A Parent’s Guide to Praise
“Well done” slips out a hundred times a day. It happens at the breakfast table, at the school gate, over homework, after a football match. Most of it is heartfelt and instinctive, and none of it does any harm. But there is a growing body of research suggesting that the *way* we praise children shapes how they think about effort, ability and failure, often more than the praise itself.
The interesting part is not that praise matters. It is that not all praise pulls in the same direction.
The trouble with “clever”
Telling a child they are clever feels like a gift. It is warm, it is generous, and it lands well in the moment. The difficulty is what it quietly teaches over time. When a child comes to believe that success flows from a fixed trait they either have or lack, a hard task stops being a challenge and starts being a threat. If cleverness is the thing being tested, then struggling must mean the cleverness has run out.
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Psychologist Carol Dweck’s long-running work on mindset found exactly this pattern. Children praised for being smart tended to avoid harder tasks afterwards, preferring the safety of things they already knew they could do. Children praised for their effort and strategy chose the harder challenges more often. The words were small. The effect on behaviour was not.
Praising the process, not the person
The practical shift is to point praise at what a child actually did rather than at who they are. “You kept going even when that got difficult” tells a child that persistence is worth something. “You tried a different way of working it out” tells them that thinking flexibly is valued. These comments give a child a repeatable thing to do next time, which “you’re so talented” never can.
This is not about withholding warmth or turning every kind word into a coaching note. Children still need to feel delighted in for no reason at all. It is simply about noticing that specific, honest, effort-focused praise builds something durable, while vague labels tend to evaporate the moment things get hard.
It is worth being honest, too. Children have a sharp ear for praise that is not true, and empty flattery teaches them to distrust the person offering it. Praise carries weight precisely because it is not handed out for everything.
What good schools model
Parents do not have to work this out alone. Some of the most useful ideas come from watching how thoughtful schools talk to pupils every day. Settings that take wellbeing and academic ambition seriously tend to frame feedback around growth rather than judgement, and there is a lot to learn from schools that place real emphasis on resilience and independent learning. The language teachers use in a classroom, focused on progress, strategy and honest reflection, translates surprisingly well to the kitchen table.
At Lady Eleanor Holles, staff talk about praise as something that should help a pupil understand their own learning, not simply feel good for a moment. That distinction is a helpful one for any parent to borrow.
A gentler expectation
There is a quiet relief in all this for parents. It means you do not have to be a cheerleader for your child’s every triumph, nor a critic of every stumble. You can simply describe what you see. “That took real concentration.” “You worked at that for a long time.” “You went back and fixed the bit that wasn’t right.” Comments like these are easy to make and hard to overdo.
Over years, small habits of language add up. A child who hears that effort, curiosity and persistence are the things worth noticing tends to carry that belief into adulthood, long after the specific praise is forgotten. That, in the end, is the point. Praise is not really about the moment it is given. It is about the story a child slowly learns to tell about themselves.
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You can find more on the school’s approach to learning and wellbeing at https://lehs.org.uk.
*Written by the team at Lady Eleanor Holles, an independent day school for girls in Hampton, south-west London, known for combining high academic standards with a strong focus on pastoral care and pupil wellbeing. Lady Eleanor Holles (LEH) supports families in raising confident, curious and resilient young people.*
