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January 1 - January 6, 2024
Without a healthy sense of control, kids feel powerless and overwhelmed and will often become passive or resigned. When they are denied the ability to make meaningful choices, they are at high risk of becoming anxious, struggling to manage anger, becoming self-destructive, or self-medicating.
Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.
We will help you move in the direction of being a nonanxious presence, which is one of the best things you can do for your kids, your family, and yourself.
I didn't think this book was about me though .......
It is frustrating and stressful to feel powerless, and many kids feel that way all the time. As grown-ups, we sometimes tell our kids that they’re in charge of their own lives, but then we proceed to micromanage their homework, their afterschool activities, and their friendships.
So how do you capitalize on positive or tolerable stress while avoiding the bad kind? It is simple in theory, but tricky in execution: kids need a supportive adult around, they need time to recover from the stressful event, and they need to have a sense of control over their lives.
The prefrontal cortex has been called “the Goldilocks of the brain,” as it needs a “just right” combination of chemicals—the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine—to operate effectively.15 It is easily taken off-line by stress. Arousal, mild stress, excitement, or minor pretest jitters can raise the levels of these neurotransmitters, resulting in sharper focus, clearer thinking, and stronger performance. With sleep deprivation or too much stress, however, the prefrontal cortex becomes flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine and is essentially taken off-line.
If a zebra is attacked by a lion and survives, its cortisol levels will normalize in forty-five minutes. By contrast, humans can retain elevated cortisol levels for days, weeks, or even months at a time. That can be a problem, in part, because chronically elevated levels of cortisol will impair and eventually kill cells in the hippocampus, the place where memories are created and stored. This is why students have trouble learning when they are under acute stress.
What they discovered was that there is a complex and highly integrated network in the brain that only activates when we are “doing nothing.” This is known as the default mode network. Our understanding of its functioning is still new, but we know it must be very important, as it uses 60 to 80 percent of the brain’s energy.
It’s processing your life. It activates when we daydream, during certain kinds of meditation, and when we lie in bed before going to sleep. This is the system for self-reflection, and reflection about others, the area of the brain that is highly active when we are not focused on a task. It is the part of us that goes “off-line.” A healthy default mode network is necessary for the human brain to rejuvenate, store information in more permanent locations, gain perspective, process complicated ideas, and be truly creative.
Remember that your job is not to solve your children’s problems but to help them learn to run their own lives. This reframing means that while we should guide, support, teach, help, and set limits for our kids, we should be clear—with them and with ourselves—that their lives are their own. As Eckhart Tolle wrote, “They come into this world through you, but they are not ‘yours.’”
Kids need responsibility more than they deserve it.
When kids feel that they are deeply loved even when they’re struggling, it builds resilience. Battling your child about due dates and lost work sheets invites school stress to take root at home. So instead of nagging, arguing, and constant reminding, we recommend repeating the mantra, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework.”
this mantra is very funny
As a parent, you have to do what feels right to you, and you should help your child understand that. “I can’t in good conscience let you make that decision. It doesn’t feel right” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. So is “It’s your sister’s turn to pick a movie tonight. You get to choose next week.” “It’s your call” does not conflict with limit setting, which will always be an essential part of parenting.
As parents, we often make decisions for our children that seem perfectly reasonable, like signing them up for soccer instead of drama, only to kick ourselves later. The same is true in our own lives. Most of us work too much, eat too much, sleep too little, make bad investments, and find ourselves in careers that do not go as planned. Remember to be humble. Sometimes you just don’t know what’s right.
He didn’t find all the answers, but he did return to college in a better place. It was during that second attempt at sophomore year that he joined an a cappella group, and he sings with several of its members to this day.
for me personally, this is not a positive outcome
One wise friend of ours who was a parent educator for twenty years advises giving calendars to preschool-age children and writing down all the important events in their life, in part because it helps children understand the passage of time better, and how their days will unfold.
They’re very aware of the risks entailed by their behavior. It is true that they put stronger emphasis on the possible positive outcomes of an action than the potential risks. Experts call this hyperrationality.7 When engaging in collaborative problem solving with teenagers, know that they have this bias and put a special focus on helping them to really think through the possible downsides.
If money isn’t the issue, ask yourself why it matters to you. If it’s not for him, it’s not for him. So often, parents want to play Edward Scissorhands and start pruning their child like a tree, but the reality is that your tree has just begun to grow, and you don’t even know what kind of tree it is. Maybe it’s not a sports tree.
Overall, try to remember that negotiating is a great thing for your kid to know how to do. You want him to learn to advocate for himself and to practice those skills for the real world. If he’s never able to “win” with his parents, he’ll internalize that message. He may be more apt to sneak, lie, or cheat to get what he wants, or to give up pushing back on authority altogether, believing that he has no voice. To improve your legitimacy, you have to show your child that he is being heard.
What to Do Tonight
please
recent studies have shown that secondhand stress persists. For example, when parents are anxious about math, their kids are more likely to be anxious about math, too, but only if the anxious parents often help with the homework.7 In other words, if you have math anxiety, your kid is probably better off if you don’t offer your help. It works the other way, too. When your kid is upset, your amygdala reacts, which makes it even harder to be calm. This is why so many parents find themselves, ironically and often comically, angrily yelling at their kids for losing their temper.
Kids see what you feel, even if you don’t want them to. Then they mirror those feelings, even if you don’t think you’re projecting them, and they begin to feel those feelings, too. One of the reasons for this is that kids tend to be particularly bad at correctly interpreting what they’re seeing. So whereas an adult might spend the evening in the company of her grumpy spouse and think, “He’s grumpy, but it’s not about me. I think I’ll just leave him be,” a kid is likely to think, “Dad is grumpy. I must have done something wrong. He’s mad at me.”
Make enjoying your kids your top parenting priority. In a competitive, overly busy world, it’s so easy to forget the basics: that enjoying your kids is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. You don’t have to spend every moment with your kid, or convince yourself parenting isn’t hard when it is. But think for a moment about the giddy look we give babies when we see them in the morning or after a long day away. Think about the experience of being that baby: every time someone looks at you, they smile as if you’re a miracle.
babies are a miracle!!
If your child is struggling, schedule a short time every day for you to worry about his or her problems. Literally write it into your planner. This will let your brain know that it is safe not to worry all day long.
Will use this in my planner for other worries
Likewise, when your child feels connected to you, when you communicate unconditional love and he tells himself, “My parents care more about me than about my grades,” then it is more likely that your child will internalize your values. Self-determination theory calls this “integrated regulation.” It is a child’s identification with the values and goals of the people who care for him and love him unconditionally.
When kids work hard at something they love and find challenging, they enter a state of what’s come to be called “flow,” where time passes quickly and their attention is completely engaged, but they’re not stressed. When you’re in flow, levels of certain neurochemicals in your brain—including dopamine—spike.6 These neurochemicals are like performance-enhancing drugs for the brain. You think better in flow, and you process information faster. To be fully engaged this way, the activity has to be challenging enough not to be boring, but not so difficult that it’s overly stressful.
the great neuroscientist Marian Diamond concluded that, “while ‘wrapped up’ in a favorite pastime, children report feeling excited and forgetting their problems. The high internal motivation accompanying those feelings is a form of reinforcement for directed effort, learning, and accomplishment that can’t be achieved in any other way as successfully.”
Boys are not girls. And while there are notable exceptions and not everyone fits the gender mold, girls tend to like to be on top of things and to feel stressed when they fall behind or have too many things on their to-do list. Then, of course, these girls grow up and many of them become moms. It’s moms who most frequently oversee their sons’ homework. The result? What we’ve come to think of as the Dopamine Wars.
I need this cited. This is quite obviously socialization?
Einstein’s breakthrough on relativity came shortly after a year spent in Italy “loafing aimlessly” and attending occasional lectures.)7
it's a nonfiction book, so here's our Einstein reference
Psychologist Adam Cox noted that whereas fifty years ago kids might be bored after a couple of hours with nothing to do, nowadays kids become bored after thirty seconds, while most adults feel the need to check their phones in the four seconds it takes to slow down and stop at a stop sign.
help
The fact that girls’ risk for depression triples after puberty may be related to the fact that it gets harder for them to get enough sleep.
hmmmmm ..... can't think of a SINGLE other reason why girls would be depressed after puberty. this must be it!
Many teens consume up to 800 milligrams of caffeine a day, which is equivalent to around eight cups of coffee. (The Mayo Clinic recommends a maximum of 100 milligrams of caffeine per day for adolescents and no caffeine for children.)
What
Screen time has a whole host of physiological effects that make it different from other sedentary activities like reading or drawing, and make it an independent risk factor for many physical and mental health problems. In children, every hour of screen time is associated with increased blood pressure, while every hour spent reading is associated with decreased blood pressure.
The Japanese have a term for this: shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Walking in nature “cleans” the prefrontal cortex of its clutter, calming us, centering us, and allowing us to perform better on tasks or tests that demand working memory.
You can’t do two things at once if they require conscious thought, so multitasking is really a misnomer. If you try to focus on two or more things at once, what you’re actually doing is rapidly shifting between tasks. Multitasking compromises the quality of learning and performance. It’s highly inefficient, as people make many more errors and in the end perform much more slowly.38 Multitasking also limits opportunities for deep thought and abstraction and for creativity and invention.
me reading this off a notecard in my next job interview
