3 Easy Steps to Developing Your Descriptive Praise

Almost intuitively I find parents know they should praise there children. However, in practice, praising your children is one of the fastest ways to not only have the result of better behaved children; it’s also a fantastic way to develop a stronger bond with your child.  When praising your child there are 3 simple strategies for consideration that can help, you as the parent, take your ability to praise your child to a whole new level of parenting excellence.

1. Being Intentional With Praise

Now in this section, I’m just going to point the finger at myself as a parent. For me, I find there are days where it can be super challenging after a long stressful day of work or dealing with life circumstances to praise your child. When I’m tired, feeling stressed or overwhelmed, I will sometimes remind myself of the importance of being intentional as a parent to praise my child. It’s way too easy to always find the faults in our children. By intentionally praising your child, even when super tired, allows you to catch your child doing well and praising them afterwards is a great way to build a stronger bond, to be present and available for your child.     

2. Practicing Descriptive Praise

Praise is a great thing to say to your children. Descriptive Praise is taking praise to a whole new level. Imaging your child is playing with their toys nice and quietly. General praise will cause you to say something such as saying in passing “Good Job.” That’s okay and it’s better than nothing, however, I would encourage you to take your praise to a whole other level and describe what your child is doing so well in what they are demonstrating. Descriptive praise for this child could sound like “Good Job playing with your toys so quietly and calmly.” Here’s some other examples; “Wow, you two are sharing so well together and getting along quite well.” “Great job in brushing your teeth without being asked.” And “It looks like you are really working hard at your homework. I’m very proud of you for trying your best.”

Descriptive praise can be as simple as that. Just catching a good behavior and describing it with what the child is doing well in full sentences.

3. Beware the Double Negative

Okay, so you’re now being intentional and practicing descriptive praise regularly to you child. One more technique to consider is listening to how you are saying your descriptive praise. Sometimes, and even with good intentions, we can unintentionally say a great descriptive praise and then tag on a double negative ending such as “Wow, that was some really calm and quiet playtime. That was soooo much better than last week when you were throwing a tantrum during playtime.” Did you feel what happened there? A positive description of play was given with a negative description of prior poor behavior creating a double negative. Once you catch yourself saying double negatives; you can then go back to being intentional and practice not adding negative statements that neutralize your positive descriptive praise.     

Like anything worth doing or learning when it comes to increasing your ability to parent it takes consistency, application and making some humble mistakes in the parenting process. However, in time, you will find yourself catching your child doing good and taking the opportunity to apply descriptive praise to your palette of effective parenting tools.