Is it bad to shower your children with praise, no matter how well or badly they've done? In the Feb. 19 issue of New York Magazine, Po Bronson summarizes a variety of research studies that suggest it can be counterproductive ("How Not to Talk to Your Kids," nymag.com/news/features/ 27840/).

Psychologist Carol Dweck, then at Columbia, and her team there carried out "a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders" (that's Bronson's phrasing) to determine the effects of praise.

First the kids were asked to solve a series of easy puzzles, and at random were praised for their intelligence - "You must be smart at this" - or else for their effort - "You must have worked really hard."

In the second round, they had a choice of tests, one hard and one easy. "One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they'd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles," Bronson says. "The other choice, Dweck's team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The 'smart' kids took the cop-out."

And then, "having artificially induced a round of failure," the team gave another easy test. The children praised for effort improved their scores by 30 percent, while those who had been told they were smart did worse by 20 percent.

My first thought is, with effects as large as that, how did they get the parents' informed consent to experiment on their kids?

My second is, those don't sound like any smart kids I ever knew. Perhaps - since the experimental groups were assigned randomly - the mischief, if such it is, comes not from telling children they're smart, but from telling them that when they know it isn't true.

Other research Bronson cites make it hard to tease apart those two possibilities. On the one hand purely vacuous praise tends to teach children to disregard not only insincere praise - as recommended by the "self-esteem" movement - but sincere and well-deserved praise as well.

Another psychologist, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, found that by the age of 12, children have come to think that praise from a teacher "is actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement."

And teens go a step further, believing that only criticism truly reflects the teacher's belief in the student's ability.

On the other hand, Bronson says, researchers from Reed College and Stanford reviewed more than 150 studies of the effects of praise and found that fulsome praise was correlated with "shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions."

Such children become more afraid of failing, less willing to accept challenges, and less able to recover if they do fail.

This article has been widely discussed online, and it seems that a lot of people comment, "Oh, yes, that's exactly my experience."

Bronson says that a Columbia survey found that "85 percent of American parents think it's important to tell their kids they're smart." But I'd worry more about children who really are smart, but don't entirely believe it because no one ever tells them so, because they worry the children will become vain about it. I'd rather they knew the real score.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.