When Praising Your Child, Is Bigger Better?
If your child is finding a task difficult, you do not have to keep making the praise more spectacular. My practical suggestion is to offer a warm, ordinary acknowledgment rather than assume that “incredibly well” must help more than “well.” A 2022 experiment gives a reason to question that assumption: bigger praise did not reliably encourage children to change their approach after failure. Modest praise did, but only at the lower end of the study's self-esteem scores. At the higher end, the pattern reversed.
That is a more complicated answer than a parenting slogan. It is also more useful than treating encouragement as a volume knob.
One adverb, quite a lot of equipment
Eddie Brummelman and colleagues recruited 202 children, aged eight to twelve, and one parent per child at the NEMO science museum in the Netherlands. Children first answered questions about how they felt about themselves. Then they put on a virtual-reality headset and tried to copy a straight line in three-dimensional space with a handheld controller.
They could see the target line, but not the path their own hand had drawn. After each attempt, the task gave them a green success signal or a red failure signal. To try a different solution, they had to change their movement without seeing exactly what they had done wrong.
The task also adjusted its success threshold to each child's recent attempts. Failure was part of the design, not evidence that a child had arrived at the museum particularly bad at lines.
Halfway through sixty attempts, the parent spoke through the child's headphones. Parents were randomly assigned to give one of three responses: “You did well!”, “You did incredibly well!”, or no praise. Even in the no-praise condition, the parent greeted the child and said they were halfway done.
The two compliments differed by one adverb. The equipment was considerably more elaborate.
The researchers then measured how much children changed their movements after a failed attempt. This was their measure of exploration: trying a different movement rather than repeating the previous one. They were not measuring how long children would persevere, how much they loved their parent, or whether they felt more confident afterward.
The compliment did not land the same way for everyone
After withdrawals, interruptions, and missing data, 192 children remained in the analysis. There was no overall boost in exploration from either kind of praise compared with no praise. The interesting result appeared when the researchers took the children's earlier self-esteem scores into account.
Toward the lower end of those scores, children varied their movements more after modest praise than after either inflated praise or no praise. Toward the higher end, children varied their movements less after modest praise. Inflated praise showed no reliable difference from no praise across self-esteem levels.
The researchers treated self-esteem as a sliding scale, not as two fixed kinds of child. The finding does not hand parents a test for deciding whether their child belongs in the “good job” or “amazing job” department.
One possible explanation is that modest praise reassures a child who doubts themselves without suggesting that the next attempt must also be exceptional. For a child who already feels very positive about themselves, the same compliment might sound underwhelming. Those are explanations the authors discuss, not feelings they demonstrated were driving the result. They did not measure anxiety during the task.
The useful surprise is that adding more approval did not reliably produce more exploration. And removing the extra word was not universally better either.
Bring the attention home, not the laboratory rule
Suppose your child is making a cardboard bridge that keeps collapsing. You can acknowledge an actual step: “You got the two sides to stand up.” You can be interested in what they want to try next without declaring the structure an engineering triumph.
That is an invented home example and an editorial suggestion. The experiment did not test specific observations like that sentence, ask parents to coach a building task, or establish the best response to a child's frustration. Both tested compliments praised performance; this was not a comparison of praising intelligence with praising effort.
The study concerned one brief exchange, in a mostly Dutch sample of eight- to twelve-year-olds, with the parent largely reduced to a voice in the headphones. Its effects were small. The task was too short to establish whether the extra exploration produced better learning over time, and it did not show that either phrase builds a stronger relationship.
So I would not turn this into a ban on enthusiasm, or start editing every affectionate sentence in front of your child. The narrower lesson is to stop assuming that a bigger compliment is automatically a more helpful one. Offer encouragement that fits what happened, and stay interested in the child beyond the quality of the latest attempt.
You can be delighted by your child without needing every cardboard bridge to qualify as a landmark.
The research
Eddie Brummelman, Stathis Grapsas, and Katinka van der Kooij (2022). Parental praise and children's exploration: a virtual reality experiment. Scientific Reports, 12, 4967.
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