“And he sailed off through night and day…to where the wild things are.”

May 17, 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 May 13, 2012.

In 1981, I wrote a term paper for a college course on children’s literature.  I was so fascinated and absorbed by the topic that I had to set time limits on how long I would work on it, so I could focus on other courses. Don’t get me wrong; I liked my other courses. But nothing compared to delving into the creative mind of Maurice Sendak.

Perhaps some of my intrigue came from not meeting the Wild Things until I was a student teacher in college. The preschoolers in our campus nursery school would find any Sendak book on the shelf, as if there was a secret child magnet sewn into the binding. Then they would find me, and tug on my hand until I stopped whatever I was doing, and plop happily into my lap to hear their favorite stories. In my younger, more flexible years, I could fit three children in my lap and tuck another two in under my arms. Together we would venture Into the Night Kitchen, or sail with Max in and out of a day and over a year to Where the Wild Things Are. They could read them again and again. So could I. 

In my early 20s, my favorite presents were books from Sendak’s collection and stuffed animal creatures from Wild Things. As a young mom, I could have read his books to my children by memory, but who would want to miss sinking into the rich illustrations on every page?  The experience was insatiable.

What was so compelling about these stories?

In many ways, Sendak went for the emotional jugular – not a typical approach for a modern day children’s author. Instead of thinking of fantasy as a distraction from the emotions of childhood, or a framing of its preciousness,  he understood it as a powerful tool to grasp the most primal, human emotions that are part of us from our youngest years.

It wasn’t without controversy. Published in 1963, librarians, teachers and critics cringed at the story of a boy angry at his mother, chasing his dog with a fork, and running away from home to party with monsters. It was as if Sendak was putting the idea of being angry at a parent’s discipline, or running away, into children’s heads for the first time.

Sendak thought that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, each character’s words and images connected so profoundly with the primal feelings of childhood that children resonated from the first words: “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another…”

In his 1964 acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal, Sendak said:

“Certainly we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and that intensify anxiety; and to a point we can prevent premature exposure to such experiences. That is obvious. But what is just as obvious — and what is too often overlooked — is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”

Yet it isn’t only the fears and frustrations of childhood that Sendak communicated with such mastery of words and art. He understood the sensual pleasure of childhood. In the Night Kitchen finds a young boy, Mickey (inspired by his childhood hero Mickey Mouse), sliding from his bed into a bowl of dough in a night bakery, naked. As Mickey dreams his way through the events of the bakery, the texture and intensity of children’s dream lives swim from the pages. Mickey joins the mysterious night world of adventure, one typically kept from sleeping children.

Ultimately, Sendak could see and accept the world through a child’s eyes: fears and anxieties, frustrations and triumphs, the comfort of food and the sensuality of being human. He embraced the authenticity of childhood, and accepted the dreams as readily as reality.  Though dramatically different in personality, to me he is a kindred spirit to Fred Rogers, who also accepted children just the way they are.

Today Blue Beast watches over my office door at the nursery school, much like a sly, silent guard. If a child forgets their favorite rest time snuggly, Beast will offer to step in. But mostly he is there to remind them that they are safe, loved as children, and accepted just the way they are.

Can You Hear Me Now?

April 30, 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 March 4, 2012.

This may seem like an odd statement from a mother who finally bought a cell phone so that her teen-age children could reach her in an emergency.  I bet five to ten years ago, many a parent got their first cell phone number with this goal in mind.  I remember being perplexed when area codes started multiplying to make room for more phone numbers and I simply could not imagine the day when every member of my family would have their own cell phone number.    Now I recognize each family member’s call by their number and unique ring tone.   I rarely answer “Hello?” because I already know who it is.

Here’s my issue.  If you are talking on your cell phone in front of your child, you are not talking with your child.  But you are communicating a message to your child.  It might not be an intentional message, but it is a message.   It tells your child that you are focusing on something other than him or her.   Because you don’t respond to your child’s bid for communication and connection, you lose an opportunity to complete a circle of communication.   For example, if I say something to you and you respond to me, we complete one circle.  These single circles spin and link together to become orchestrated dances that form the foundation of language and literacy development.

So, you might wonder, what’s the big difference from when our parents talked on the phone in the kitchen while making dinner and shushed us away until the conversation was over?  In some ways, there isn’t a big difference.   Adults have things that need to get done and children sometimes need to wait.   Mr. Rogers even taught us songs to sing to ourselves while we learned how to wait. 

The problem is that the phone used to be mounted to the wall and the most it could reach was the length of the cord.  If an adult was on the phone in the house and child got a scraped knee in the backyard, an adult had to put down the phone to attend to the child.  If a parent was giving a child a bath, chances are they weren’t on a phone in the bathroom.  If a family was eating dinner when the phone rang, chances are someone had to leave the table to answer it, and the conversation at the table could continue.   If a parent was driving their child to school, chances are if they were talking outloud, it was to another person in the same car.

None of these physical limitations hold nowadays. Much of the time, it isn’t a big deal.  But some of the time, it is a huge deal.  And in those times, timing is everything.

Here are five questions to ask yourself when you make a choice to be on a cell phone around your child.

1. Am I separating or reuniting with my child?  If the answer is yes, do everything possible to make your communication with your child your top priority.  Silence your phone or turn it off.  Let a call go to voice mail for the next 10 minutes.   The communication you create with your child at departures and reunions require your focus and attention as you send messages verbally and non-verbally about your relationship with one another.   In my mind, those are the most important minutes of your day because they create the foundation of trust and reciprocity in your relationship.
2. Can it wait? If a voice message will provide you the same information in a reasonable time frame, it can usually wait. 
3. Is this an appropriate conversation to have near a child? 
4. Is my child needing to communicate something that is important to him or her? (Note I said “important”, not “urgent” or “necessary”.)
5. In two hours from now, will it matter more that you answered your cell phone or that you answered your child? 

It really is true that in the life of a young child, timing is everything.

Once Upon A Time ... Tales of Executive Functions at Work

April 22, 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 15, 2012.

In the glorious days before homework ruled our evening household schedule, our elder daughter, Leslie, would come home from nursery school and see to the lives of all 27 children single-handedly. She knew precisely what each child was doing, and helped him or her carry on with many adventures. Occasionally, we would come into her bedroom and see their world for a moment in time, a panorama of drama and action sprawled before us from one end of her rug to under her bed. Through our naïve adult eyes, the whole community seemed frozen in motion. Leslie knew otherwise.

I have never asked Leslie much about the world that lived within her bedroom kingdom. As much as we longed for a live-action glimpse, or in our weaker moments as developmental psychologists, to mike her dialogue, we never did. The complex world of a doll house and castle existed only for one person in our family.

On occasion, a worry would creep in. Was I being a bad Mom? Maybe we should have other friends come over and join her play. Or maybe we should put a limit on Playmobile world time. Was I creating an isolated child?  What if she never played with anything else?

The worry would fade when I saw her at nursery school. She had a social life with peers 8:30 am to 3:30 pm every day. She had a host of activities and could frequently be spotted in dramatic play with some best friends. She had arguments and conflicts, laughter and bemusement. Her expressive language skills were delightful and amazing, and she looked forward to everything (except nap) every day.

So what do we make of a child who wants to play with the same type of toys daily?  Are they learning anything? Is intensive play a red flag?

During those years, I understood a chunk of what she was learning. Role playing, even when you are the puppeteer of multiple characters, requires extensive perspective-taking skills. Each character represents a different perspective, no matter how simple (sister, mom, cat, dog). Just for the characters to have a dialogue requires a child’s perspective taking skills to kick in. When actual children are the characters, they lose the ‘puppeteer’ advantage and have to constantly engage in a give and take of ideas, modifying roles and storylines to keep the play in motion. Between her home kingdom and a dynamic nursery school classroom, Leslie had both experiences daily.

I also understood the literacy connection. Role playing is storytelling; in fact, it is often literacy at its finest because it is the co-creation of shared meaning. As dramatic play skills leap forward during the preschool years, children gain the ability to weave increasingly complex plot lines, elaborate on a character’s role, and change the ending!  This involves planning, sequencing, and expressing ideas clearly enough that others understand your intention and meaning.

What I didn’t understand until a few months ago was the intensity of focus, working memory, self-regulation and cognitive flexibility skills at play each day in Leslie’s kingdom. She could sustain her focus for an hour to two hours in active play. Her working memory was in full gear as she held each character’s story line in her head so that the bigger drama of the kingdom could unfold.  Sustaining her attention acted like cross-training in self-regulation. And cognitive flexibility?  She had 27 characters beckoning to her imagination.

As I think back, I see my younger self pondering the repetition of her play. But that’s just it… it wasn’t repetitious. Every day the life of the kingdom moved forward. When I carefully tiptoed through the kingdom to crawl into her bed for story time, there was a newly arranged scene of characters frozen in time, waiting for their next adventure. The passion and pleasure of her interests set a stage for in-depth exploration of ideas and problem-solving in a world limited only by her mind.

It was a bittersweet day when she moved the kingdom down the hall to her younger sister’s bedroom. Yet I watch the characters live on in her unfolding life story of becoming an early childhood music teacher.

PS I can’t wait to unpack the kingdom for my grandchildren someday.

Executive Function Skills Are Essential to America’s Present and Future

April 12, 2012

There have been an increasing number of highly influential calls for America to wake up to the importance of what are called "executive function skills."

Take the high school graduation rate. Economics professor at Princeton University and former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse, was recently asked on PBS's Need to Know what she would do to improve the high school graduation rate (where America is reported as 21st among the top 28 industrialized nations). In addition to stating that she would invest more in the early childhood years and would provide more support, including mentors, for children in the 8th to 9th grade transition, Rouse called for a rigorous curriculum that includes promoting executive function skills. She says:

When you talk to employers, they say that students and job applicants ... don't have the executive functioning kind of skills to really be able to function in today's workplace.

Noting that machines and computers can now perform routine tasks, she states that we need employees who can do what ONLY people can do, such as problem solve and use their creativity. Unfortunately, however, she concludes:

Many people have argued that our curriculum is stuck back in the 1950s and 1960s and that everyone, soup to nuts, needs to be thinking about what are the skills that we need to be teaching our children going forward.

Because I also conduct research on the workforce and workplace at Families and Work Institute, like Rouse, I am acutely attuned to the fact that employers are concerned that families and schools are not promoting the kind of skills employees will need. Too many young people, they tell me, have a fill-in-the-bubble mentality, where they think that knowledge consists of the one right answer to a multiple-choice question. However, employers know that employees are increasingly called upon to solve problems not yet imagined, and will need out-of-the-box thinking. Employers are also concerned that young people are used to competing, where success in the workplace also increasingly calls for working with diverse teams.

Based on my review, the skills I have identified as most essential are: 

• Focus and Self Control,
• Perspective Taking,
• Communicating,
• Making Connections,
• Critical Thinking,
• Taking on Challenges, and
• Self-Directed Engaged Learning.

In addition to a concern about the dropout rate, and the achievement gap, I can also see that we have a learning-dropout phenomenon in America. Far too many children lose the fire in their eyes for learning that they are born with. And far too many children see learning as extrinsic -- what it can do for them -- and are losing the intrinsic connections to learning -- the joy, the curiosity, the passion.

In the course of talking about executive function skills for the past two years to audiences across the country, here are some questions I hear frequently.

Just what are executive functions skills?

Executive function skills take place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and other areas of the brain working in concert with it. We use these skills to manage our attention, our emotions, our intellect, and our behavior to reach our goals. They include:

• Focus -- being able to pay attention;
• Working memory -- being able to keep information in mind in order to use it;
• Cognitive flexibility -- being able to adjust to shifting needs and demands; and
• Inhibitory control -- being able to resist the temptation to go on automatic and do what we need to do to achieve our goals.

As children grow older, these skills include reflecting, analyzing, planning and evaluating. Executive function skills are always goal-driven.

As you will see in the video below, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia, finds that executive functions predict children's achievement as well as IQ tests or even better because they go beyond what we know and tap our abilities to USE what we know.

Children need both content and these life skills. The National Scientific Council on the Developing Childsays it well:

In practice, these skills support the process (i.e., the how) of learning -- focusing, remembering, planning -- that enable children to effectively and efficiently master the content (i.e., the what) of learning -- reading, writing, computation.

Don't teachers and families have enough to do to add one more thing to their plate?

Promoting these skills require a different mindset so that families and teachers do what they already do, but in slightly different ways. For example, while young children are waiting, they can play Simon Says, Do the Opposite (to promote Focus and Self Control). Or when they are doing scientific experiments later on, they can be taught to think about what makes a good experiment (to promote Critical Thinking).

Can these skills really be taught?

In a word, yes. There are numerous experiments that show that adults can promote these skills in children. For example, the experiments of Michael Posner of the University of Oregon show it is possible to promote focus and self control. The experiments of Larry Aber of New York University and his colleagues also show that it is possible to reduce aggression in children by helping children learn to understand the perspectives of others through a literacy curriculum.

A final word of hope

As we learn more about executive function skills and as we begin to promote them, it is clear that we can make progress on some of America's more enduring challenges. However, we need to do so in ways that keep the fire for learning burning brightly in children's eyes, as we help children thrive! If we do so, then I will have achieved my most enduring dream.

Let’s Put the Child Back Together—The Social, Emotional, Physical, and Cognitive Child

April 02, 2012

Learning equals intellect.

Is this true? Increasingly, this seems to be the prevailing wisdom.

In 1990, the president and 50 state governors established National Education Goals. The first goal was notable in that it included children before school entry, stating "all children in America will start school ready to learn" by the year 2000. As time passed, "ready for school" became shorthand for fostering children's literacy, which became shorthand for ensuring that children were ready to learn to read and write.

These national goals were accompanied by a call for educational accountability, which also became shorthand for many of the debates that swirl around us today -- testing children on their competence in literacy and math -- now a primary indicator of school and teacher success.

Partly in response to the over-emphasis on intellectual learning, a parallel movement gained momentum. It was a call for fostering children's social-emotional development. It was a means of righting the over-emphasis on intellectual learning, but continues the unfortunate tendency for adults to see children's learning as divided -- it's either social-emotional or intellectual.

In this either/or world, intellectual learning remains primary; in fact, social-emotional competencies are commonly called "soft skills" or elements of "character."

If we simply watch children who are fully engaged in learning, it has never been clear to me which part of the learning is only cognitive, only social, or only emotional.

By 2000, this trend to divide children up was gaining steam, often to the detriment of children and their learning. Perhaps because I also work with business and know how important job engagement is to productivity, I wondered why we try to divide children up to focus on cognitive learning or social-emotional learning only to try to put them back to together to focus on full engagement when they are adults.

So when I conducted the research that led to Mind in the Making, I asked every researcher I interviewed to comment on the relationship of social-emotional learning to cognitive or intellectual learning. Again and again, the researchers saw them as inextricably connected. Here are some of their comments:

Larry Schweinhart of the HighScope Perry Preschool Project says:

We don't have cognitive learning now, but no social learning and no emotional learning, and then have emotional learning later for a set period of time -- they are all together.

Kurt Fischer of Harvard University says:

One of the most beneficial things that brain research has done is it's made it very hard for us to split cognition from emotion. The areas of the brain most involved in memory -- the quintessential cognitive function -- are tied to the emotion areas.

Charles Nelson of Harvard University adds:

The field of child psychology has for years been broken up into its own little fiefdoms so that some study cognitive development and some study emotional development and social development and language development. And what's unfortunate about that is that's not how the brain works. The brain works as a unified system.

Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington states:

The brain is an interdisciplinary device. You could think of language and cognition and social-emotional development as being totally separate, but that's not what the baby provides evidence of.

Carol Dweck of Stanford University reiterates this point: neuroscience shows that "we can't carve people up -- there isn't the cognitive person, the emotional person, the motivational person, the social person. All of these co-occur in the brain."

Although there are times when learning is more cognitive than social or more emotional than cognitive, when children are fully engaged in learning, they are engaged on all these levels. And life skills -- such as the ability to take the perspective of others, critical thinking, and self-control -- involve these levels as well.

The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, the group originally convened by the National Academy of Sciences to review what we know about children's development, concluded, "Cognitive, emotional and social capacities are inextricably interwined throughout the life course."

So let's use what we are learning from neuroscience and focus on the whole child -- the social, emotional, cognitive and physical child.

This is a passionate call for engaging children in learning on all these equally important and interconnected levels.