(The Nationalist, 8 November 2002)
I know of a school where a teacher who was committed to teaching the Christian faith put up a small prize, out of his own money, for the child who was best in religious education. He held a competition, and a young girl, one of those preparing for first Communion, was declared the winner and awarded the prize.
Naturally she was delighted and told her parents about it when she went home. Her father’s reaction was to say to her, ‘Well, if you came first, that doesn’t say much for the rest of them.’ What a savagely destructive thing to say to a child! Words can crush, and those words, coming from her father, must have deeply wounded that young girl in her moment of celebration. Would it have been so hard, would it have done harm, to have spoken instead a word of praise?
Some time back I was speaking with some people in an adult education group. I told them the story of the girl. To my great surprise and disappointment, most agreed with the father’s attitude. They said that otherwise the girl might have got a swelled head, got notions about herself and considered herself better than everyone else. In their view, the father was right to keep her down.
Whatever happened to the Irish saying, ‘Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí’? – praise the young and they will come. Saint Francis de Sales used to say that a spoonful of honey would attract more bees than a barrel of vinegar. When will we rid of ourselves of the idea that blame, criticism and fault-finding are the best ways of getting a person to try harder?
Many young people, it seems to me, suffer from lack of self-esteem, sometimes in a way that seriously diminishes them. A word of praise could give them the confidence to believe in themselves, the courage to hope that they are not really so bad after all. There is a great deal of potential good going to waste because people, not only the young indeed, are afraid to venture, to try, to risk, lest they be blamed, or incur ridicule, or find themselves belittled or disparaged.
I remember an elderly friar who said to me over forty years ago, ‘The man who never made a mistake never made anything.’ And another said, ‘If you can’t do the best, do the best you can.’ How much more positive was their attitude, and more likely to evoke a constructive response. Maybe we could take a leaf out of their book.