There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

Testing creativity and problem-solving skills is arguably harder than testing factual knowledge, but the results of two separate studies conducted by MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, show that teaching children too much too early can backfire. At MIT, the researchers gave a group of four-year-olds exactly the same toy, and only varied the method with which they introduced it to the children. In one group, the researcher acted naïve and clueless when she demonstrated one of the functions of the toy, whereas the other group was given direct instruction by the researcher on how to use it. When left alone with the toy, all the children in the study were able to replicate what the “teacher” had done—pull on one of the toy’s tubes to make it squeak—but the children in the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its functions. They were simply more curious and more likely to discover new information than the children who had been told by the teacher how to use the toy. The study at UC Berkeley had similar results: When the children with the “clueless” researcher were left with the toy, they discovered a smarter way to get it to play music, whereas the children who were taught how to use it only replicated what the teacher had done.