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“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”
To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The
Dweck and others have found that frequently-praised children get more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. Image-maintenance becomes their primary concern. A
Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.
“A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”
Around the world, children get an hour less sleep than they did thirty years ago. The cost: IQ points, emotional well-being, ADHD, and obesity.
“A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explained.
The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.
The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
schools are scheduled for adult convenience: there’s no educational reason we start schools as early as we do. “If schools are for education, then we should promote learning instead of interfere with it,” he challenges.
According to Dr. Paul Ekman, a pioneer of lying research at UC San Francisco, here’s an example of how that plays out. On the way home from school on Tuesday, a dad promises his five-year-old son that he’ll take him to the baseball game on Saturday afternoon. When they get home, Dad learns from Mom that earlier in the day, she had scheduled a swim lesson for Saturday afternoon and can’t change it. When they tell their son, he gets terribly upset, and the situation melts down. Why is the kid so upset? Dad didn’t know about the swim lesson. By the adult definition, Dad did not lie. But by the
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Any sudden spate of lying, or dramatic increase in lying, is a sign that something has changed in that child’s life, in a way that troubles him: “Lying is a symptom—often of a bigger problem behavior,” explained Talwar. “It’s a strategy to keep themselves afloat.”
What really works is to tell the child, “I will not be upset with you if you peeked, and if you tell the truth, I will be really happy.” This is an offer of both immunity and a clear route back to good standing. Talwar explained this latest finding: “Young kids are lying to make you happy—trying to please you.” So telling kids that the truth will make a parent happy challenges the kid’s original thought that hearing good news—not the truth—is what will please the parent.
parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say that lying is wrong. The more kids hear that message, the more quickly they will take this lesson to heart.
They’ve learned that nine out of ten times a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest.
while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every one time a child seeks a parent for help, there were fourteen other instances when he was wronged and did not run to the parent for aid.
parents are ten times more likely to chastise a child for tattling than they are to chide a child who lied.
Talwar says parents often entrap their kids, putting them in positions to lie and testing their honesty unneccessarily. Last week, I put my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter in that exact situation. I noticed she had scribbled on the dining table with a washable marker. With disapproval in my voice I asked, “Did you draw on the table, Thia?” In the past, she would have just answered honestly, but my tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. Immediately, I wished I could retract the question and do it over. I should have just reminded her not to write on the table, slipped newspaper
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“Kids’ rank ordering in third grade is very meaningful. If we measure reading in third grade, it can predict performance much later, in a lot of areas.” The issue isn’t some innate flaw with intelligence tests. The problem is testing kids too young, with any kind of test.
What this means is that many kids who turned out to be very good students were still fidgety and misbehaving at age five, while many of the kids who were well-behaved at age five didn’t turn into such good students. That social skills were such poor predictors was completely unexpected: “That is what surprised me the most,” confirmed Duncan.
I am surprised by the fact that they found this surprising when there's a stereotype of autistic people being academic high achievers.
“When I began this research, I would have thought the main reason teens would say they lie was, ‘I want to stay out of trouble,’ ” Darling explained. “But actually the most common reason for deception was, ‘I’m trying to protect the relationship with my parents; I don’t want them to be disappointed in me.’ ”
“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observed. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing her freedom to make her own decisions.
In the families where there was less deception, there was a much higher ratio of arguing/complaining. Arguing was good—arguing was honesty. The parents didn’t necessarily realize this. The arguing stressed them out.
What most surprised Holmes was learning that for the teen daughters, fighting more often, or having bigger fights, did not cause the teens to rate the fighting as harmful and destructive. Statistically, it made no difference at all. “Certainly, there is a point in families where there is too much conflict. But we didn’t have anybody in our study with an extreme amount of conflict.” Instead, the variable that seemed to matter most was how the arguments were resolved. Essentially, the daughter needed to feel heard, and when reasonable, their mother needed to budge. The daughter had to win some
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“Parents who negotiate ultimately appear to be more informed,” according to Dr. Robert Laird, a professor at the University of New Orleans. “Parents with unbending, strict guidelines make it a tactical issue for kids to find a way around them.”
I can only wonder how many teens, naturally prone to seeing conflict as productive, instead are being taught to view it as destructive, symptomatic of a poor relationship rather than a good one. How many like their parents just fine, yet are hearing that it’s uncool to do so? How many are acting disaffected and bored, because showing they care paints them as the fool? How many can’t tell their parents the truth, because honesty is just not how the story goes?
Ideally, the parent isn’t intruding, or directing the child’s attention—instead he’s following the child’s lead. When the parent times the label correctly, the child’s brain associates the sound with the object.
It’s when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.
