“There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.”
-Marianne Williamson
I saw a video recently that struck me. A baby was giving abundant adorable smiles—despite the weird black box right in her face1—and the parent kept repeating a phrase over and over.
“Good smiling! Good smiling!”
It stuck me as so odd. Why are you praising your baby for… smiling?
And yet, it wasn’t all that odd. I see people using the word “good” to and about kids all. the. time. Climbing at the playground or going down a slide: good job. Putting their shoes or pants on: good job. Eating—if kids eat their food and aren’t “picky,” good job; if not, they’re shamed and cajoled into trying it and then when they take that bite, good job. I once saw a mom at the library saying “good pretending!” over and over to her child as she played.
More telling is “good” as an adjective. “Is she a good baby?” is such a common question asked to new moms. (And by it, people mean, “Does she sleep well, not cry that much?”) It continues as they grow. “Good” kids are kids that are quiet and calm, and/or immediately compliant to adult requests. Kids are “good,” apparently, if they’re not too much of a hassle to adults.
Listen, I’m not trying to “gentle parent script” anyone. No single word or phrase is going to make or break your child. I’m simply questioning why the word “good” so easily comes out of our mouths when talking to or about small children. Why are we even evaluating children? Especially for things like smiling and eating and playing, normal tasks of existence?
And it’s not just that: we as parents seem to need “good job,” too. Are we even parenting if we’re not taking pictures or videos of what we’re doing with our kids and posting it on social media? And it’s connected: when we praise our kids, that serves our ego too (My kid is doing a good job! Which means I’m doing a good job!).
I think our tendency to praise our children (and need it ourselves as parents) speaks to a massive underlying problem in many of us. We wonder why we’re all in therapy for people-pleasing, why we care way more about what others think of us than what we think of us. At the end of the day, I think the simple truth is this: so many of us are trying to earn worthiness and love, a pattern set in childhood that carries on through the generations—until it doesn’t.
Judgment of our children begins early—both good and bad. We tell them “good job” for every blessed thing, smiling at them proudly when they make things easy for us—or make us look good as parents. On the flip side, when they resist or rebel or do any number of developmentally normal and appropriate things that don’t make it easy for us (or don’t make us look good), we lash out, we withdraw our love.
And then those kids grow up and become parents themselves. And—lo and behold—they still desire approval and admiration.
No wonder we feel a pressure to perform, to make sure people know we are Parenting Our Children, and we are Doing It Well. The thing we need to realize, and become comfortable with, is that the best parenting is quite hidden. It’s routine and ritual. It’s stopping their hitting hand with your hand. It’s quiet conversations between just you and your kid.
It isn’t loud lectures or commands—those are actually signs of a parent who isn’t doing their first job, regulating themselves. But lectures and commands are visible to others, a reason I think we use them more often than not (aside from straight up parental emotional immaturity). God forbid someone think we’re spoiling our kids; we need to do something!
I remember clearly a time when my mom was at our house and my older girls had a conflict. It seemed our middle child was at fault, but both were upset. I set out to comfort said middle child—the bigger feeler—and my mom said “So you’re just going to let her get away with that?” I wasn’t—I was simply helping her return to calm and then we talked about what happened (and it actually wasn’t all her fault, as was assumed). My mom observed and apologized for saying what she said, but it was a hard moment in the moment. Because I still want my mom to think I’m a good mom.
Those who know me would say I’m not much of a people-pleaser. I’m pretty feisty and independent-minded and have been that way since I was a child. However, just because my people-pleasing isn’t easily observed doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I was recently convicted of another layer of it at a silent retreat.
I was in the confessional, repenting of, among other things, my excessive phone use. I told my priest that I justified my social media presence because I’m “building an audience” for my writing, for ideas that I think are important. Ones in alignment with humanity’s good, ones God would be proud of. He said—and bless him—that I need to check my intentions for purity. He basically called out my social media use as a (subconscious) desire to be seen and loved for the things I was producing, instead of resting in the unconditional love of God, who loves us not for anything we do but just because we exist.
*Not me crying in the confessional.*
The programming to find what we most desire through our efforts to impress runs deep. So many of us learned this as children when well-meaning parents gave us loving attention when we did what they wanted and withdrew that loving attention when we didn’t. We understood early on that being ourselves wasn’t enough, that we had to earn our worthiness through our actions.
Many of us continue to seek what we need (love, connection, validation) through achievement and performance, even in family life. In addition to trying to prove to others how well we are parenting, we can also get wrapped up in the the achievement and performance of our children. A tendency I’ve observed among new parents is comparing milestones: How early are they walking? Talking? How many animal sounds do they know? Can they name all the colors? The assumption is that earlier is better, because, well, it’s a race, a competition! Why would we be so singly obsessed with our kids’ milestones, especially when they’re so brand new? Why wouldn’t we be equally obsessed with getting to know these brand new humans, seeing their souls and helping others see them, too? Young children are, after all, fascinating and absolutely amazing.
Because that can’t be measured, can’t be compared. You can’t win at sharing with a friend an interesting thing you noticed about your baby’s developing personality. And so we carry on with our conversations-as-veiled-comparison.2
One can observe this tendency even in parents of adult children. People are quick to tell you about specific achievements when you ask how their kids are doing, and Christmas letters are basically reports of impressive facts about each of them. Children who aren’t high-achieving might get a sentence or two (they’re still alive, living in ____, working at ____). We could be writing totally different Christmas letters, giving a genuine reflection on life this past year, the highs and maybe even some lows. Instead, many use these once-a-year letters as a socially acceptable way to brag, a dog-and-pony show to maintain status and boost parental ego disguised as an update.
Why do we do things like this? I don’t think we’re aware that we’re doing it; we’re just acting out of our programming. Just like I was unaware that a foundational reason I spend too much time on Instagram is because somewhere deep in my psyche is a message that got hard-wired in: I need to perform to be loved.
I think so many of us are in this boat. We perform our entire lives, because this is what we learned about love in childhood: that our parents smile at us, are kind to us, want to be around us when we please them. When we do things they like.
(And our parents were likely parented that way, too. No parent blame, really: it’s hard to pass on what you didn’t receive yourself, and American culture is nothing if not achievement and status-oriented.)
A song I love, one that we had at our wedding, is “Be Thou My Vision.” One of the lines goes like this:
Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always;
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.
The praise of others is truly empty. We will never get enough of it to feel satisfied. We can only find our rest in unconditional love, and there’s only one Someone who can really love us that way.
This is hard work, to release ourselves from the rat race of trying to live through achievement. It takes intention. It takes unlearning. It usually takes therapy and it definitely takes a spiritual life. But we must do it.
So let’s stop calling babies and kids “good” and telling them “good job” for every dang thing. Let’s understand they are whole human beings at every age and get to know them as such. What do they like and not like? What is their experience of the world? What are they struggling with; what comes easy for them? No judgment, no competition with others, just a foundation of acceptance and curiosity. Let’s let them teach us.
As we commit to this radical, world-changing work with our kids, we may notice that our desire to be seen and celebrated in our parenting still remains. And that’s ok. We can breathe through moments when we know others are judging us because we’re not putting on the expected parenting display. We can confidently hold space for our children to be upset, frustrated, sad, embarrassed, etc.—all the emotions we tend to want to squash—and let them run their course. We can quietly keep them accountable to age-appropriate expectations and have teaching conversations later when everyone is calm (and the grocery shopping is done). And we can apologize and repair when we fly off the handle—because we will, sometimes.
Mostly no one will see these things, and some may think we’re “letting our kids run the show.” That’s okay. This work needs to be done if we want the world to heal. And we’re not alone in it.
My friend
wrote a gorgeous essay this week and it weaves perfectly with these thoughts I’m sharing, so I’ll end by quoting her beautiful words:“When those of us roaming now upon the earth are returned into her to feed new iterations of life, I’m no longer convinced it will be the humans who captured the greatest attention or reached the heights of status who will have lived in the fullness of their gifts.
Instead, I imagine those who have lived in the fullness of their gifts—and who will largely influence the vision of future generations—will be those who leaned into the places and people with whom they found themselves. They will be those who did the work labeled most boring, most unglamorous. They will be the people who did the work while understanding it to be not a bridge to the truly meaningful, exciting parts of life, but the foundation stones beneath life’s meaning.”
Childhood isn’t a performance, and neither is parenthood—we don’t have to earn love, and neither should our children. We can break the cycle of living for the approval and admiration of others. We can.
What are your thoughts? Do you see this tendency in yourself? Are you trying to interrupt this pattern for your own children? Do you think this is all BS? ;) I’d love to hear from you, as always.
P.S. I’d like to write more about parenting. Would you like to read more? Here’s one other post I wrote about a year ago on what I think is the best parenting hack. It’s simple—but not necessarily easy.
I saw a video once where the viewer was in the POV of the child—a phone constantly in your face as someone interacts with you—and I can’t unsee it.
Of course some of this is simply trying to ease our modern parental anxiety, making sure our kid is doing okay. But I think there’s also a good dose of IS MY KID THE BEST?!
I loved this!!! I have also been thinking so much about praise since reading Hunt, Gather, Parent. In indigenous cultures, parents don't praise their children AT ALL. Instead, they acknowledge their contributions to the family. This actually creates much more intrinsic motivation in children to be helpful and kind. I love how the author borrows a term from some other researchers, calling our culture "WEIRD:" "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic." It's an amazing book and dovetails with a lot of what you wrote here.
Really enjoyed your insight about how our shallow, performative acts of parenting plays into/reinforces our need for validation.
This has been an issue for us - a family member constantly saying "good girl!" with the same voice and energy she uses to praise her dog, about everyyyyything my daughter does. I can't stand it. I'm not interested in raising my daughter to be obedient or compliant. It feels like a generational thing, though, and I'm not really sure how to handle it.