Turns out there is such a thing as bad praise.

Dr. Dana Suskind, founder of the Thirty Million Words Initiative at the University of Chicago, in her book "Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain" cites the research on the growth mindset by Professor Carol Dweck and others.

It's the idea that intelligence is not fixed at birth. That you can, with the right tools, make a baby smarter.

Growth mindset research finds that the way children are praised influences how hard they will work later on when a task becomes harder.

Kids who are praised for “being smart” quit difficult tasks sooner than kids who are praised for working hard and the effort they put into completing a task.

“While growth mindset believes that ‘intelligence is enhanced by challenges,’ a fixed mindset believes that abilities are absolute and unchangeable,” Suskind writes in her book. “You are smart or you aren’t. In her pivotal study of 1998, Professor Dweck showed that just a single line of praise, praising either the person or the process, can profoundly influence whether a child is motivated to take on a challenge or not.”

In Dweck’s study, 128 fifth-graders were given a puzzle to complete. After finishing some kids were praised for being smart, others for working hard. The children were then given the choice of a second task, one that was more difficult than the first but from which they would “learn a lot,” or one similar to the first.

Sixty-seven percent of the kids called smart picked the easy task; 92 percent of the kids praised for working hard chose the harder task.

"If praise is not handled properly," Dweck has said, "it can become a negative force, a kind of drug that, rather than strengthening students, makes them passive and dependent on the opinion of others."

"Children with a fixed mindset," Suskind writes in her book, "attributed to person-based praise, have been found to be more likely to give up when things become challenging and, even more important, were more likely to compound failures by continuing to perform poorly after a failure.

"They were also more likely to lie about achievement in order to appear smarter, since being thought "smart" by others was such an important part of their personas," Suskind writes.