Why Your Child Is Not Foolproof

April 01, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on April 1, 2012.

 It wasn’t until I went to graduate school in 1984 that I started to work on a Compac computer, the size of a standard weekend suitcase which my husband lugged up to our third floor apartment   I couldn’t believe my eyes. I could correct my typos before they were even on paper! It was beyond my wildest dreams as an academic.

Nowadays I can make one of my colleagues giggle just by opening my “old-fashioned” sliding keyboard cell phone. I am still resisting touch screen technology and long for my cell phone to ring… well… like a phone instead of a jukebox.

There is simply no denying that our children are growing up in a vastly different world. With this endless game of technology leapfrog comes increasing demands on our ability to figure out what is possible and impossible, valid or unreliable information.

For young children, this is even harder than you might think.

At the University of Virgina, Professor Judy DeLoache and her colleagues set out to explore how young children ages four to eight would react to seeing “impossible” events with their own eyes.  They individually invited children into their lab to see their very fancy machine with lots of flashing lights, dials and buttons.  The researchers then told the children:

“This is my special machine. This machine can change things in all sorts of ways – it can make big things little, it can turn pictures into real things, and it can make toys turn real, too!  Let’s turn it on and see what it can do.”

The researcher would then put one object (a toy hammer) in one door of the machine, have the child push the “on” button, and open another door where a transformed object (a real hammer) would appear. After seeing several “transformations” (such as a picture of a duck becoming a stuffed animal duck), the child’s parent would ask the child questions about what he or she had just seen. Questions included whether it was a trick, a magical machine, or if these things had really happened.

What they found stunned the research team. One hundred percent of the four year olds, 88 percent of the five year olds, 71 percent of the six year olds and even 33 percent of the seven year olds completely believed that the machine had magically transformed the objects.

Amazed, they made the transformations even more fantastical. A picture of a lizard in a cage would go into the machine and a live lizard in an identical cage would come out!  Still, the range was remarkable:  88 percent of five year olds to 40 percent of eight year olds believed the transformations to be real.

Yet when they asked a separate group of children whether a flashlight could turn little or if pictures of animals could become real animals, approximately two-thirds of the time the child would report it was not possible. Asked as a question, this age group was more likely to get it right.

In this research team’s experiments, it wasn’t until children were eight or nine years old before they consistently said that what they had seen the magical machine do simply wasn’t possible.

While this may seem difficult to imagine as an adult, think about watching a skilled magician’s performance. We know it isn’t possible, but the power of the visual information is overwhelming.

This research has all kinds of implications, from what we might interpret as to when a child is intentionally lying, to the resonance of screen images as “real”, to the idea that children are absorbing information and knowledge from everyone around them. It is an enormous task to figure out what is valid and reliable knowledge, especially in the early years.

Enjoy this April Fool’s Day, but remember that for your child, seeing is often believing.

Once A Parent, Always A Parent…

March 11, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.
This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on February 19, 2012 (my son's 26th birthday...)

Last week, I had a meeting with a parent at my nursery school to talk about that often turbulent time called toilet training.  This was her first-born child, and Mom remarked: “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. I’ve never had a three-year-old before!”.

I smiled and thought to myself, “I’ve never had a 26-year-old before!” 

Today is my first-born’s birthday. It is the first time I had to stop and think what birthday this is. Today, I will talk with him on my cell phone or Skype with him on our flat screen TV. I will ask him about what Bloomington restaurant he picked for his birthday dinner, and what his wife gave him as a present. I’ll comment on this being his first birthday with his own dog, while thinking about my 26^th birthday holding him as a four month old. I will remember the first time I saw his face, and marvel anew at the mystery of development.  I will think about the parent I was, the parent I’ve become, and the parent I still strive to be.

I often tell preschool parents that our children grow up and become adults, but we will always be their parents. Their waning smiles or quiet nods let me know they heard my words, but don’t necessarily believe them. It may be a fact of life, but the only similar relationship that we have experienced is being a child to our own parents. And there was no surer way for my mother to push my buttons than to exclaim at some public event, “You will always be my baby.”

While I remember the day my son was born with hour-by-hour (and sometimes moment-by-moment) clarity, I have never thought of him as always being my baby. He is our son. True, it is hard not to be mesmerized by the rapid transformations of infancy, childhood or adolescence. We count age in hours, then days, eventually weeks and months then finally years. Imagine the looks you would get if someone asked you your age and you said, “I’m 34 years and 4 months old.”  The timeline widens with development, changes become more subtle, and our lens more muted to the details.

Yet parenting in the years before children are adults can be like riding white-water rapids: exhilarating one moment and harrowing the next.  Sometimes skill or expertise helps to steer the raft while other times the forces of nature toss the technical manual overboard. This is how I imagine my early years as a parent. I was much less able to predict the hidden rapids or upcoming storms. Sometimes I felt like I was trying to steer the raft with one paddle while reading the manual in my other hand.  If only I could get to the quiet bay, catch my breath, and restock my backpack. In fact, there were many calming waters around me: my husband, my friends, my extended family.  The trick was being able to look up long enough to see them and value their power of nourishing and replenishment.

It was during these earlier years of parenting, especially when we had three children at home, that folks used to say, “Oh, they grow up so fast!  Enjoy every minute.”  I could hear their words, but I didn’t necessarily believe them.

If I wrote a letter to my younger self as a parent, I think it would have the following pieces of advice. It’s ok to make mistakes. There really is a “good enough” parent within. Your children know you love them, even when you are distracted or exhausted. Love being a mother but keep a strong bond to your inner self. Dream for yourself as much as you dream for your children. Know that every moment you give them, you will see reflected back in their eyes as adults.

And what about my present day parenting self?  The river is definitely calmer these days, even with a teen still at home. Calmer waters make it possible to think more than react, and to gaze with admiration at the changing shoreline. I appreciate the challenge of those occasional rapids, knowing they will help me to shine a light by which each of our children will eventually build their own strong rafts.

Perhaps the words of this traditional folk song say it best:

The water is wide, I can’t cross over

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that can carry two

And both shall row, my love and I.

Free Time: Why Women’s Views of It Are Out of Sync With Reality

March 08, 2012

Many of us have grown up in a world where bells marked the beginning and the end of classes at school, where a series of homework assignments had to be completed each day, and where we were supposed to finish dinner before we could have dessert ("the clean plate club"). As adults, we then went into a work world where "face time" equaled commitment and presence signaled productivity. And even if we varied our arrival and departure times at work (flex time), it was called an "alternative" work arrangement. Our lives have been marked by time boundaries.

And today? We have been catapulted into a 24/7 world marked by the death of distance, where work and family demands never cease, and where, in the time it takes us to answer one e-mail, ten more e-mails arrive in our inboxes.

It is no wonder that a new study conducted by my organization, Families and Work Institute, in partnership with Real Simple magazine, reveals that almost one in two women ages 25-54 (49 percent) feels that we don't have enough free time. Although the finding that women are feeling a time crunch is not a surprise, this study is filled with many other surprises for me -- even after years of conducting research on our changing lives at work and at home. Here are some of my major surprises.
 

• We do tasks in our free time (defined as time we spend on ourselves, where we can chose to do things that we enjoy) that we don't really enjoy. Yes, most of us enjoy the time we spend with our children (79 percent) and spouses/partners (77 percent) a lot, but many of us also spend some of our free time doing laundry (79 percent), cleaning (75 percent), and decluttering (62 percent). When asked how much we enjoy all of the things we do in our free time, these tasks were at the bottom of the list with only 20 percent saying they enjoy organizing and decluttering a lot and even fewer saying they enjoy cleaning (13 percent) and laundry (11 percent) a lot. Okay -- the laundry is there and it needs doing but ...
   
• We actually are more likely to share quality standards with our husbands and partners for taking care of our children (80 percent) than taking care of our homes (63 percent).
   
• And about one third of us (32 percent) very often feel as if we are not doing our jobs if we don't do the housework ourselves. It is like the "new feminine mystique" -- we say to ourselves that we don't mind the dust balls in our homes, but do we really mean it?
   
• Many of us (58 percent) feel that we have to finish our chores before we can enjoy time for ourselves. Though we live in a world where housework is never really finished, we still seek to keep our membership in the "clean plate club" when it comes to those chores.

Why are these findings out of sync with reality? Because when we do get help and take some time for ourselves in the midst of our busy lives, we feel much better about ourselves. We are better wives, mothers and workers.

But what about the free time itself? We can substitute one schedule for another -- the laundry for the free-time schedule. I was struck, however, by the 77 percent of women in the study who said that they spend some of their free time "just relaxing" and by the 71 percent who say that really enjoy this a lot. The times when I am the happiest are when I drop any semblance of a schedule and simply putter around. For me, it is among the most restorative times.

And it seems this desire for unstructured time starts young. In my Ask the Children study, young people made it clear that they would like to replace the quality time versus quantity time debate with the notions of "focused time" and "hang around time." Hanging around time is when we drop the schedule for a little while and go with the flow, live in the present, act spontaneously.

So here is to adding some guilt-free "hanging around time" and "puttering time" to our lives --not as another to-do on our busy schedules, but as a restorative time for rest and recovery.

Social Media Webinar Replay

February 22, 2012

A replay of the Mind in the Making social media webinar is now available online. There are also some highlights available on the webinar open thread.

Promoting Self Control: It’s Not How We Might Think!

In my travels around the country with Mind in the Making, it seems as if people increasingly understand that heaping indiscriminate praise on children (“good job” or “you are so smart”) is not a good way to promote self-confidence and self-esteem. Perhaps this shift in awareness has occurred because it primarily comes from the work of single researcher, Carol Dweck of Stanford University. She has shown that praise for intelligence tends to promote a “fixed mindset” whereby children end up believing that their capacities are inborn. Thus, these children are less willing to take on tough challenges because they don’t want to risk losing their label as smart. In contrast, specific and authentic praise for effort (“you worked very hard until you solved that math problem” or for strategy (“you sounded out the letters so you could figure out what that new reading word is”), promotes a “growth mindset” where children are willing to “take on challenges”—one of the life skills I have found is essential in helping children thrive now and in the future.

Sadly, we haven’t come as far in our cultural understanding of another life skill I find essential—“self control.” Perhaps it’s because the findings in this realm of research come from many different researchers and many different studies. Yes, the Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel of Columbia University has gained widespread recognition, but as often as not, I find that people seem to think that adults need to “make” children learn to wait so that they will be able to resist “one marshmallow now for two marshmallows later”—the challenge Mischel posed in this study. In essence, people tend to think that teaching children delayed gratification comes from strict and enforced discipline.

For this reason, I welcomed the New York Times editorial by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang: Building Self-Control, the American Way. They have spent their careers researching and writing about neuroscience. As authors of many books and articles, including Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, (a book for which I wrote the Foreword), they know the multiple studies that conclude that promoting “self control” is not learned by strict discipline, by keeping children at their desks, and by cutting out the so-called frills in curriculum and focusing just on academics.  

First, the undeniable importance of self control. As Aamodt and Wang write in the editorial: “childhood self-control is twice as important as intelligence in predicting academic achievement.” Likewise, in Mind in the Making, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia focuses on executive functions of the brain—the basis of life skills—because they enable children to use what they learn. She says that more and more evidence is revealing that executive function skills including self control “actually predict success better than IQ tests.”

So, how do we promote self control? Here are a few ideas from research that show it’s not how we might think.

1. It’s building on what children are doing to control themselves—not imposing strict discipline. 
   Even infants, immediately following birth, have ways of regulating themselves when they get over-stimulated. Watch a baby close his or her eyes if the lights are too bright, or turn away if there is too much noise. We need to watch what calms children down and help them build on their own strategies for self control. Obviously as adults, we provide firm guidance, but we are better served by helping children learn to come up with their own strategies beginning in the preschool and extending into the school-age years rather than simply imposing them. For example, Walter Mischel is now looking at what children did to resist the immediate gratification of “one marshmallow now” for the delayed gratification of “two marshmallows later” and helping children learn those techniques (such as thinking of the marshmallows as puffy clouds rather than yummy marshmallows).  

2. It’s providing children opportunities to engage in physical games and experiences—not making them sit still for long hours.  
   We tend to think of promoting self control as making children stay still, yet there is increasing evidence that children learn this skill through active games (like Red Light/Green Light or Simon Says, Do the Opposite) and through focused attention in physical activities. In a time when schools are cutting back on recess and physical education, Aarmodt and Wang write, “Though parents often worry that physical education takes time away from the classroom, an analysis of multiple studies instead found strong evidence that physical activity improved academic performance.”

3. It’s giving children opportunities to play—not just do academics. 
   Though pretend play may be seen frivolous, it is an essential building block in learning. Think of the concentration in young children when they play doctor or fireman. And think of the concentration in older children when they learn about another culture by putting on a play about it.

4. It’s encouraging children’s interests—not cutting back on them. 
   I call these interests “lemonade stands” after my daughter’s passion for lemonade stands when she was five and six-years-old. Whatever their interests, we do well to promote them and build on them.  Increasingly research is showing that the arts and academic success are linked. And sadly, schools today are also cutting back on the arts.

5. It’s helping children set and achieve goals—not imposing them.  
   Self control draws on executive functions of the brain and as such are always goal-driven. We do well to help children set and achieve their own goals, rather than handing goals to them, whether it’s making a plan for how they will spend Saturday to making plans for getting a school paper done on time. As Aamodt and Wang write in the New York Times, “Helping your children learn to manage themselves, rather than rely on external orders, could pay big dividends in adulthood.”