We have all seen people become full of themselves because of compliments and as a result, we are careful and even neglectful in our compliment giving. Nobody wants to inflate someone else’s ego. That would be incorrect and lead to ruin for the person.
Our modern world has shied away from compliments nearly altogether. Can’t give someone else a complex!
Compliments are essential for the development of children. Compliments have nothing to do with a person’s immutable qualities, such as their intelligence level, their physical attractiveness, or the color of their hair, skin, eyes, and so forth. There is even a good deal of wiggle room for complimenting people on these things but this is not the basis of healthy complimenting that helps a person develop, today’s topic.
Where compliments are particularly useful to people in their development is when a compliment informs a person of their aptitudes and progress at skillful improvement and moral betterment.
Children are so completely and totally failed by modern, especially public, schooling. We don’t have time to go into that. For the purpose of this topic, it’s worth mentioning that schools do literally nothing to know and foster special interests in a child. The fundamental basis of especially public schooling is to churn out compliant conformists who will work menial jobs or accept universal basic income and pose no difficulties to the banking oligarchy. There is no articulation of what is unique in a child. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach to pedagogy.
In helping our kids, we want to give them compliments and encouragement that contain:
A) an accurate or relatively accurate assessment of the pursuit they have devoted themselves to, however basic
B) an accurate understanding of how they have done well, relative to how they did before
C) an informative stance toward the child meant to enrich their consciousness with further articulation of the pursuit, holding an understanding of their level of enjoyment and an openness to them trying something else
With these three components, we see that children become:
-more secure in taking healthy risks
-more ACCURATELY confident in their pursuits
-more resilient in the face of inevitable criticism from the broader world (and perhaps in the home)
-more knowledgeable of the art and discipline involved in all manner of pursuits
It is so important that we give our children more and more context for what they are doing, what they may do in the future, and how the world corresponds and interacts with this. As they grow up, our children venture further and further into the social matrix but ONLY if they have a strong foundation of encouragement (through compliments and plain good old fashioned parental love) and an actual grasp of important, relevant skills that will help them to be competitive and secure in their own lives.
As an experiment, and without taking the stance of a parent fostering another, give a few compliments to the people in your life in a similar drift as outlined here. Don’t make them aware of what you’re doing beforehand. Just give it a whirl and see what happens. People will love you for it!
