Praise in public, criticize never

One thing I’ve learned being a parent is that criticizing doesn’t work.

There might be some short term behaviour changes if I criticize, but over the long term progress is usually lost.

Criticism and constructive feedback are very close to each other. In fact, if I drew a Venn diagram they would probably overlap quite substantially.

The thing with young kids is if you try to give them ‘constructive feedback’, it’s just criticism to them. Thus it doesn’t work.

However praising when they do things well, publicly, seems to work.

An example:

My youngest daughter hates washing her hands (how convenient during a pandemic, right?). But rather than nagging her to wash her hands it’s more effective to publicly tell her big sister that it’s great that she washed her hands.

All of the sudden, guess who wants to wash their hands?