Most mornings I read for 30 minutes before I respond to emails or do any online posting. This morning I read something that literally stopped me in my tracks. I re-read the sentence several times before putting down my book and calling my husband into the room so I can could share this nugget with him.

I was reading Stephen Grosz's captivating book, The Examined Life which is about the last 25 years of his work as a practising psychoanalyst. These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. They show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.

I was reading the chapter about how praising children can cause them to lose their confidence rather than gain it. Eh? Even the title made me pause. Isn't praising someone meant to boost their confidence and self-esteem? According to Grosz current research suggests otherwise (note: I wish he had referenced that!). Over the last decade, several studies on self-esteem have concluded that praising a child as 'clever' may not help her at school. Praise can have the opposite effect as in: why make a new drawing if I have already made 'the best'?

I know from my own play therapy practice that it's more important for the child to find her own sense of achievement than it is for me to keep saying to her, "You've drawn the most beautiful flower. Well done." Because she may not actually like what she's drawn, the picture may evoke ambivalent feelings of loss and sadness, and then what?

According to Grosz, 'being present builds a child's confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we've not been attentive to her?'

Indeed.

This idea made me pause and reflect on the number of times I have wanted to praise my clients, felt the words forming in my head and rising in my throat, and catching them just in time before they have flown out of my mouth. By not praising I have been able to witness the part of the child's story that they have struggled with all along.

As Grosz explains:

"I once watched Charlotte Stiglitz (mother of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) with a four-year-old boy, who was drawing. When he stopped and looked up at her - perhaps expecting praise - she smiled and said, "There is a lot of blue in your picture.' He replied, 'It's the pond near my grandmother's house - there is a bridge.' He picked up a brown crayon, and said, 'I'll show you.' Unhurried, she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed, she listened. She was present.'

So often my job as a therapist is to get out of my own way so that I can wait for and listen to what the child needs and wants. And if I am patient, she will tell me or show me.

In the end, as Grosz says, isn't it this attentiveness - the feeing that someone is trying to think about us - something we want more than praise?