Sunday, November 1, 2009
praise
after having our first official meeting (missing sarah of course) i set off to find out more about one of the many topics we discussed; praise. i found this article by alfie, tara's b-friend. really makes me rethink a lot of what i'm doing and saying to lea. i just think she's amazing all the time, but i can totally understand the points fi-fi makes in his article. and it hits a nerve to the way i am as well. oh these habits are hard to break!
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I read articles like this maybe a year ago, and tried to bounce the ideas off my family and friends. People kind of rolled their eyes and that was the end of the conversation. I think it is great food for thought, and I slowly learned how to mostly stop saying it myself. But every so often I just get excited (like when Charlie did the monkey bars alone for the first time) how could a proud mother not say, GOOD JOB.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of just explaining it rather than judging it. Wow, Charlie you used all your strength and went from bar to bar, was that fun? It takes a lot of thought and training, but is so much more meaningful.
So sad I missed the meeting, when's the next?
:)
yeah...the eye rolling can be so common with this line of thinking. i actually thought jeff might do the same when i explained this article and he surprised me, yet again, with an open minded approach. he said he knows he praises a lot because he wants to encourage lea, not the opposite and that he's open to whatever might help do that. even if it means he has to change his ways. gotta love it. next meeting? don't know. let's figure it out. maybe there is a calendar feature i can add onto this site?
ReplyDeletesarah...we missed you too!
I was thinking a calendar feature would be good too.
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind that Alfie Kohn is also a little nuts and his thoughts are ideals that are impossible and unrealistic to have at all times. This is advice I got from Katy after reading his stuff and telling her, "How can I possibly not screw up our daughter after hearing Alfie speak?"
What I take away from his lectures and articles is that it is great to give thought to this stuff (praise for example), to talk about it with other people, and to use the ideas that feel right to me.
I think that it is important to balance his extreme view with conversations like these, reality, your intuition, and even other people's writing on the subject. (Dweck & Bronston are good and basically lay out the research without being extreme about it.)