Somewhere between the toddler who paints because the paint moves and the older child who asks, before starting, whether the drawing is going to be good, something shifts. The making stops being the point. The response to the making becomes the point. A lot of childhood, and a lot of the culture kids grow up inside now, quietly trains them to make that trade: to do the thing for the gold star, the praise, the likes, the sense of being liked. It looks harmless. In our experience it is one of the easier ways to lose the very thing you were hoping to encourage.
We think about this a lot at the art table, because art is where the trade shows up early and plainly. A child hands you a picture and watches your face instead of the paper. That look is worth paying attention to.
What happened when preschoolers drew for a prize
In 1973, three psychologists ran a study at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus that has stuck around for fifty years because the result is so ordinary and so easy to miss. Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett first watched preschoolers through a one-way mirror to find the children who already loved drawing with felt-tip markers on their own. Then they split those children into groups.
The Artful Age
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One group was shown a “Good Player Award,” a card with a gold star and a red ribbon and a space for their name, and promised they would get one if they drew. A second group drew and then got the same award as a surprise. A third group just drew, with no award at all.
Weeks later, the researchers put the markers back out in the classroom and watched again without the children knowing. The kids who had been promised the award drew noticeably less than they had before. The children who got a surprise award, or no award, kept drawing about as much as ever. The promised-award group also made pictures that blind judges rated as lower in quality than the other two groups. You can read the original paper, Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward, in full.
The children who drew for the prize did worse and, given the free choice later, mostly walked away.
It is not just one study
A single clever experiment is easy to over-read, and the authors themselves warned against that. They were careful to say the effect shows up under specific conditions: when a child already likes the activity, and when a reward gets stapled onto it that was never needed. Rewards are not poison. For a task a child has no interest in, an incentive can be the thing that gets them started.
But the pattern did not stay a single study. In 1999, Edward Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan pulled together 128 experiments in a meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, and found the same shape again and again: tangible rewards that people expected for doing something tended to reduce their later interest in doing it for its own sake. Their review is available through the Self-Determination Theory group. The finding is not that praise ruins children. It is narrower and more useful than that. When the reason to do something moves from inside the child to outside, the inside reason tends to fade.
Popularity is that same trade grown up. It is approval on a bigger scale, from more people, kept score of in public. The felt-tip marker becomes the post, the room, the friend group, the follower count. The question quietly changes from “do I like doing this” to “will this be liked.”
What a life built on approval costs
The psychologist Jennifer Crocker has spent years studying what happens when self-worth gets hooked to specific things, a framework she and Connie Wolfe laid out in Psychological Review in 2001. Their point is not about how much self-esteem a person has. It is about what that self-esteem depends on. When a person’s sense of worth rests on other people’s approval, chasing that approval has real costs, and her research links approval-based self-worth to worse outcomes for learning, relationships, and mood.
You do not need the studies to recognize the shape of it. A child who makes things to be liked has handed the verdict to someone else. Every picture, every performance, every post is now a small referendum they can lose. The work gets safer, because safe things are easier to approve. The risks that make art interesting, the odd color choice, the strange story, the thing no one asked for, start to feel expensive.
This is the quiet cost. Not that a popular child is unhappy, but that a child who builds a self on popularity can lose track of what they actually like, because liking something privately stops being the point.
What tends to help at home
None of this means going silent while your child makes things. Warmth is not a reward in the sense the studies mean. The distinction that seems to matter is between attention to the child’s experience and a verdict on the product.
“You used every color in the box” is different from “that’s beautiful.” “You worked on that for a long time” is different from “you’re so talented.” The first kind notices what the child did and felt. The second hands down a grade. In our experience, children who mostly hear the first kind keep going longer and take more chances, and children who mostly hear the second kind start making things for the grade.
It helps to protect some making that has no audience at all. Drawing that does not get shown. Building that gets knocked down. A song no one records. Kids need somewhere the work is just for them, where there is no one to please and nothing to win.
It also helps to let your own face relax when they show you something. Children read us closely. If our approval arrives like weather, sunny for a good drawing, cool for a boring one, they learn to farm us for sun.
And when the older-kid version arrives, the likes and the group chats and the ranking of who is in and who is out, it is worth remembering that the marker study started with children who genuinely loved to draw. The love was real first. The reward is what crowded it out. The job at home is less about banning the scoreboard and more about keeping alive the part of a child that still does things for no reason anyone can count.
The toddler with the paint had it right. The paint moves, and that is enough. Most of raising a maker is helping a child hold on to that for as long as the world will let them.