If you clap for your child, they might not feel that inner feeling anymore but focus more on your sense of pride, your happiness, and enthusiasm instead of their own feeling of pride and happiness from within. As a result, they might start doing things specifically to make you clap enthusiastically, doing it for the applause. And where is their own inner sense of motivation then?

When a child achieves something visible in your eyes, you tend to clap for it. Clapping is a natural expression of happiness at your child’s success. But if you look closely, your child already receives a reward from within: a feeling of pride and happiness comes from inside. You can see it in your child’s radiant face. This is based on their own inner motivation, the drive that stimulates them to want to experience this feeling more often. Your child naturally has this, and it is reinforced with every experience of success.

What to Do With Your Own Pride?

There are better ways. You can direct your enthusiasm towards their own feeling of happiness. You could say: “I see that you are happy that you grabbed that toy,” or “I see that you are enjoying playing with that block in your mouth.” Or: “I see that you are happy that you managed to pull yourself up so you can stand.” So, you focus on what you see and describe it. Even very young babies can understand a lot of what you say, just from the tone in which you say it.

Fixed Mind and Growth Mind

Carol Dweck has done a lot of research on success. From these studies, it appears that children who were always clapped for what they did are ultimately less successful than children who received a compliment for how they did it. She calls it creating a fixed mind or stimulating a growth mind. To stimulate a growth mind you can say, for example: “I am proud of how well you persevered” or “how well you organized this.” This way, the child is rewarded for qualities like perseverance, etc. In growth mindset hese qualities will therefore become more and more prominent and become part of their personality.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

You can read more about this in “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol Dweck. It includes many examples from parenting, education, sports, and business. These examples mainly focus on creating a mindset based on a developing brain: what you can’t do now, you can learn over time; what you don’t know now, you might know by the end of this year. This is opposed to examples where people assume a certain amount of talent, and that’s what you have to work with. Even if children have a certain talent in something special they excel at, encouraging them with applause for what they do will ultimately yield less than encouraging them with compliments on how they do it. The first children feel they are entitled to that success simply because they were born with it. If things get harder later, not as naturally, they will have to work for it. But they haven’t learned that. As a result, talented children who are used to receiving applause or other rewards for their successes are ultimately less successful than children with an inner drive and a lot of perseverance. Carol Dweck also provides tips in her book based on her research on how to get the most out of it as a parent, teacher, trainer, and manager.

Your Child’s Motivation

It’s not just about success, but mainly about strengthening the child’s own motivation, the joy in following their own ideas, and in the process of executing them, as opposed to doing something only for the result and your happiness about it and getting frustrated if it doesn’t work out.
This is already in our hands early on by allowing the baby to have their own success and celebrate their own little party! And, of course, we can join in by being happy with them and asking: “You’re proud, aren’t you, of what you can do/have done now?” Or something else that makes it clear that you also enjoy it when your child enjoys himself.