Being present builds a child’s condence 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?

And consider this, too: praise, appreciation, expressions of respect – all

develop human thinking. They unwrap confidence and let it saturate talent and will and buds of ability. You know this. Every time someone mentions a quality they admire in you, you do even better at just about everything for a while. And you feel good. And you think better.

And that’s the point. That good-feeling phenomenon is a good-thinking

phenomenon. So says the chemistry at least. Appreciate someone and, as with attention, the hormones in their brain change. Oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine dash around their cortex; and before they know it, they think better and better. We have noticed this repeatedly in all of our work.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t we do it more? It’s not that difficult. We can just notice what is good and say it. That’s it.

In fact, the next time you are with a human being, anywhere at all, notice

something you respect about them, or like about them, or just think is a plus for that moment, and tell them. Even strangers. Their day will change, and when they start to think about something, they’ll be better at it.

I think we can, however, assert that our capacity for ‘good’ is of a higher order than our capacity for ‘bad’ and, therefore, merits our focus. I say ‘higher order’ because the science of the brain suggests that only the ‘good’ feeds human development. The ‘bad’ limits, even derails, human development. For example, when the human is born, the brain arrives not fully formed and needs further ‘processing’. That ‘processing’, as it turns out, is a form of the ‘good’. Key in this is sustained generative attention supported by the other components of a thinking environment.

Appreciation. But not as we usually understand it. Appreciation at the end of a thinking pair is not a thank-you-for-your-service thing. It is far bigger than that. It is a recognition of a quality in a person. Now I know you were probably told not to do this. We all were, one way or another. We might get a ‘big head’. (What is that?) Or become ‘too big for our boots’. (Boots?) Or grow conceited. That stuff sticks. So we need to replace it with a better take on reality.

Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parents’ concerns about children’s lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to

deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to

abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to

perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise

is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is

neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass

is muddy, but is not mud.