Will Play for Praise

Parents of college students: When you see your kids at Thanksgiving, don’t ask them how they are doing (in terms of grades). Ask them what they’ve learned. Ask what they have enjoyed. Ask what is magical, transformative, even useful.
 
And students: Don’t play for praise. Don’t learn for me.
 
Sink in, really be there, and forget about your teachers. Forget about me.
 
Play, learn, climb the log for yourself.
​

Over the weekend I went to the American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis. At the Hyatt Regency I watched a two-year-old climbing on a metal log-like bench. She was having fun, but she also kept looking over her shoulder to see if her mother approved.  As I watched with enjoyment, she added me too. With each successful move, she looked at me, then her mother, waiting. Gold star. Approval. Praise. Great job!


So the little blond cutie had been cocooned in positive feedback her whole life, and nothing could be done completely until she got that praise.  She could not delve into the activity for its own sake, even though it looked really absorbing and really fun—and challenging—to scramble along a slippery metallic simulacrum of a log, with notches. This could have been done on her own, away from adults’ eyes, but she had already had two years, twenty-four months, forty-eight weeks, more than three hundred days, give or take, of parental attention. She had completely absorbed the message that everything she did had two aims: the activity itself, and the response, evaluation, feedback about the activity. She was then always split: she was herself, and she was the watcher of herself.
 
So in my university classrooms, when I am attempting to move away from teacher-centered learning, I am fighting two decades—more than three thousand days—of performing for the teacher. When I ask students to evaluate themselves, they are made off-balance. (Of course, then the evaluation is, in their view, something that will be evaluated by the teacher.) I ask them to stop raising their hands. I don’t look at them when they address me, asking them to talk to their classmates. But even in round rooms, even in consciously unhierarchical seating arrangements, they find me. I tell them to stop worrying about pleasing me; this is their learning. But still they seek my approval.
 
James Herndon in his hilarious and tragic masterpiece (like all masterpieces) How to Survive in Your Native Land writes of his middle-school students being completely confident and capable in their jobs and tasks outside school, including things that are really math, but as soon as they enter the school, their entire focus is on doing for the teacher: Is this right? Is this what you want?

 Our poor, successful, middle-class students have been taught that this is what life is for. It is hard to plunge into an activity for its own sake, to do anything just for its own enjoyment or for learning because it matters. That Holy Grail of psychological well-being, absorption, or flow, cannot be achieved with this double consciousness, in Du Bois’s words (for a different purpose): “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
 
Marx’s notion of alienation is similar: the self cannot be unified because there are always competing masters.
 
I know. We have moved beyond authenticity. It is too earnest, as if there is a single personal essence at the core. And people are always performing. But I think that is part of the cost of our current unease. We are always watching to see the evaluation of our performance.

 There is a lot of research on this, actually. So much so that a person can say “I-R-E” and hearers will know what that means. It stands for “Initiation-Response-Evaluation” (Mehan 1979). That’s a thing.

 It is exactly what well-meaning doctors and social workers and some psychologists are pushing as a “natural” way to “parent” and it is exactly what Alfie Kohn has been decrying for decades.  There is a new anti-praise movement too (here and here).
 
My hypothesis, one I will be exploring in the next year or so, is that this very structure leads to a lifetime of un-ease. It is difficult to be comfortable, because there is always the need for approbation.
 
So my advice to parents is: stop watching every move of your children. Stop praising them for something that is inherently enjoyable. Stop evaluating everything. If you have to talk about their activities, model appreciation of the intrinsic value of their play.
 
Parents of college students: When you see your kids at Thanksgiving, don’t ask them how they are doing (in terms of grades). Ask them what they’ve learned. Ask what they have enjoyed. Ask what is magical, transformative, even useful.
 
And students: Don’t play for praise. Don’t learn for me.
 
Sink in, really be there, and forget about your teachers. Forget about me.
 
Play, learn, climb the log for yourself.
​
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Photo credit for family image
http://www.focusonthefamily.com/-/medialibrary/images/articles/constructive-praise.jpg?h=275&la=en&mw=490&w=490&hash=4AE100B88F4A192FB0A52B89CC017899B3D44A84

photo of Hyatt Regency Minneapolis lobby
https://minneapolis.regency.hyatt.com/en/hotel/our-hotel.html

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