Cal Ripkin Jr. and I Give Advice on Raising Kids

According to a news report on television, Cal Ripkin Jr. has a new book out telling parents how to work with their athletic sons and daughters. One of his key points, apparently, is that kids are trying to figure out who they are and this is a process with lots of highs and lows. If the parent praises the kid excessively when he or she performs well, it increases the depth of the lows.

I think the book Punished by Rewards is accurate when it suggests that praising and rewarding kids or anyone else is more often counter productive than productive. For example, the curve reflecting the number of books read by kids who were rewarded by giving money for reading books was initially much steeper than one in which the kids were encouraged to read books because of the intrinsic value of reading. However, when the rewards stopped, as they inevitably will, the curve dropped dramatically and the intrinsically rewarded curve passed them by a great margin resulting in many more books read in the long run by those intrinsically rewarded than those extrinsically rewarded with money.

But if a parent must reward, I think it is best to reward the process. In every situation there are many things you can't control. But the one thing a person can control is how well they prepared, whether or not they stuck to it during the difficult times, whether they created the mental conditions that allowed the talents they'd work so hard to develop to express themselves. In other words praise the process not the outcome. This means that every child is a candidate for praise not just those who give outstanding performances.