Last Sunday morning, Elise was sitting at the kitchen counter watching me flip pancakes — the box-mix kind, same as every Sunday — and she said, completely unprompted, “Papa, you make really good pancakes.” It was the simplest thing. Four years old, bare feet swinging off the stool, syrup already on her chin before the plate was even in front of her. I said thank you. I smiled. And then I felt this strange tightness in my chest, this reflexive impulse to deflect. They’re from a box, it’s nothing, anyone could do this. The words were already forming before I caught them.
I didn’t say them. But I noticed them. And I’ve been thinking about why they were there at all.
Because here’s the thing — I know where that impulse comes from. It comes from growing up in a house where attention almost always meant correction. Where being noticed meant something needed fixing. And I know I’m not the only one carrying that particular inheritance.
When love speaks the language of correction
There’s a specific kind of household where the parents aren’t neglectful, aren’t cruel, aren’t absent in any obvious way. They’re present. They care deeply. But their love flows almost exclusively through the channel of correction. Tuck your shirt in. You missed a spot. That grade could have been higher. Don’t hold your fork like that. The attention is constant, but it’s oriented toward what’s wrong, not what’s right.
The child in this household learns a particular equation early: being seen equals being evaluated. And evaluation, more often than not, means something about you needs to change.
Dr. Edward Tronick, the developmental psychologist best known for the Still Face Experiment, demonstrated that infants are exquisitely attuned to their caregivers’ emotional responsiveness from the earliest months of life. When a parent’s face goes neutral — or when their engagement consistently signals dissatisfaction — the child’s stress response activates. They learn, at a preverbal level, what kind of attention is safe and what kind is threatening. This isn’t a conscious lesson. It’s wired into the nervous system long before the child has language for it.
In homes where love primarily comes through correction, children develop an implicit understanding: When someone focuses on me, something is about to go wrong.
The architecture of praise avoidance
I’ve been reading about this pattern since Julien was born, partly because becoming a father for the second time cracked open some things I thought I’d already processed. One concept that keeps surfacing is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance in self-concept — the uncomfortable friction that happens when incoming information contradicts your deeply held beliefs about yourself. When someone who grew up being corrected receives genuine praise, it doesn’t just feel unfamiliar. It feels wrong. It clashes with the internal model that says, If someone is paying close attention to me, I must have made a mistake.
So the praise lands, and the nervous system doesn’t register warmth. It registers threat. It registers the anticipation of a correction that hasn’t come yet. And the person deflects, minimizes, or dismisses the compliment — not because they’re modest, but because accepting it would require updating a belief system that was installed decades ago, before they could spell their own name.
This is something I’ve written about before in the context of how growing up without praise creates patterns that follow people everywhere. The inability to receive a compliment at thirty-five isn’t a personality quirk. It’s an echo.
What “dangerous praise” actually looks like in adult life
I want to be specific about this, because I think people sometimes imagine praise avoidance as a dramatic thing — someone flinching visibly when told they did a good job. Usually it’s much quieter.
It looks like this:
- Immediate deflection. Someone says, “You handled that really well,” and you say, “Oh, it was nothing,” before you’ve even registered the words. The deflection is automatic, not considered.
- Suspicion. Someone compliments your work, and your first thought isn’t gratitude — it’s What do they want? or What did I miss?
- Physical discomfort. Praise creates a tightness in the chest, a restlessness, an urge to change the subject or leave the room. The body doesn’t distinguish between this attention and the attention that used to precede correction.
- Waiting for the other shoe. Even when praise lands gently, some part of you is bracing for the “but.” You did great, but… Because in your childhood, that’s how attention worked. The positive note was just the preamble.
- Giving it away. “Oh, it was really a team effort.” “Camille did most of it.” “I just got lucky.” The praise can’t belong to you because you don’t have a category for deserving it.
Research on low self-esteem and positive feedback, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that people with lower self-regard actually feel worse after receiving praise that contradicts their self-view. The compliment doesn’t uplift them — it destabilizes them. This isn’t ingratitude. It’s a nervous system trying to maintain coherence with what it learned early.
The parents who loved through fixing
I want to be careful here, because I’m not describing monsters. I’m describing my own family. I’m describing a lot of families.
My mother loved me fiercely. She still does — she FaceTimes with Elise every week, and Elise lights up when she sees her on the screen. But when I was growing up, my mother’s love was most visible when she was correcting something. Posture, grades, tone of voice, the way I spoke to adults. She wasn’t cold — she was vigilant. She was trying to prepare me for a world she found unforgiving. The corrections were her way of saying: I love you too much to let you go out into the world unprepared.
I understand this now. I didn’t understand it at eight.
At eight, what I understood was: when Mom pays attention, something is wrong with me.
This maps onto something that resonates deeply with what we know about parenting habits from previous generations that left lasting marks on children. Many of those habits — the emotional reserve, the focus on discipline over affirmation, the belief that praise would “spoil” a child — came from genuine love filtered through generational anxiety. The parents weren’t trying to wound. They were trying to protect.
How this shows up in our own parenting
Here’s where it gets personal in a way that’s harder to write about.
When Elise says, “Papa, you make really good pancakes,” and my chest tightens, that’s my childhood talking. But when I catch myself defaulting to correction with her — hold your cup with two hands, don’t drag your coat on the ground, say please — sometimes I hear the echo even louder. Because the gravitational pull of correction-as-love is strong. It’s the dialect I was raised in. It’s fluent in my body in a way that affirmation still sometimes isn’t.
Camille notices it. She’s pointed out, gently, that sometimes I give Elise instructions when what the moment actually calls for is just… noticing her. “She wasn’t asking you to fix anything,” Camille said once after Elise showed me a drawing and I immediately started suggesting she add more colors. “She was showing you something she was proud of.”
She was right. And it stung because I could feel the exact mechanism at work — I didn’t know how to just receive something without turning it into an opportunity for improvement. Not because I don’t love my daughter. Because love-through-correction is the only fluency I practiced for my entire childhood. As I’ve written about before, children raised by emotionally reserved parents don’t develop less capacity for love — they develop a different fluency for it. And sometimes that fluency needs translating.
Learning a new language — slowly
I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. I haven’t. But I’ve started doing a few things that feel like progress, and I want to name them because they’re small enough to actually try.
I practice receiving before responding. When someone says something kind to me — Camille, a friend, even Elise — I try to let three full seconds pass before I speak. Three seconds is long enough for the deflection reflex to lose some of its urgency. Long enough to actually feel the compliment land somewhere before I bat it away.
I notice my body’s response to positive attention. The tightness, the restlessness, the desire to flee. I don’t try to fix it. I just name it internally: That’s the old pattern. That’s the part of me that learned attention means danger. Dr. Dan Siegel’s framework of “name it to tame it” is useful here — the simple act of labeling an emotional response can reduce its intensity by engaging the prefrontal cortex.
I practice praising Elise and Julien for things that don’t need fixing. Not performance praise — not “you’re so smart” or “great job.” Specific noticing. “You were really patient with your brother just now.” “I like how you arranged those blocks.” “You seem really happy this morning.” The goal isn’t to become a praise machine. It’s to make sure that when my kids are seen by me, they don’t always brace for what comes next.
This connects to something I keep returning to — the idea that family rituals outlast childhood. The Sunday pancakes are part of that. But so is the emotional climate of the house. The felt sense of what happens when a parent turns toward a child. Whether that turn signals warmth or evaluation — that’s a ritual too, even if nobody names it.
The inheritance you can interrupt
Last week, Elise drew a picture of our family. Four figures, varying sizes, standing in front of something she said was our house. I looked at it, and I felt the old pull — the impulse to suggest she add a door, or draw the sky, or make the people bigger. Instead I sat with it for a moment. I let myself just look at it the way she wanted me to.
“Tell me about this,” I said.
She talked for five minutes. She pointed at every figure. She told me that Julien was smiling because he’d just had milk. She told me the brown scribble at the bottom was our driveway.
I didn’t correct anything. I didn’t add anything. I just listened, and I told her it was wonderful, and I meant it.
The tightness in my chest was still there, faintly. Maybe it always will be. But Elise doesn’t need me to have healed completely. She just needs me to be aware enough to choose a different response — to let attention mean warmth, at least in this kitchen, at least on this Sunday morning, at least for her.
That’s enough. The box-mix pancakes taught me that much.
