Success

One of the great bonding elements of affection is the ability to understand a person's success and to share in that success with them. There are huge successes in life like a Nobel Prize or an Academy Award, and there are lots of people who will share that success because they get something out of it. But those successes are rare. More than likely the successes we realize in our lives are personal achievements. Unfortunately those achievements will mostly go unnoticed or noticed with a little criticism because they are not sharable. Too often the people we want to share with can't find room their busy lives to understand just how we feel. From childhood we realize that not everyone around us will find the same pleasure we have in what we have accomplished, and that makes us reluctant to take a full delight in what we have managed to do.

Bonding one life to another comes from understanding human emotion and need. Bonding is more difficult when a person doesn't get anything from another's success no matter how much it means to the successful adult. So year after year, people hide their feelings and their joy when something they have worked very hard to do becomes a reality. At the same time, this behavior is transferred to the child, and that's a shame.

When parents view a child's success with the same rules they apply to their own success and call it modesty, the joy of achievement for the child is often squashed and dies. Children who receive little or no praise from their achievements wonder why they should achieve at all. A child's real joy is in pleasing the parent. When the parent does not respond, the child's disappointment is extreme. The root of this adult behavior comes from the kind of response they have had in their own lives - none. To change this, there has to be a stopping point.

Success comes in little things as well as big things. But the bigger successes are often the product of little successes. A child has learned to draw a face. The parent looks at the irregular shapes and can't see the control, the mastery of direction, the idea that came from the head to the paper. No, it's not Rembrandt, but it's an achievement. Before this, the child could barely hold a crayon. When the parent sighs and says, "Well, maybe someday you'll be an artist," the child is disappointed because today he achieved drawing a face. Proper response? "It's a treasure and I love it." That way, the child understands the parent is pleased.

A child brokenly reads a few words. He stumbles through things he is learning and the parent listens for a minute or two, and says, "You need to practice that," and the child sighs with disappointment because he feels his parent's disappointment. Two weeks earlier, he couldn't even begin to try to sound out one word or did he know that's how you begin to read. He has mastered a lot and for that his parent is disappointed, so what's the point?

"But there are standards I want my child to achieve," is the common argument. "And when he misses the standard I have for him, I'm not going to call it success."

Sometimes a child takes a long time to come up to someone else's standard, but as he is climbing that ladder, he is having his own success. The question is, will he have to enjoy his success all by himself or will he be able to share it? Will it only be called success when he achieves his parent's standard or will each of his achievements which he feels strongly about be counted in the package of the successful child?

We went to see Horton Hears a Who yesterday. The young Who in the story never shared his successes with his Who father. He was solitary and reserved, and until the end of the story, the young Who was considered a failure. I think that happens in the best of families when a certain kind of achievement is held up as real and other things are passed over for praise.

So what is praiseworthy? If you consider that a young child of three is learning just about everything and very rapidly, a good parent can find praise in something a child does every day. That doesn't mean blanketing all his actions with "That's nice, Charlie." It means looking at what a child can do today and understanding what he is trying to do, and when he accomplishes that, praise him or her.

Some people think praise is as unnecessary as frosting on a cake. Frosting is messy, after all, has too much sugar and will spoil a child's dinner. It's too hard to make from scratch, and the cake will do; in fact, a box cake on sale will do; in fact a plain cake from the 1/2 price sale basket will do.

This is a minimalist's point of view. A minimalist is someone who gets by in life with as little as possible. After studying minimalism in college, I turned in a minimalist paper. It had my name, the date, and " ." on it. I got an A. I despise minimalism because I think it crushes all artistic expression and all human individuality. It wastes time taking away and it reduces achievement to a pathetic white room.

Now the cake: It's your birthday and someone is thinking of a cake for you. How would you like to know that a typical cake has gone through the metamorphosis of a frosted delight to the 1/2 price basket nobody really wants?

It's the same with praise. Praise is unnecessary because... and there's where it gets sticky. Praise is messy for whom? Me or the person praised? Praise means I'll have to stick my neck out and say something that makes me sound like an idiot, and me sounding like an idiot is too far to go even if it means the successful child or other has to go without. It's too bad, but that's the way "I" feel. Then we rationalize our decision by saying that too much, which to the minimalist is nothing at all, will spoil the child, and we sure don't want to spoil the child. Whew, saved by the bell.

Then the selfish parent can say, "It's too hard to really praise well, and I would rather it be well said than realize that I failed at saying the right thing." So the child's achievement will stand for itself, and the child will have to seek his own back patting or rely on those around him to pat him on the back. "It's not my job anyway; my job is to put a roof over his head, not to..." and the child is presented with the half price cake in the basket at the rear of the store.

Understanding a child's need for successes in his life and understanding that the little things in life mean success can make or break a child's whole attitude and sense of self worth and ability. Every child has the ability to achieve something wonderful. Every parent has the ability to encourage the child every day to continue his small successes because small successes amount to a mountain of success. At the top of that mountain are the big awards.