If that was at all difficult, let me suggest you pick up either David Stahl's Words Kids Need to Hear or The Five Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell. The first book contains a couple of chapters on why encouraging words are necessary and specifically which encouraging words benefit kids (although the book isn't all about how to give praise), while Love Languages identifies words of affirmation as one of the five ways in which kids can feel loved.
These are times of high anxiety in our nation, but preteen and early teen years are always times of high anxiety when kids run up against the belief that they're not good enough. The message is rarely that blatant, but even the subtle forms are deadly: you should be more... you should have what I have... you obviously can't... you don't belong...
As kids fight through the wilderness of identity formation, they need lots of encouragement in the form of affirmation. What is it? For starters, affirmation is not praise. Praise is usually tied to performance: a good game played, a high grade achieved, an award garnered, a talent displayed. Praise is healthy and appropriate, but affirmation is altogether something different. Affirmation - well, affirms. It states what is. In a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall culture, affirmation is the antidote to narcissism. Far from engendering an exagerrated sense of one's importance (praise can do that), affirmation grounds us in what is true.
Secondly, there are many places we can draw information from about who we are and why we matter. Adolescents operate from an egocentric perspective and they assume everyone is thinking about and noticing them as much as they're noticing themselves. Life is lived in the fishbowl, so presentation is all-important. But, is the feedback we're receiving from those we encounter accurately perceived? Is it accurate at all?
Affirmation serves as the healthy counterweight to negative messages about self picked up in the culture: you don't look right... you really should be able to... you'll never... people don't like you... It can be exhausting to constantly refute that! But, there are a few good reasons why words of affirmation should rightly come from parents primarily.
Parents have the longest-standing relationship of anyone with their child, and by extension, they should be the ones who know their child the best. And, it is likely that apart from other family members (like siblings), they are the only ones who have a close relationship with the child who will still have a close relationship with them in ten years. Even best friends come and go. So during the time that your son or daughter is forging an identity, guess who the two long-term constants are in their life? Mom and Dad. What better messengers for truth? And, truth, safety, consolation - all of these are part of what makes home, home. We go home to escape the part of the world that demands our performance and that rewards our efforts to transcend who we really are. At home we can just be. And the message of affirmation is: who you are is ok.
If kids don't get that message from parents, either because the parent confuses praise with affirmation and doesn't want to inflate their ego, or because the parent struggles to be positive and find things to affirm, or because parents are just too busy to fill that need, kids will get that affirmation somewhere. Everyone lets down their guard sometime - no one can pose forever. And the "home" to which we return is the place of affirmation and acceptance.
I'm convinced this real self is the one God not only loves, but values. So the implications of affirmation for spiritual development are clear. We must affirm the nonperforming selves of kids if they are ever to believe that God loves that part of them. Otherwise the unbelievable love of God actually becomes that - not believed, while kids cast about for affirmation from the world, which is like hitting a moving target.
Make it a habit this year to offer regular, non-performance-based affirmation to your child. It won't spoil them, really. But starving them of affirmation just might.
