A pro-family advocate says a recent study published in
Psychological Science highlights the problem of too much positive reinforcement. The study compared teens from the 1970s with teens today, and researchers found that today's teens are highly overconfident, more arrogant, and expect more things to be handed to them rather than earning their way. The researchers concluded that the self-esteem movement may have gone too far. Dr. Bill Maier from
Focus on the Family agrees. He says over the past two decades a "cult" of self esteem has developed within parenting and teaching, and society is just now seeing the fallout from it.
"We've even had experiences here at Focus on the Family with our Human Resources department where young, new employees right out of college come in for an entry-level position and they expect to have a corner office with a view of Pike's Peak and a nice salary with big perks -- and they're kind of surprised to learn that that's not in the cards for them," he notes. "So I do believe we really are setting up kids for failure and frustration if we lead them to believe that life is going to be a bed of roses and that the world owes them everything on a silver platter."
He encourages parents to give praise where praise is due, but also to be willing to correct children when they do wrong. Maier believes when parents balance praise and discipline, they are preparing children for the real world. "If we believe that every child is just this inherent fountain of goodness and we don't implement consequences when a child doesn't follow through, when a child deliberately breaks the rules, again what we're doing is we're going to create a whole generation of young people who just don't get it and who are really going to have a lot of difficulty getting through life," he concludes.
Christian theologian and seminary president Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., concurs. In a February 2007 column, Dr. Mohler writes that while praising effort and achievement yields positive results, "praising for the sake of praising" -- one of the tenets of the self-esteem movement -- "hurts far more than it helps. It is a recipe for individual and social disaster."
