Nearly every day, my children come home from school with stickers attached to their work proclaiming it to be "awesome", "brilliant" or some other adjective usuallly accompanied by an exclamation mark when written down. And every Friday, their teachers send e-mails to the parents saying that their class had worked amazingly and learnt and achieved so much that week.
On top of this, the kids keep bringing home small presents or sweets for having completed the week's tasks or getting a certain number of "very goods". On one occasion, my daughter took part in a sponsored money-raising activity and was thanked for her participation with a plastic water bottle and a skipping rope (if she'd raised more, she could even have received an iPod)!
At first, such apparently over-the-top encouragement seemed somewhat misplaced, exaggerated, even embarassing, to me given that Europeans are schooled in self-analysis, realism, moderation and understatement - not to mention German Angst, Weltschmerz and similarly negative attitudes to performance and life itself.
One year into my stay in the New World, I now believe that I better understand the complex consequences of this:
Children who are constantly praised and told (whether justifiably or not) that they have performed excellently tend to grow up with very high self-esteem/self-confidence and the feeling that they can indeed achieve anything. Sure, this can lead to over-confidence and what we would in England term big-headedness, but it also means that Americans approach problems more positively and with more energy than their self-critical, navel-gazing European counterparts.
The sweets and presents are another aspect of this behavioural training. After all, America is a meritocracy. Whereas in Europe we are encouraged to do good things for the sake of it, Americans are taught to believe - bribed, cynics would say - that appropriate behaviour will be rewarded. And not with a mere feeling of having done good, as a European might expect, but an actual, physical reward.
Although I still cling to the Old-World Christian notion that people should feel morally obliged to do the things expected of them rather than having a carrot dangled in front of their noses, I do see that Americans are far more successful in business, science and industry than Europeans. Praise and rewards in childhood undoubtedly play a role in this.
I've also started praising my children's achievements more.
