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Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to be talking about

praise. It's an interesting topic. It can be confusing because there's a lot of different advice out there.

A lot of it is these really strict do's and don't.

Don't say these certain words.

Don't do it this certain way.

And a lot of those don'ts are actually against our

instincts so that makes it doubly hard to to navigate. One thing my mentor Magddigurber, always said is children don't need big hoopla's.

And she recommended that we acknowledge rather than praise.

One thing I loved about Magda was she was all about clarity

and simplicity.

She didn't use complicated terms, but she was very exacting in the words she used to communicate.

Maybe that's because her original degree was in linguistics.

And if we think about it, acknowledge, that's something

that we do that's really about noticing what our child is doing, noticing what they're accomplishing. So they have ownership and we're just the ones

noticing. With praise we're more subjective. It's more about us imbuing what we see, our child's accomplishment, their activity, with certain qualities.

We are giving it a certain value.

So it's more about us than just acknowledging is.

Which isn't to say that we should only ever acknowledge and never ever praise.

Children need a little of both, I think.

They want to know what we think sometimes.

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