"My brother is awesome, he'll dress himself!" Watching my two-year-old brother put on his pants independently, I smiled and praised. "I'm not good, I just say my brother is good?" The sister who is playing with blocks next to her

"My brother is awesome, he'll dress himself!" Watching my two-year-old brother put on his pants independently, I smiled and praised.

"I'm not good, I just say my brother is good?" My sister, who was playing with blocks next to me, heard me praise my brother and asked alertly.

"Great, my sister is great, my sister will already dress herself, right?"

Hearing my praise for my sister's tense expression instantly relaxed a lot.

Looking at my sister who continued to play with blocks, my heart began to worry faintly, because similar words have recently come out of my sister's mouth frequently - "What about me?" "Only praise my brother, not me!" "I'm great too!" ......

The younger brother, who is more than two years old recently, seems to have been helped by God, and he has got a lot of new skills, which really makes us happy, and with each new skill, we will always praise my brother.

Good boys are exaggerated. Of course, when my sister was young, we also praised her in this way.

We also never felt there was anything wrong with doing so, and it wasn't until recently that I saw my sister frequently ask for praise when we praised our younger brother, and I realized that there may be something we did wrong.

Yes, we do do it wrong, because many times children need not praise, but encouragement.

Children need encouragement, just as plants need water. Without encouragement, a child's personality cannot develop healthily.

Encouragement is important, but in the right way. If the method is not right, it will be counterproductive.

Think about what our ultimate goal is to encourage our children. It is not to give the child a moment of happiness and psychological satisfaction, but to give the child a real sense of self-esteem and achievement.

Many times if we don't guide well, then the praise we give to our children is not encouragement.

Child psychologist Rudolf Drex points out in The Child: The Challenge that if a child sees praise as a reward for himself, less praise will make the child feel demeaned; if the child does not get praise in everything, then he may feel that he is a loser.

Such children do things to be praised, not to be satisfied because of their contributions and efforts.

Therefore, such behavior can easily reinforce the misconception that only praise is valuable, leading to frustration and discouragement.

So how do you properly encourage your child? There is no uniform answer and standard for this, it should depend on the child. However, we need to pay attention to the fact that encouragement is a persistent process, and as long as the ultimate purpose of our approach is to help children tap their own value, then encouragement is effective.

I believe that as long as we are willing to learn and explore, we will have the answer in our hearts.