Thursday, January 14, 2016
Children's false sense of success
Today, in class we discussed how children in recent years have been told how great they are. Psychologists suspected that telling these children they are great, when they did not accomplish anything out of the ordinary, was only causing children to have a false sense of success. Instead of creating confident achievers they created entitled and overconfident children. This made me wonder: At what age to does telling children that they are special start to backfire? Take for instance, toddlers, will telling a toddler that he/she is special cause them problems in the future? How long do you have to tell a child that they are special for it to have a significant effect on them? I think that at a very young age children need encouragement, but encouragement does not need to be: "You are the most special child ever!" I think that children should be taught that they have the potential to be great if they work hard.
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I think that it's not so much the age but more of how many times you tell that kid they are special because if I were to tell a 10 year old they are great and all these things to make them feel confident every single day; eventually they will actually start to believe it for themselves.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, it is important for younger kids to get encouragement, especially in sports, so they continue to play. Kids will stop playing sports at a young age if they do not feel like they accomplished anything or are "good." But after the kids know that they love and truly want to play the sport, then kids should no longer get a false sense of confidence by getting trophies just for participation. I believe this age would be around fourth grade.
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