Abstract: This paper reviewed the recent studies on the relations between adults' criticism/praise and children's responsive patterns after briefly introducing the types of criticism/praise. The research findings showed that person criticism/praise could lead children to display helplessness responses, and process criticism/praise could result in children’s mastery-oriented responses. The mechanism through which adults' criticism/praise influenced children’s responses was empirically found that different types of criticism/praise could foster children’s different theory of intelligence, achievement goal and the attribution for performance, and then result in different responsive patterns. It was also suggested that there were some key issues that need to be further explored in the future

Key words: criticism/praise, helplessness response, mastery-oriented response