The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
When Approval Becomes Addition: The Cost Of Praise #44
It all started with a gold star. A single shining sticker on a kindergarten chart that—without me realizing it—began rewiring my understanding of love, worth, and motivation. In this episode of The Whole Parent Podcast, we dive into the hidden cost of praise—why “good job” might be doing more harm than good, and how something as innocent as a sticker chart can turn play into performance.
Drawing on groundbreaking research from psychologists like Edward Deci and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I unravel how extrinsic rewards shift our kids’ focus from curiosity to compliance…and why this shift often leaves adults feeling hollow, disconnected, and trapped in perfection.
Through personal stories and parenting insights (including an unforgettable block tower moment with my son), we explore what happens when we stop praising kids for performing and start truly seeing them instead. If you've ever wondered whether we’re raising children who chase approval instead of wonder, this episode is for you.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why praise can undermine confidence and creativity
- The difference between being seen and being evaluated
- How to encourage intrinsic motivation in your kids—and yourself
- A new language of love that sounds nothing like “good job”
Let’s trade gold stars for presence—and rediscover the quiet magic of being enough, just as we are.
It started with a gold star. A single shimmering sticker on a construction paper chart in my kindergarten classroom. I don't remember the assignment. I don't remember what I drew or said or built. I just remember the star. How it glowed. There's a picture of me from that week. Five years old, Dragon Ball Z backpack, missing front tooth. For reference, I knocked it out on the back of my older brother's head at the pool where my cousin was lifeguard. I'm grinning with my hand on that chart, like I had just discovered buried treasure. My mom had written on the back, he's so proud of himself. But thinking back now, I'm actually not sure I was proud of myself. I was proud of the star. That's the thing about gold stars. They sparkle just long enough to blind you to the differences between joy and approval. We praise children to build their confidence. We reward them to keep them motivated. We raise them in a world where good job is practically punctuation. But here's the paradox. The more we praise, the more fragile that confidence seems to become. Psychologists like Edward Desi and Richard Ryan noticed this decades ago. Praise, they said, doesn't always inspire. In fact, it can control. It shifts a child's attention from doing to being seen doing. And once approval becomes the goal, authenticity begins to fracture. So today, I want to explore a question that's haunted me for years. When did we start mistaking validation for love? And what happens to a person, to a culture, when praise replaces presence? Come along for the journey. This is the whole parent podcast. A few months ago, I found myself watching my three-year-old son try to build a tower of blocks. This kid is usually the one knocking down towers, not building them. Yet on that day, he was stacking them carefully. Wobbling, grinning, falling, and then trying again. I opened my mouth to say, Good job, buddy. But then I stopped. He wasn't asking for praise. He wasn't asking for anything. He was totally absorbed, lost in the rhythm of his play. In that moment, I thought of Alfie Cohn. He's been on the podcast. And he wrote that praise is often judgment wrapped in sugar. We think of it as encouragement, but it's actually evaluation in disguise. It teaches a child not just what we value, but whose valuation matters the most. In other words, good job sounds harmless, but said too much, or when unnecessary, it subtly conditions dependence. I began to see it everywhere in classrooms, offices, Instagram feeds. The world is built on these little gold stars now. Take, for example, this strange experiment from the 1970s. Maybe you've heard me talk about it before. It's one of my favorites. Researchers go into a preschool classroom armed with felt tip markers, and at first they just lay them out to see which kids are going to use them for drawing, for coloring, whatever. Once they find all the kids that really seem to enjoy it, they separated them into three groups. They took the markers away, and when they brought them back, they told one group, You are going to be given a reward if you use these markers, if you draw with them. It's going to be a fancy certificate with a gold seal, and your name is going to be put up on the board. The Good Students Club. The other two groups weren't told about any reward. Some of them got a reward, some of them didn't. When that phase of the experiment was over and the rewards were handed out, actually everybody was happy. But here's what happened next. The children who expected to get a reward, the kids from that first group, they stopped drawing when the markers came back after the experiment was quote unquote over. This activity that had once just been play for them had now become work. The joy that they had from simply using the markers had become a transaction. The kids who didn't get a reward, they kept using the markers. In fact, when researchers looked at the pictures drawn by the first group, the group that knew that they were going to get a reward, and all of the other kids, they found something astounding. Even the quality was different. The kids who drew just for the love of drawing had produced objectively better pictures. That small moment in a preschool art corner was a window into something enormous. Because as it turns out, motivation at all ages is extremely fragile. It's like a campfire. Add a couple of logs to it, and it'll burn brighter. Provide more warmth. But add too much fuel and it'll burn itself out entirely. Around this time, in a different corner of the world, a young psychologist named Mihali Chiksemihali was studying what he called flow, the deep state of immersion that comes when time disappears and you forget yourself completely. Artists know it, athletes feel it, even monks in silent prayer describe it. But what fascinated Chicksa Mihali was what killed flow. It was external evaluation. The moment that you notice that someone is watching, or worse, judging, the spell breaks. In other words, praise interrupts that present moment. And presence, that's the birthplace of meaning. Which makes me wonder. If praise disrupts presence, then maybe the opposite of love isn't actually criticism. Maybe it's evaluation. That's the twist that most of us miss. We think that praise is an act of love, the opposite of judgment, when often it's just judgment with better lighting. When we say good boy, what we really mean is you're lovable when you make me happy. That subtle distinction between I love you and I approve of you becomes the architecture of a lifetime. It's why grown adults, people like me, still measure their worth in promotions and likes and applause. It's why so many high achievers still feel empty. Because somewhere along the way, their sense of value got outsourced. Rewards, in a sense, are a form of modern control. They feel like progress, the grade, the raise, the pat on the back. But they're really just upgraded obedience. The carrot replaces the stick, but the leash, it stays on. You can see it in schools. A generation raised on stickers and honor rolls grows into one that's hooked on metrics and performance reviews. The gold stars becomes a resume. The chart becomes an algorithm. And we all learn in subtle ways to trade our curiosity for compliance. Even our moral education is built this way. We teach our children to do the right thing and then hand out prizes when they do. But morality without internalization is just manipulation. We've replaced conscience with conditioning and then wondered why empathy feels endangered. It's not that praise is bad. It's that it's too easy. It's cheap. It's not real connection. It gives us the illusion of connection without the substance of understanding. When I think about my own childhood, I can trace this thread like a faint scar. After I began to manage my ADHD, I became one of those good kids, a rule follower, the one who never got in trouble. My teachers loved me, adults in my life trusted me, but I realized now I wasn't being myself. I was just performing goodness. And there's a loneliness to that. The loneliness of the extrinsically motivated person. Because when your worth depends on applause, or likes, or followers, silence feels like rejection. Even my success became hollow. You hit the mark, but the satisfaction evaporates almost instantly. You start chasing the next thing, the next star, the next like, the next nod from someone whose approval you've confused for love. And all the while, your true desires grow a little bit quieter. Until one day you realize you're not even sure what you want anymore. This isn't new. In ancient Rome, soldiers were given coins stamped with the emperor's face as a reward for bravery. Those coins weren't just currency, they were loyalty tokens. Proof of worth bestowed from above. We haven't changed much, have we? The Emperor just got rebranded. He's an algorithm now. If you zoom out far enough, extrinsic motivation isn't just a psychological issue, it's a spiritual one. It reflects the deeper human fear that without proof of value, we might not really have any. But here's the quiet act of rebellion. To live from intrinsic motivation, to act from curiosity or wonder or love, is to trust that simply being is enough. It's to plant a seed without needing a witness. The good news is every child begins this way. We don't need to do anything as parents. They don't paint for praise or sing for approval. They build and they imagine because the world is fascinating and life itself is innovation. Our job as parents, or teachers, or humans in general, isn't to instill motivation. It's to protect it. A few nights ago, I watched my son again. Same blocks, same small hands stacking. When he finally built the tower taller than himself, unlike me at his age, he didn't look at me for approval. He just screamed in triumph, that pure, round, kind of joyous hurrah that only comes from the inside out. I sat there in the quiet, realizing he didn't need me to say good job. He just needed me to see him for who he is. That's what praise tries and fails to imitate. The deep, wordless knowing of being witnessed, not evaluated. Maybe the point isn't to stop praising altogether. Maybe it's that we need to learn how to praise differently. We need to learn how to encourage rather than evaluate. Not you're so smart, but you worked so hard. Not you're so good, but I love watching you try. Not a good job, but I see you. We can't gold star our way back to wonder. But maybe we can notice when it appears, unprompted, unmeasured, for free. Because love, the real kind, doesn't sound like a job. Sometimes it sounds like silence, held open long enough for a child or an adult to hear their own heartbeat and believe that it's enough. Just scroll down on your podcast app, tap those stars, and if you've got an extra 30 seconds, leave a couple words for me to let me know how this podcast has been helping you. I read every single review. It really means the world to me. Number two, after you rate it and review it for the masses, I really want to encourage you to think about what we talked about in this episode and send it to one parent in your phone who you feel like might benefit from this specific episode. It's great to have ratings and reviews, and yes, they help so much, but there's nothing like a personal recommendation from a friend, hey, you gotta listen to this. It's really been helping me. Last, if you want to go deeper with me, get exclusive parenting insights, free resources, and updates on everything that I'm doing, go ahead and join my email list. It's where I share things that I don't get to get into on the podcast. I also will let you know about upcoming episodes and events, and best of all, it's completely free. You can sign up at wholeparentacademy.com or just go to the show notes below and there'll be a link there. All right, that's it for now. Thanks again for listening, and thank you in advance for doing those three quick favors for me. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast.
