Key findings:
- Children’s views of themselves develop through daily interactions with parents and teachers, including praise, attention, and feedback
- Children from disadvantaged backgrounds develop more negative self-views, which can undermine their academic achievement and reinforce inequality
- Teachers who offer excessive praise may inadvertently communicate low expectations to students from disadvantaged backgrounds
- Showing interest in children’s activities and sharing joy with them can promote their self-esteem, without cultivating narcissism or unhealthy competition
Imagine telling a child that she did an “incredibly good job!” Strong affirmations feel good to receive and to give, yet that positive sensation may mask hidden consequences for how a child appraises their own capabilities. Dr. Eddie Brummelman, the recipient of this year’s FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Research in Child Development, studies how children develop beliefs about themselves that either support or undermine their long-term thriving. Importantly, his research reveals the downsides of effusive compliments and offers parents and teachers alternatives for nurturing positive self-views and resilience, without inadvertently lowering self-esteem or breeding narcissism.
With the members of his lab, the KiDLAB, Dr. Brummelman is driven to uncover and intervene around the psychological mechanisms that lead to persistent educational disparities. In compelling studies ranging from tightly controlled laboratory experiments to large international surveys, Dr. Brummelman’s research has shown that students develop theories about their own abilities and gather evidence through lived experiences. For example, a student who is resoundingly praised for a high grade may reason that he surprised his teacher by exceeding his true underlying ability. In one recent study, Dr. Brummelman showed that strong praise toward a student actually deflated classmates’ beliefs about that student’s intelligence. This situation plays out in many classrooms when well-meaning teachers offer excessive praise to students from marginalized backgrounds, inadvertently betraying lowered expectations for these students. Over time, this could lead to the development of more negative self-views.
While educational policies are typically agnostic to students’ self-views, Dr. Brummelman believes it is vital to consider how the psychological impacts of policies reproduce inequality across generations. For example, strict academic tracking, which places some children on a path to college and others on a path to trade schools at a young age, can signal expectations about their futures, become ingrained in their self-views, and impact their motivation and achievement.
Like teachers, parents often strive to raise children who work hard, persist through adversity, and achieve their highest potential. To that end, Dr. Brummelman’s work has also tackled the challenge of raising a resilient, but not narcissistic, child. Narcissism was often considered the extreme version of self-esteem, but Dr. Brummelman has theorized that these are separate phenomena that develop in distinct ways, rather than two points along a single continuum. Children develop more narcissistic self-views when they are seen and treated as if they are more special and entitled than others. His work suggests that caregivers can foster self-esteem, but not narcissism, by offering children realistic praise for their improvement over time. Better yet, he argues, “you don’t always need praise in order to make kids feel good. You can show warmth and affection without evaluating a child, such as by showing genuine interest in the child’s activities, sharing joy with them, and helping them bounce back from failure.” These approaches reinforce self-improvement and a realistic appraisal of one’s abilities, rather than the drive for superiority and inflated self-view that are hallmarks of narcissism.
Given the practical implications of his work, Dr. Brummelman has been highly engaged in communicating his findings to a non-scientific audience through talks, books, and popular press articles. However, he began to feel that underserved students were not being reached through these approaches, which could further magnify inequalities. “My more recent science outreach activities have been about establishing a dialogue. So rather than me telling children, parents, and teachers what science is and what my work shows, I want to engage them in the work.” In that spirit, Dr. Brummelman gathered young students from disadvantaged backgrounds and career scientists in the Lil’Scientist program, which reaches thousands of children throughout the Netherlands. In this outreach work, he implements research-backed practices to cultivate young scholars’ growth mindsets towards scientific skills and collaboration.
Through a combination of rigorous science and effective outreach, Dr. Brummelman is working to promote equality for children globally.
Future Directions:
- Determine how education policies shape students’ self-perceptions and contribute to social inequalities
- Investigate the specific messages about social class and opportunity that teachers and parents communicate to children
- Engage in collaborative, multinational research to make developmental psychology more representative of the world’s children
