they are, they conclude that they are just naturally gifted and therefore shouldn't have to work like everyone else. In fact, if they should be seen to be working too hard, it would upset the image that others have of them, so we are giving them a disincentive to realize their potential. Whoa, whoa, whoa, that is not what we meant.

Curiously, we find ourselves wondering why Jr. who has such a high IQ is only half trying in school, more interested in video games than in math, and never seems to be motivated to actually try to move from the B range to the A range, no matter how hard we beg, plead, or bribe. I don't think it occurred to most of us that we might actually be part of the problem.

And there is one other pernicious unintended consequence. Praising intelligence complicates how our kids deal with failure in such a way that it makes it more difficult for them to fail. What caught my eye is the fact that while this is true for boys and girls, Professor Dweck's study showed that it was actually truest for the brightest girls. They were more likely to broadly just give up after a failure. (The tendency to collapse).

Responding to failure is actually quite important and if there is one area that all of us parents are concerned about it is how to create a context where you can learn from your failures and grow from them in a productive way. We know that something we have done in the previous generation set our kids up, so that they are not adept at handling failure. Over and over, you hear parents wondering if their kids have what it takes to deal with setbacks and failures out there in the ‘real world'.

Praising children for effort had quite different results. Says Professor Dweck, ‘praising kids for their effort, gives them a variable they can control.' When they feel that they can control this, they are more willing to test the limits, to try new things. Not only that, when these students took the same test twice, the ones that were praised for their effort increased their scores by 30% on average. The kids that were praised for their intelligence saw their scores dip by an average of 20%.

Likewise, all of the children were given a third test that was indeed much harder-actually two grades harder than where their natural age – so all of them did poorly. The kids that were praised for their hard work were much less likely to be threatened by failure. Internally, they recognized that there are limits to hard work and those limits don't seem to affect their sense of personal dignity.

Professor Dweck took this just a bit further and was able to show that excessive praise of children actually induces them to become competitive in the unhealthy manner that we parents worry about. It makes them more likely to attack their peers and siblings because they are overly-concerned about image-maintenance.

In a study similar to the first, students were given a test. After it was over, they were given a choice. They could spend five minutes studying some methods to do better on the next test or, they could wait while the first test was graded and find out what grade they made. The children praised for intelligence wanted to know the grade, those for effort wanted to study new strategies.[iii]

The spiritual dimension of this is apparent. We want our children to do well but we recognize the danger in being too motivated by extrinsic rewards – trophies, college brands, and money – because they if learning and inquisitiveness are not intrinsically satisfying, they will be dropped as soon as the perq's cease. And we know that our culture is trending in a worrisome direction towards more and more external rewards that is shaping all of our children. Too many of our children are too worried about their image and it doesn't take Dr. Freud to point it out.

Similarly, students were given a test, told their score, and were asked to send a note to some students in another school, students in another school that they would never see and never know. They included some basic information about themselves and they were asked to report the score they just made on the test. Of the kids that were praised for their effort, almost all of them reported their score exactly as it was. Of the kids that were praised for their intelligence, 40% of them lied and inflated their scores. Why do they lie? It is one of the pernicious effects of being ‘too concerned' about image. In this case, there is nothing even at stake. It is part of the routine of maintenance of that image.

Everybody knows we have a large and growing problem with cheating among our youngsters. Until recently it was a mystery. First, we sensed that it might have something to do with internalized competition. Few of us really thought that it might be related to their ‘image-maintenance' combined with the fact that we have under-equipped them to deal productively with failure.

If you want to strengthen our ability to rebound and persist we are not all that different from any other mammal, you deploy intermittent reinforcement. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis has actually shown how structured training has altered the brain pattern of reward, the chemical substructure that undergirds our moods and disposition. The key is to figure out how encourage them to learn to do things more and more for intrinsic reasons that don't have to be propped up with a reward. We don't want to unwittingly train them to the reward.

It is curious that having a strategy for dealing with failure would be so important. At the same time, when you listen to most people tell the story of their lives, one of the pivotal chapters turns out to be something they failed at utterly and rebounded from. It was an integral part of their developing independence and thriving. Integrating failure fosters independence and the will to risk in the healthy sense of exploration and growth.

Not surprisingly, studies point out that praise needs to be specific to be effective. For most of us this is not our default setting. And the way you know that is just try it for a few days. Ask yourself, exactly what am I praising at this moment and why am I doing it?

Also not surprisingly, the research underscores the importance of sincerity. We are fundamentally emotional creatures, particularly adept at reading cues subliminally and we teach this very important skill to our children from the earliest ages, so we are very good at it.

Professor Wulf-Uwe Meyer studied children in the classroom and has documented how children, by the time they reach the age of 12 understand that a teacher's praise is a sign that the teacher doesn't really think they can do the work. They get it that teachers are harder on the best students, so they will seek ways to avoid being praised. At any rate, they discount praise routinely because they can read the double message subliminally.

I would suspect that the same thing is true when we use praise to communicate our very high hopes and expectations to our children. They are very sophisticated on an emotional level and it is also one of the biggest challenges of parenting – figuring out genuinely what is in each child and letting them develop their path. We are always pre-consciously compensating and parents just routinely have to separate ways that they are projecting onto the next generation from letting them develop for who they are. We are aware and then we are not aware of that on-going dynamic. But that is what makes it so challenging and so fulfilling when it comes together positively.

And that is what we want, to channel energy positively. Praise is a powerful, important tool. St. Paul's description here is what life looks like when you are tending positive spiritual energy consciously and subliminally. It brings gifts into our life like an orchard ripe with fruit – things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. May you so bear spiritual fruit and may peace be upon you. Amen.

[i] This comes from Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman's book “NurtureShock” (New York:12 Books, 2009), p. 18. Most of what follows comes from their reporting on the research. I recommend the book. Bronson and Merryman write for Time magazine. They do an admirable job of summarizing the research and making it accessible to the wider audience without getting bogged down in research methods. My qualification is that they are journalists and not academics and thus, one is never entirely sure about their judgments assessing what we are to make of the research. I've tried to keep to the more obvious, less controversial pieces that are cited.

[ii] Ibid. pps. 14 and ff.

[iii] Ibid. pp. 21, 22.