Give a --dog-- child a bad name!

You are so right, flower. When I was teaching the difficult teenagers,, I used to lie in my teeth to their parents and tell them they should be proud of their child. They used to look very surprised because they had been told nothing but bad things about them. The pupils would be remarkably well behaved (for a time) afterwards.
I think it is better to say 'That is not a good thing to do because.....' than to say you are naughty.

You are so right Flower
Tell your DS to 'focus on the problem not the person'

This is why I object to kids with T shirts etc with slogans like cheeky monkey on them. Self fulfilling perhaps, particularly if it reflects parental
attitudes.
Always praise every little achievement when they are babies, they respond to it even when they are tiny. Good boy/girl! Clever girl/boy. They can't get too much in the early years.

Too true! I must be careful what I say to my youngest GS!

Yes it's generally the boys who sport these slogans. The girls have pretty princess or Mummy's little helper . Perhaps that is why girls make earlier progress than boys at school sometimes

I too hate these slogans - there is one on the pushchair that we acquired.
And some nurseries have silly names along the same lines.

There is a difference between telling a child that they are being naughty and that they are naughty. These labels do not help at all.

I think it is allright to say of certain behaviour "That is naughty." You can then add "I don't want you to do that" or something similar.

Yes Bags 'that is a naughty thing to do' is much better than 'you are naughty'. I think most parents would understand that if it is explained to them but perhaps not think of it when dealing with a difficult child. It is very hard when it is your child and so much more obvious when it is someone else's.

We always talked about 'good' & 'bad' choices with the children at school or phrases like ' I don't like the choice you made.' because I was so fed up of kids arriving at my office because they had been naughty..they often had no idea what 'naughty' was! As a school we agreed to adopt the choice strategy and always named what we liked / did not like so that kids were clear!

Someone I know well often tells her child she is "naughty". Whe I spoke to the little girl the other day the first thing she said was "I'm naughty". I too thought this was rather sad and replied that I thought she might have done something naughty but that she was usually a very good little girl. As a young mum, though, it didn't occur to me that regularly telling my daughter she was "naughty" would be counter-productive. I think it would be so useful for all parents (not just those deemed to be "problem parents") to have access to, and encouraged to attend, sessions that include the rudiments of child psychology.

As to the point about giving lots of praise all the time, I thought this was a fairly good idea too (and tended to do it myself) until I read an article a couple of weeks ago. The writer said that to praise a child all the time by telling him/her that they're "clever", that their work is "brilliant", etc., is not necessarily the best thing to do. He based it on evidence obtained from research. A child interprets this use of the word "clever" as a personal quality that's not connected to its own actions. So, if a child subsequently doesn't do well in a task, it becomes disheartened and questions the original statement that it is " clever", replacing it with "Now I'm not clever". If, on the other hand, someone says something like "That's a good picture - I can see you've tried very hard", they associate the outcome with the fact that they have tried/worked hard, and, if they subsequently fail, they don't become disheartened and are therefore much more self-motivating and persistent.

The writer also said that to keep heaping praise on a child for fairly average achievements devalues that praise. He talked about watching how a successful, experienced teacher interacted with children - she made insightful comments about what they were doing and listened carefully to their responses. He gave an example of a child presenting a painting to her that he'd finished. Instead of saying "Oh, that's brilliant" she looked at the painting carefully, paused for a moment and then said "There's a lot of blue in your painting" (it was all blue) and the child then decided to paint in more details.

I don't know if other gransnetters agree with this, but it seemed to make a lot of sense to me.

Agree completely Eloethan over praise and reward for expected behaviour is unhelpful. It is important to encourage children to do their best and try hard but if we praise everything with generic terms they do not learn exactly what was good about things they have done...hence the 'lots of blue' comment. For example I have often said, to children at the stage of doing simple figures, ' I like the arms and legs you have put on your mum, what else does she have to help her walk /make your dinner etc' to gently guide them to think about the next step they can take to add detail. This applies in other aspects of development too!

I think there is a clear line between encouraging a child and building up their self esteem and praising them indiscriminately for every thing they do. I also feel children should learn to accept that they aren't good at some things, but it is not important, providing they do their best.

DS, like me, is dyspraxic, we both have atrocious handwriting (less important these days), he knew this as well as I did, so he learned to accept that teachers would always criticise his untidy writing and messy presentation, but I encouraged him to work on making sure his writing was legible so that examiners would have no difficulty reading it and could see the quality of his answers. In his case the rise of computing and word processing resolved his problems but before that he got the A levels grades he needed for university.

As G K Chesterton said: If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly.

The 'evesdropping' technique works very well too. Idea is that you say something like '....... was so helpful today, I am so proud of him, or ......did some beautiful work today, he/ she is so clever. This makes the child feel that you REALLY mean these things, especially if it is a child who is always made to feel naughty or bad in any way. It worked with my No 2 DS who had a real downer on himself after his father and I divorced. Of course he was told face to face but this method reinforced things for him.

Bags I agree that it is fine to say THAT is naughty but he is constantly being told that HE is naughty, he is the naughty one. It is so sad. When I picked the little ones up on Sunday I had only been there for a couple of minutes when my DS said to me that the little one wasn't a problem "HE is the problem, he is the naughty one" nodding towards the 4 year old. I did address this when they picked them up as stated earlier.