It happened so many times a day I had stopped hearing myself say it.
Good boy.
Good boy for eating that.
Good boy for getting your shoes.
Good boy.
It was a reflex. Something that came out automatically, the way careful does when a child runs near something hard.
I didn’t think much about it until one afternoon when my son did something that genuinely surprised me.
He had been playing in the garden while I was trying to get something done inside. I hadn’t asked him to do anything. I hadn’t been watching. But when I came out he had – without any prompting – picked up his things from the grass and stacked them by the back door.
His boots. His jacket. A stick he had been carrying around for three days as though it were something important.
I opened my mouth.
And I said it.
Good boy.
He looked up at me briefly, then went back to what he was doing.
And I stood there thinking – that wasn’t right.
Not the words exactly. But something about them felt thin. Like I had handed him a coin when what he had done deserved something more considered.
He had done something kind and responsible, entirely on his own. And I had given him the same two words I used when he finished his dinner.
The problem with praising children as “good”
I started noticing after that.
How often good boy was standing in for something more specific.
How it said I see you without actually seeing anything.
How children, I think, can feel the difference.
But I also started noticing something else.
How much of the language around my son described what he was rather than what he did.
He’s so energetic.
He’s a handful.
He’s a typical boy.
Even the kind things. He’s such a good boy. Still a label. Still something pinned to him like a name tag.
How labels shape a child’s identity
Boys collect these descriptions early. The lively ones. The loud ones. The ones who can’t sit still. Before they are old enough to have opinions about it, they already know what category they belong to. And they start to live inside it.
Good boy and naughty boy are two sides of the same thing, really. Both of them about identity. Neither of them about behaviour.
When we say naughty boy, we’re not describing what happened. We’re describing him. The whole of him, condensed into a verdict.
And good boy does the same thing, just more kindly.
Neither one tells him anything useful. Neither one shows him what to do differently, or what specifically he did well. They just tell him what he is in that moment. And children, especially boys who hear these words often, start to believe them.
The boy who is told he is naughty enough times doesn’t think – I do naughty things sometimes. He thinks – I am naughty. And once that becomes part of how he understands himself, his behaviour starts to follow the story.
The same is true in the other direction. A child who is only ever told he is good doesn’t really know what good looks like in practice. He just knows he currently has the label. And labels can be lost.
Why specific praise works better
But a child who is told – you noticed your brother needed help and you stopped what you were doing – that child has something more solid. Not a verdict. A mirror. A small, specific picture of himself doing something that mattered. That’s harder to take away.
What to say instead of “good boy”
So I began trying something different. Not a system or a method, just a small shift in how I paid attention.
Instead of good boy, I tried to say what I had actually noticed.
You remembered to bring your boots in.
You waited while I was on the phone and that was hard.
You shared that without being asked.
It felt awkward at first. But I soon noticed he started listening differently. Not because the words were magic. But because they were specific. Because they named the thing he had actually done rather than just labelling him for having done it.
Raising boys with awareness, not labels
And there is something particular about that for boys.
Because boys tend to hear a lot of correction. At home, at school, in the supermarket, at the park – there is a steady stream of feedback about what they are doing wrong. What is too loud, too rough, too much. The positive feedback, when it comes, is often just as vague as the correction. Good boy. As if it balances out, but doesn’t need to be any more precise.
But a boy who is told you noticed your brother was upset and you stopped – he learns something. He sees himself doing something specific and good. He has something to come back to:
That is the kind of person I am.
Not because he was labelled. But because someone looked closely enough to see it.
My son didn’t have many words for how things felt inside. He could tell me when something was unfair. He could tell me when he was hungry or tired. But the more subtle things – frustration, embarrassment, the particular feeling of having tried hard at something – those were harder to reach.
Some of that is just how boys are wired, at least for a while. The connections between feeling something and finding words for it develop more slowly. The feeling is fully there. It just doesn’t have an easy path to language yet.
But some of it, I think, was me.
He is my oldest. Which means he got the version of me that was still figuring things out. Still learning what questions to ask. Still moving through the days on instinct rather than intention, trying to keep everything together before I really understood what keeping everything together even meant.
With a first child you establish patterns before you know they are patterns. You find what works – what gets you through the morning, through the bedtime, through the week – and you repeat it. And by the time you start to look more carefully at how things are going, the habits are already quite deep.
I had spent years asking him what he did rather than how things felt. What happened at school. What did you build. What do you want for lunch. Concrete questions with concrete answers. Easy to ask. Easy to answer.
The quieter questions – that seemed hard, how are you feeling about it – I asked less often than I probably should have. Partly because they felt intrusive. Partly because he would usually shrug and walk away. Partly, if I’m honest, because I hadn’t been taught to ask them either.
So the vocabulary just hadn’t been practiced much. Not because he couldn’t feel those things, but because neither of us had found a way in.
Naming what I saw in him turned out to be a gentler route than asking.
Not – how did that make you feel? Which he would have walked away from.
Just observation.
You kept going even when it was difficult.
You felt embarrassed just then, I think, and you held it together.
I wasn’t asking him to look inward. I was just handing him the word for something he had already felt. Something small. Something he could take or leave. But over time he seemed to reach for those words more himself.
Which is, I think, one of the quieter things we can do for boys.
Not more praise. More precision.
Not more questions. More noticing.
A slow parenting shift
And I noticed something in myself too.
Saying what I actually saw meant I had to actually look.
It meant slowing down for a moment. Stopping the movement of the afternoon. Actually noticing what was happening in front of me instead of managing it from a distance.
Which is, I suppose, what slow living keeps asking of me.
Not a method.
Not a script.
Just the practice of paying attention.
Of saying what you see.
Of being present enough to notice that your child carried his stick to the back door and stacked it carefully.
And that that was worth more than a reflex. It was worth being named.
Not so he would feel proud for a moment, but so he could begin to recognise himself in what he does.
Not a good boy. Just a boy, learning – slowly, in small ways – what it means to be kind, careful, and capable.
And me, learning to see him properly.