This week’s Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) topic was “The Problem of Praise”, an in depth look at the perils of employing praise to reinforce desirable behavior with children. The instructor, a Ph.D. in early childhood education, walked us through a discussion on the major research that demonstrates, among other things, that continuous praise (“Well done!”, “Good job!”, “That is so special!”) can actually lower a child’s desire to strive for achievement. Citing a study on the ubiquitous elementary school “Book It” program sponsored by Pizza Hut that rewards children who read books with free meals from the national pizza franchise, our class learned that the program actually decreases a student’s love of reading. Rather than read for reading sake, as one might expect, continuously rewarding the accomplishment of finishing a book led children to seek pleasure not in reading itself but in the prize or the attendant praise. Far from completing increasingly more and more difficult books, children in the study were found to read below their competency in order to achieve more points, and thus more rewards.
Research shows that when we are praised our brains literally release small amounts of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that heightens our sense of pleasure. Dopamine is directly related to learning in that whatever brings us pleasure we are bound to repeat – and repetition leads to mastery and confidence, both of which increase our sense of pleasure and the cycle continues. What studies have shown is that too frequent praise undercuts the learning process by locating the pleasure in the experience of approval, not in the joy of discovery. Children who are repeatedly praised, one study showed, were more likely to quit tasks at which they first experience failure or that didn’t come as easily. Instead, children who were in some sense hooked on the dopamine produced by praise tended to focus on tasks and activities that they were better at and which garnered them more congratulations.
All of this may come as no surprise to you. In fact, many of you who have raised a family (or participated in ECFE) will know this as though it was second nature. So why, you might ask, am I writing about it here, particularly in a forum usually dedicated to theological reflection and spiritual insight?
In my time as a spiritual leader in the church, I can’t tell you the number of times people – learned and accomplished people, good people – have told me “I’m just no good at spiritual stuff” in the same way I used to tell my parents in junior high “I’m just no good at math.” When a conversation turns to matters of prayer, devotion, experiences with God, and spirituality, these folks will insist that they have nothing of substance to contribute, and most of the time they’re right. Unfortunately no one has ever insisted with them that spirituality and prayer takes hard work and time, the same way your parents and mine insisted the same about math and reading. “So what if you’re not good at math” my dad responded “stick with it and you’ll get better.” He was right. I’m no astrophysicist but I’ll be able to help my son Jude with his pre-calculus homework some day. And, far beyond this, the pleasure I experienced at one new discovery in math in high school far outweighed a dozen compliments I ever received for a poem or an essay.
Of course the comparison of learning to spirituality isn’t a simple one-to-one correlation, and our life of faith isn’t just about “getting better.” But, there is enough from one that maps onto the other that we ought to pay attention. Lent is a time when the church calls each of us as followers of Jesus to deepen our devotion and to pay special attention to the life of the spirit. For most of us (and I include myself here) these things do not come naturally or easily, and there will be little external praise when we do persevere and arrive at new insights and encounters with the Holy. But the reward of these insights and encounters is far too valuable to be forfeited just because we’ve told ourselves we aren’t spiritually gifted. If our experience of educational growth is true, the encounter with the Holy and the spiritual learning itself will propel us to further exploration and prayer, to further devotion and listening, and ultimately to a love, not of praise for our accomplishments, but of the God of our encounter, the One to whom all praise is worthy and with whom is true joy.
If you’d like to read further about the research mentioned above, please read this excellent article in the New York Magazine from back in 2007.