When it comes to praising your child for their actions, parents walk a fine line between being helpful or harmful to their child’s development. However, if you’ve got some rising kids in your home that need to learn to brush their teeth, don’t worry. It’s just fine to praise them.

“Our study does suggest that praise can be a really positive feature of parenting. Praise wins the gold when compared to boring instruction, at least when it comes to dental hygiene (口腔卫生). You can’t go wrong if you say ‘good job!’ when your child successfully brushes their own teeth,” said Julia Leonard, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University.

The study followed 81 three-year-old just learning to brush their teeth. Parents were required to video their child’s tooth-brushing endeavors (尝试) for 16 nights, hitting record as they handed the brush to their child and pushing stop when they took it back.

That allowed researchers to capture all of the parent’s praise “Well done! Good job!”—and instructional endeavors such as “Brush the backs of your teeth.” and “Hey, don’t stop. You’re not done yet.” After uploading the videos, parents were told to score their child’s mood (extremely bad to extremely good) and their own stress levels during the nightly endeavor. Those scores ranged from a scale of 0 (easy-peasy) to 10 (I’m pulling all their teeth out now).

Interestingly, a child’s tooth brushing success was directly related to the level of praise in the parents’ talk. Children brushed longer on days when their parents used more praise and less instruction. The work is the first to show that parent praise relates to child’s persistence (坚持不懈).

However, the study could not show a direct cause and effect, only an association, Leonard stressed. “We don’t know that praise causes kids to brush longer. We just know it’s associated with more brushing, she said. More research is needed to see if the study’s findings could be applied to other tasks that require a child’s persistence.

Dillon Doeden is not an athlete—and yet, he’s undertaking one of the toughest physical sports, climbing Mount Qomolangma. The dad from Omaha, Nebraska, is motivated (激励) by someone special: his 5-year-old son, Connor, who has a disease of muscular dystrophy (肌营养不良) called Duchenne.

Connor was said to have Duchenne when he was 2 years old. Duchenne is a disorder that causes muscle wasting of every muscle in the human body. And it finally leads to death. There is no cure. But people like Doeden are trying to change that.

The disease is rare, but Connor is not alone. Doeden met a fellow dad, Jim Raffone, on the Internet, who has a son with Duchenne. Jim Raffone also runs JAR of Hope, a charity to bring awareness and raise money for Duchenne research. Raffone said they were going to do a big fundraiser by climbing Qomolangma to help try and fund a clinical trial for Duchenne and asked whether Doeden would go. Doeden said he absolutely would go.

“I am so grateful another dad in the Duchenne community is coming on the Climb For The Cure,” Raffone said. “We need to work together to make Duchenne a household name.” That’s why they’re planning to climb Qomolangma—the world’s tallest mountain. “Why is it the Qomolangma? Well, I would do anything for my son and we chose Qomolangma because, well, quite frankly, it deserves some attention,” Doeden said.

Doeden said he’s been training for the climb—which is 80 miles round trip—and he feels confident that he can do it. For Doeden, the difficulty is worth it because of his son. “This isn’t necessarily something I would’ve done on my own. But because we’re doing it to help my son and others dealing with Duchenne, it’s easy to stay motivated in my book. Like, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do,” he said.

My father Ed Kobbeman built his own house after he married my mother, so it wasn’t too surprising when he proudly showed me his latest creation—the outhouse (户外厕所). The traditional sun and moon were cut out of the front door. There was a fancy (精致的) seat inside. It was, indeed, a fine outhouse. Dad said he wanted to use his creation in the outhouse races, where teams must pull or push their homemade outhouse to compete. To be in this event, Dad found some old wheels in his storage area.

On the day of the race, Dad’s nephews and great-niece arrived. The four made up the outhouse racing team, along with one great-niece weighing a hundred pounds, chosen to ride on the seat inside.

In the sun of that hot day in June, the teams lined up. The starting shot rang out. The red-shirted Kobbeman team led the way and turned to make their way back to the start/ finish line.

Just then, disaster happened. The hard rubber on the wheels started peeling off (剥落). The nephews hung on for the last few meters, barely winning the first race by great strength of will and brute force (蛮力) as they lifted that outhouse off the ground across the start/finish line. But there was no hope for the second round. I stood there, ready to cry.

Ten minutes later I realized Dad was nowhere to be seen. How could he just leave like that? Soon the announcer was telling the participants (参赛者) to get ready. Just then Dad turned up with new wheels. We changed the wheels and won the next four races.

On the way home, I asked my dad, “Where did you go? And where did you get those new wheels?”

My father took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “I ran two blocks to the car, unlocked it, drove home, ran into the house, got the key to the storage, ran out there, unlocked the garage, pulled my new lawnmower (割草机) out on the grass, took some tools, pulled off the wheels and threw them in the car.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Dad, why did you do that in this heat? You had a heart attack ten years ago. What if you couldn’t come back on time?”

He smiled, “Well, I just couldn’t let the boys down. They worked so hard. There was a problem, and it just needed to be fixed. That’s all.”