As parents, we are all guilty of saying things in haste to our kids that we didn’t really mean. But even our well-intentioned words of praise (when focused on the wrong things) could be having a negative effect on our kids. One of my goals as a parent and physician has been to be the kind of person who focuses not on one’s performance, but on one’s character. This is a tough challenge in a culture that over-applauds performance.

Here’s a story to demonstrate what I mean:

A few years ago, I sat with a mother who asked if she could boast about her son whom I was seeing for panic attacks. I complied. For the next five minutes or so, she exuded excitement over the fact that his grades were excellent, that he was bright and that his soccer coach recently told him that he was one of the team’s star players. Now this all sounds nice on the surface but think about the 15-year-old boy sitting on my exam table listening to his mother. He was here because he was experiencing acute anxiety over his schoolwork and about forgetting things in class. When he was with large groups of…