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November 10, 2019 - February 8, 2020
Second, if you want to keep your children as safe as possible, the best thing to do is to give them experience and teach them judgment. Let them climb that tree and fall when they’re six—it will teach them important skills about risk and about being in their bodies. Even if they break their arm and are in a cast, they will benefit from knowing that they have experienced and survived a scary incident and are stronger for it. According to Rosin’s article, kids who injure themselves falling from heights are less likely to be afraid of heights at age eighteen. Experience is typically a better
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Acceptance does not mean approving, condoning, or letting yourself be abused. It simply means acknowledging reality as it is rather than internally railing against it or denying it entirely. Accepting reality is the only alternative to counterproductive ideas like “I know how the world/my son/my daughter is supposed to be (and this ain’t it).”
Acceptance is also a choice, and choosing to accept that “it is what it is” increases our sense of control. It’s the opposite of thinking that we have to change something we can’t change. (Why does my son have ADHD? Why is my daughter anorexic? Why did it have to happen to me?)
life is long, and you just don’t know what will happen next.
Studies show that rewards for things like grades or other achievements can lower performance, crush creativity, and lead to bad behavior, like a willingness to cheat on a test or take performance-enhancing drugs.1 Significantly, these external motivators can reinforce the idea that someone other than the child is responsible for his life. Rewards can erode self-generated interest and lead to interest only in the reward itself.
Lucky for us, psychology and neuroscience are in agreement as to how to “make” motivation, and have even offered up a recipe. Here are the key ingredients: The right mindset Autonomy, competence, and relatedness The optimal level of dopamine Flow
Promoting a growth mindset is one of the best ways to improve your child’s sense of control, to foster their emotional development, and to support their academic achievement.
According to SDT, the best way to motivate a child (or an adult, for that matter) is to support their sense of control. Hundreds of studies of schools, families, and businesses have found that explaining the reasons why a task is important and then allowing as much personal freedom as possible in carrying out the task will stimulate much more motivation than rewards or punishments.
The very best thing you can do to help your children develop self-motivation is to give them as much control over their choices as possible, including asking them what it is they want to be competent at and in charge of.
Many parents put all their focus on a narrow definition of competence, thinking that if their son or daughter becomes incredibly skilled at math, or at playing soccer, then his or her intrinsic motivation will kick in. These parents focus so much on the performative aspects of competence that, through their nagging and plan making, they actually compromise the fulfillment of the other two needs, autonomy and relatedness.
“You worked really hard on that science test and I’m proud of you even if you didn’t get the grade you wanted. I imagine it’s clear to us both that you are getting better and are getting nearer to reaching your goal.”
If you believe in education and hard work, and want your children to as well, we don’t recommend scolding them each time they come home with a subpar grade. Though you may think it’s the best way to communicate values, it’s actually counterproductive because it signals conditional love.
Research has also shown that kids often learn better from other kids than they do from adults, and that when a homework coach is an older kid, the one being tutored has a dopamine spike.
Saboteurs often do well when they work intensely for short periods marked by a timer and then take a prescribed break.
Radical downtime does not mean playing video games, watching TV, surfing YouTube videos, texting with a friend, or participating in organized sports or activities. It means doing nothing purposeful, nothing that requires highly focused thought. This is one of the most powerful things we can do for our brains.
Child psychologist Lyn Fry recommends that parents sit down with their kids at the outset of a summer break and have them make a list of all the things they’d like to do on their own during their free time. If they complain of boredom, they can refer to their list.11 They are the ones who have to figure out how to spend their time, without their parents filling it in for them. And they just may spend that time thinking about who they want to be. Learning to tolerate solitude—to be comfortable with yourself—is one of the most important skills one acquires in childhood.
Many years of research on TM has shown that kids who meditate for as little as ten or fifteen minutes twice a day will experience a significant reduction in stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms and express less anger and hostility.16 They sleep better, think more creatively, are healthier, have higher self-esteem, and do better in school and on tests of cognitive and academic skills.
Sleep experts say that if you’re tired during the day or need caffeine to keep you going, you’re not getting enough sleep. And if you need an alarm clock to wake you up, you also need more sleep.
Without sleep, a vicious cycle takes place. Because your sense of control is weakened by a lack of sleep, the more tired you are, the harder it is to get yourself to go to bed, and the more tempting it is to just stay where you are and watch one more episode of Homeland. Your ability to inhibit your YouTube binge-watching habit or to stop yourself from checking your phone evaporates. You’re also much more likely to eat an entire pint of ice cream at 11:00 P.M., when you’re tired, than at 9:00 A.M., when you’re fresh. Our bad habits are exacerbated by insufficient sleep.
According to Bruce McEwen, a leading researcher on stress, sleep deprivation produces similar effects on the mind and body as chronic stress. These include higher cortisol levels, increased reactivity to stress, higher blood pressure, and decreased efficiency of the parasympathetic nervous system (which serves a calming function). Sleep deprivation produces inflammation, impacts insulin production, decreases appetite, and depresses mood.
There is no difference in performance on cognitive tasks between older adolescents who sleep four to six hours per night for six weeks and those who get no sleep at all for three days.5
Emotional control is dramatically impaired by sleep deprivation. If you don’t sleep enough, your amygdala becomes more reactive in response to emotionally charged events, mimicking the brain activity of people suffering from anxiety disorders.
During non-REM sleep (sleep without rapid eye movements), scientists see short bursts of electrical activity called “sleep spindles” that help the brain move information from a short-term storage site in the hippocampus to the long-term locus of memory in the cortex. This so-called slow-wave sleep helps to solidify new memories and saves information we’ve learned.
Rapid eye movement sleep—where most dreaming happens—takes the sting out of emotional experiences. When we’re in REM sleep, all stress-related neurochemicals are absent from the brain—the only time this happens in a twenty-four-hour period. According to Matthew Walker, during REM sleep the brain reactivates emotions and problematic memories and brings them back to the mind through reflective dreaming in a neurochemically safe, stress-free environment.
Generally, preschoolers need ten to thirteen hours of sleep every day (one hour often comes in the form of a nap). Six- to thirteen-year-olds need from nine to eleven hours. Teenagers aged fourteen to seventeen need eight to ten hours. And young adults from eighteen to twenty-five years old need seven to nine hours.
This study also found that camping reduced individual differences between the sleep schedules of “late sleepers” (night owls) and early sleepers (larks). The biological clock of night owls is often delayed by exposure to electronic media and electric light. In short, if you and your child are night owls, you will need to pay particular attention to the amount of light you expose yourself to from dinnertime on, and start your wind-down process earlier than someone who is a lark.
Try getting ready for bed before you’re really tired, as it’s harder to inhibit the desire to do one more thing or watch one more episode when you’re tired.
But perhaps the most effective thing you can do is to emphasize to your child that he is responsible for his own education. It’s not his teacher’s job, it’s not his principal’s job, and it’s not your job. If he doesn’t have a handle on sixth grade math but needs to know certain things to be able to do prealgebra in seventh, the fact that he had a crummy sixth grade math teacher will be of little consolation.
Rather, acknowledge that only 10 percent of teachers will be in the top 10th percentile, and tell him that you can’t expect to have the Teacher of the Year every year in every subject. Help your child strategize as to how he can take control of his own learning, with or without the teacher’s help.
You can also encourage your kids to learn on their own and to teach what they’ve learned to someone else—a parent, a sibling, or a fellow student. This builds self-esteem, is empowering, and is the best way to truly master complex material.
In the early 1900s, two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, proposed that performance increases with physiological and mental arousal up to a point, after which it starts to decline. We need a certain level of arousal—from curiosity, excitement, or mild stress—to reach our optimal level of mental acuity. But when we’re too stressed, we can’t think straight. Our brains become inefficient.
Girls have, on average, a curve that shifts to the left, and boys one that shifts to the right. What this means is that optimal levels of stress for girls often isn’t enough to motivate boys, and optimal stress for boys can be overwhelming for many girls. (Remember, these are averages—every kid is different. Some girls are more boylike and vice versa.) As a parent, it is worth remembering that what works to motivate you may not work for your kid, and what seems like no big deal to you may be really overwhelming for your child.
Small amounts of homework (one to two hours a night) can contribute to academic achievement for middle and high school kids, but any more than that backfires when it comes to actual learning.
Finnish students—who have among the highest educational outcomes in the world—have the lightest homework requirement, rarely receiving more than a half hour per day.
Academic benchmarks are being pushed earlier and earlier, based on the mistaken assumption that starting earlier means that kids will do better later. We now teach reading to five-year-olds even though evidence shows it’s more efficient to teach them to read at age seven, and that any advantage gained by kids who learn to read early washes out later in childhood.
The central, critical message here is a counterintuitive one that all parents would do well to internalize: earlier isn’t necessarily better; and likewise, more isn’t better if it’s too much.
Teach your kids that they are responsible for their own education. Kids should feel in charge, not that school is being done “to them.”
If your child is not learning from his teacher, acknowledge this without blaming the teacher. “Mr. Cooper is doing the best he can. He just doesn’t know how to teach you the way you learn.” Encourage your child to think of what will motivate him to master the material being taught in the class anyway.
Kids between the ages of eight and ten use screens seven and a half hours a day, which is high enough, but then that number jumps to eleven and a half hours for kids ages eleven to fourteen.4 This means that most of this generation’s social and cognitive development is happening through a screen.
Technology is an incredible tool with the great power to enrich lives, but the things it displaces—family time, face-to-face interaction with friends, study time, physical activity, and sleep—are invaluable, and the way technology trains the brain to expect constant stimulation is deeply troubling.
When you refresh your e-mail, look at your text messages, or check your Instagram account, you get a hit of dopamine, and an especially big one if you encounter something positive. This taps into a basic psychological construct: intermittent reinforcement. With intermittent reinforcement, you don’t know if you’ll be rewarded for something each time you do it, but you might be, and the anticipation drives you.
The research of Larry Rosen and his colleagues has shown that time in front of a screen is positively correlated with increases in 1) physical health problems, 2) mental health problems, 3) attention problems, and 4) behavior problems.
Social media turns our attention from our own experience (Did I enjoy my sandwich? Or the people I actually had lunch with?) to what other people think of our experience.
It’s no wonder that heavy social media users—any one of whose hundreds or thousands of friends or followers can reflexively pass judgment—disproportionaly suffer from anxiety, depression, and narcissism.
Technology keeps kids from getting the things that we know they need for healthy development: sleep (at least 84 percent of teen cell phone users have slept right beside their phone, and teens send an average of thirty-four texts per night after going to bed),27 exercise, radical downtime, unstructured child-led play, and the real-life, face-to-face social interaction with friends and parents that is such a powerful antidote to stress.
Technology is highly implicated in sleep problems. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at data from twenty studies involving more than 125,000 children ages six to eighteen. If a child had access to a screen at bedtime at least three times a week, the researchers saw an 88 percent increase in the child’s risk of not getting sufficient sleep and a 53 percent increased risk of poor sleep quality. The findings held up even if the devices weren’t used. Just having a phone or a tablet in the bedroom increases sleep problems.
You have to model responsible use of technology. Talk to your kids about the universal struggle to regulate technology use, including your own. Offer tips that have worked for you or other people you know. Give your kids permission to call you out when you check your phone when they’re trying to talk to you. Apologize. Show them you’re working on it.
We’re much better able to influence our kids when they feel respected and emotionally close to us. Learn about their interests for these reasons, but most important, because doing so matters to them.
Studies show that kids feel and perform better after they’ve been immersed in nature—or even after they’ve looked at nature posters.34 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.
The first step of mental contrasting is to ask your child to set her own goal. It should not be a group goal, and it should not be influenced by you. The goal has to be something that is both feasible and challenging. Step two is to encourage your child to write down several words about the hoped-for outcome. They should not edit themselves during this process, but rather should feel free to write whatever comes to mind. Step three is to ask your child to consider inner obstacles to that goal. Note that you are not asking them to think about external barriers. Again, ask them to take pen to
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