brain rule
Face time, not screen time
Theodore Roosevelt was so sick as a child, his parents had to instruct him at home. That was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Young Teddy’s illness put him in constant contact with arguably the most loving dad a future president could have; if there were ever a hall of fame for fathers of vulnerable children, Theodore Sr. should be its founding member. Writing in his diary, Teddy Roosevelt remembers as a child being regularly scooped up into his daddy’s big arms. Up and down the hallways the elder Roosevelt would pace, carrying his bright son upright for hours, ensuring that the boy could breathe. They explored the great outdoors when weather permitted, libraries when it did not. Gradually, the son grew stronger. At every precious point, Dad would encourage Teddy to try hard. Then harder. Then hardest. Said the president in a diary decades later:
He not only took great and untiring care of me … he also most wisely refused to coddle me, and made me feel that I must force myself to hold my own with other boys and prepare to do the rough work of the world.
The senior Roosevelt could not know this, but he was exercising some pretty solid cognitive neuroscience in the nurturing of his famous child. Teddy was born smart and born into wealth, two factors not every parent is capable of providing. But Teddy was also born into love and attentive guidance, two things every parent is capable of providing. Indeed, there are plenty of behaviors over which you, like Roosevelt Sr., can exert enormous authority. Regardless of their genes, you can help your children mobilize their intelligence as fully as Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, or the most successful innovators working today. Just how do you grow a smart baby?
We’re thinking in terms of soil, so it makes sense to formulate a fertilizer. What you put in is as important as what you leave out. There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television. A few additives, hawked by marketers, are optional to irrelevant. What we’ll discover is the profound need to strike a balance between intellectual freedom and well-disciplined rigor.
The brain’s day job is not learning
First, I need to correct a misconception. Many well-meaning moms and dads think their child’s brain is interested in learning. That is not accurate. The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving. Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was engineered to escape extinction. Learning exists only to serve the requirements of this primal goal. It is a happy coincidence that our intellectual tools can do double duty in the classroom, conferring on us the ability to create spreadsheets and speak French. But that’s not the brain’s day job. That is an incidental by-product of a much deeper force: the gnawing, clawing desire to live to the next day. We do not survive so that we can learn. We learn so that we can survive.
This overarching goal predicts many things, and here’s the most important: If you want a well-educated child, you must create an environment of safety. When the brain’s safety needs are met, it will allow its neurons to moonlight in algebra classes. When safety needs are not met, algebra goes out the window. Roosevelt’s dad held him first, which made his son feel safe, which meant the future president could luxuriate in geography.
A laser focus on safety
One simple example of the brain’s fixation on safety occurs during an assault. It’s called “weapon focus.” Victims of an assault often suffer from amnesia or confusion; they usually can’t recall the facial features of the criminal. But they often can completely recall the details of the weapon used. “It was a Saturday night special, held in the left hand, wood handle,” a witness might exclaim. Why remember the perp’s gun, which is not always helpful to the police, and not the perp’s face, which almost always is? The answer reveals the brain’s familiar priority: safety. The weapon holds the biggest potential threat, and the brain focuses on it because the brain is built to concentrate on survival. The brain is learning under these hostile conditions (stress can marvelously focus the mind); it is just concentrating on the source of the threat.
A former fighter pilot, teaching at an aeronautics university, discovered how this works in the classroom. One of his students had been a star in ground school but was having trouble in the air. During a training flight, she misinterpreted an instrument reading, and he yelled at her, thinking it would force her to concentrate. Instead, she started crying, and though she tried to continue reading the instruments, she couldn’t focus. He landed the plane, lesson over. What was wrong? From the brain’s perspective, nothing was wrong. The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger. This is weapon focus, merely replacing “Saturday Night Special” with “ex–fighter pilot.”
The same is true if you are a parenting a child rather than teaching a student. The brain will never outgrow its preoccupation with survival.
Four brain boosters
Now we can dig into our fertilizer, starting with four ingredients you want in your developmental soil.
1. Breast-feed for a year
I remember meeting up for lunch with a long-time friend who had just become a mother. Upon entering the restaurant, baby in tow, she insisted on sitting at a private booth. After five minutes, I discovered why: Mom knew that once her baby smelled food, he’d become hungry. When he did, she discreetly unbuttoned her blouse, adjusted her bra, and began breast-feeding. The baby latched on for dear life. Mom had to go through all kinds of contortions to hide this activity. “I’ve been thrown out of other places because I did this,” she explained. Though shrouded in an oversize sweater, she was visibly nervous as the waiter took her order.
If America knew what breast milk can do for the brains of its youngest citizens, lactating mothers across the nation would be enshrined, not embarrassed. Though the topic is much debated, there’s little controversy about it in the scientific community. Breast milk is the nutritional equivalent of a magic bullet for a developing baby. It has important salts and even more important vitamins. Its immune-friendly properties prevent ear, respiratory, and gastrointestinal infections. And in a result that surprised just about everybody, studies around the world confirmed that breast-feeding, in short, makes babies smarter. Breast-fed babies in America score on average 8 points higher than formula-fed kids when given cognitive tests, an effect still observable nearly a decade after the breast-feeding has stopped. They get better grades, too, especially in reading and writing.
How does that work? We’re not really sure, though we have some ideas. Breast milk has ingredients a baby’s brain needs to grow postnatally but can’t make on its own very well. One of these is taurine, an amino acid essential for neural development. Breast milk also contains omega-3 fatty acids, whose benefits on pediatric cognition we discussed in the Pregnancy chapter (“Eat just the right foods”). The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year. If we as a country wanted a smarter population, we would insist on lactation rooms in every public establishment. A sign would hang from the door of these rooms: “Quiet, please. Brain development in progress.”
2. Talk to your baby—a lot
For the longest time, we couldn’t figure out the words coming from our 9-month-old son. Whenever he took a car ride, he would start saying the word “dah,” repeating it over and over again as we strapped him into his car seat, “Dah dah dah, goo, dah dah, big-dah, big-dah.” It often sounded like a child’s version of an old Police song. We couldn’t decode it and would just respond, a bit sheepishly, “Dah?” He would emphatically reply, “Dah.” Sometimes our response made him happy. Sometimes it didn’t do anything at all. It wasn’t until we were tooling down the interstate one fine sunny day, moon-roof wide open to the clouds, that we finally figured it out.
Josh saw an airplane flying overhead and shouted excitedly, “Sky-dah! Sky-dah!” My wife suddenly understood. “I think he means airplane!” she said. She asked him, pointing to the sky, “Sky-dah?” Josh cheerily replied, “Sky-dah!” Just then a big noisy semi-truck passed us, and Josh pointed to it with concern. “Big-dah, Big-dah,” he said. My wife pointed at the truck too, now shrinking in the distance. “Big-dah?” she asked, and he responded excitedly, “Big-dah!” Then “dah, dah, dah.” We got it. For whatever reason, “dah” had become Joshua’s word for “vehicle.” Later, Josh and I watched a ship cross Puget Sound. I pointed to the container vessel and guessed, “Water-dah?” He sat up, staring at me like I was from Mars. “Wet-dah,” he declared, like a mildly impatient professor addressing a slow student.
Few interactions with children are as much fun as learning to speak their language. As they learn to speak ours, heaping tablespoons of words into their minds is one of the healthiest things parents can do for their brains. Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature.
The linkage between words and smarts was discovered through some pretty invasive research. In one study, investigators descended upon a family’s home every month for three years and jotted down every aspect of verbal communication between parents and their children. They measured size of vocabulary, diversity and growth rate of vocabulary, frequency of verbal interaction, and the emotional content of the speech. Just before the visits were finished, the researchers gave IQ tests. They did this with more than 40 families, then followed up years later. Through exhaustive analysis of this amazingly tough work, two very clear findings emerged:
• The variety and number of words matter.
• Talking increases IQ.
The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback. You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter, and facial expressions; rewarding her language attempts with heightened attention. Children whose parents talked positively, richly, and regularly to them knew twice as many words as those whose parents talked to them the least. When they entered the school system, their reading, spelling, and writing abilities soared above those of children in less verbal households. Even though babies don’t respond like adults, they are listening, and it is good for them.
Talking to children early in life raises their IQs, too, even after controlling for important variables such as income. By age 3, kids who were talked to regularly by their parents (called the talkative group) had IQ scores 1½ times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least (called the taciturn group). This increase in IQ is thought to be responsible for the talkative group’s uptick in grades.
Remember, it takes a real live person to benefit your baby’s brain, so get ready to exercise your vocal cords. Not the portable DVD player’s, not your television’s surround-sound, but your vocal cords.
What to say and how to say it
Though 2,100 words per hour might sound like a lot, it actually represents a moderate rate of conversation. Outside of work, the typical person hears or sees about 100,000 words in a day. So there’s no need to constantly babble to your baby in some 24-7 marathon. Overstimulation can be just as hazardous to brain development as understimulation (remember Goldilocks), and it’s important to watch your baby for signs of fatigue. But no language exposure is too silly. “Now we’re going to change your diaper.” “Look at the beautiful tree!” “What is that?” You can count steps out loud as you walk up a staircase. Just get in the habit of talking.
How you say those words matters, too. Picture this scene from an instructional DVD, developed at the Talaris Research Institute when I served as its director: A bunch of big tough men are watching a football game, passing a bowl of popcorn, eyes glued to the set. A baby is contentedly exploring in a playpen off to the side. At a critical juncture in the game, one of the couch potatoes growls to the quarterback: “Come on, you can do this. You can do this for me. I need this.” There’s a big play, and the guys all jump up and shout. The noise disturbs the baby, and you hear him start to cry. The biggest guy on the couch happens to be the dad. He runs to his little one, picks him up, and holds him in arms the size of tree trunks. “Hi, big guy,” he soothes in a high-pitched voice. “Wanna join the party?” The guys on the couch look at each other, eyebrows raised. “Look at daddy’s boy!” the father continues in his singsong voice. “How’s d-a-a-a-ddy’s boy? Are you h-u-u-u-ngry?” The dad seems to have forgotten all about the game. “Let’s get some sp-a-a-g-heeeettti,” he continues, marching to the kitchen. The guys on the couch stare at him in disbelief. The game resumes, dad in the background, feeding spaghetti to his happy son.
We have just witnessed the hypnotic effect babies can have on attentive fathers. But what’s going on with the dad’s voice? Turns out parents all over the world talk to their kids this way, a form of speech called “parentese.” It is catnip to a baby’s ear.
Parentese is characterized by a high-pitched tone and a singsongy voice with stretched-out vowels. Though parents don’t always realize they do it, this kind of speech helps a baby’s brain learn language. Why? A speaker who has slowed down is much easier to understand, for one. Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows your baby to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate better between them. The melodic tone helps infants separate sounds into contrasting categories. And the high pitch may assist infants in imitating the characteristics of speech. After all, with a vocal tract one-quarter the size of yours, they can produce fewer sounds, at first only at higher pitches.
When should you start doing all this talking? The real answer is that nobody knows, but we have strong hints that the answer is going to be “as soon as the baby is born.” As we saw with the newborn who stuck his tongue back out at Andy Meltzoff, babies are reliably capable of interacting with adults 42 minutes after birth. And preverbal infants are processing a lot of verbal information, even if they don’t always seem to be taking it in. Even reading to a 3-month-old is probably good, especially if you hold the child close and allow her to interact with you.
Educational psychologist William Fowler trained a group of parents to talk to their children in a particular fashion, following some of the guidelines mentioned above. The children spoke their first words between 7 and 9 months of age, some even speaking sentences at 10 months. They had conquered most of the basic rules of grammar by age 2, while kids in the control group achieved a similar mastery around age 4. Longer-term studies showed that the kids did very well in school, including in math and science. By the time they entered high school, 62 percent of them were enrolled in gifted or accelerated programs. Critical parts of Fowler’s training program need further study, but his work is terrific. It adds to the overwhelming evidence that a whole lot of talking is like fertilizer for neurons.
Clearly, speech is great soil for your baby’s developing mind. As your child gets older, other elements become just as important. The next nutrient in our fertilizer is self-generated play, a delightful example of which I encountered when our boys were both younger than the age of 4.
3. Hurray for play!
It was Christmas morning. Wrapped under the tree was a racetrack toy for our two boys, and I was excited for them to open it. I knew they would immediately let out oohs and ahs as they discovered their gift. They tore open the box, and—puzzled silence. A minute passed. Then they tossed aside the racetrack and held the box over their heads. Their enthusiasm returned like inflation.
“I know!” one of them yelled. “It’s an airplane!” “No,” the other boy yelled, “It’s a spaceship!” “Yeah, it’s a spaceship,” the first quickly agreed, and they both seized some crayons lying on the floor. Soon they were drawing shapes all over the racetrack box, cryptic little circles, lines, and squares, completely neglecting the toy parts lying scattered around them. I was left wondering why I wasted the money.
The older child went upstairs looking for more crayons, then let out a war whoop. He had spotted an enormous, discarded cardboard box, which earlier that morning had carried a new chair my wife and I had purchased. “Yahoo!” he cried, struggling successfully to bring the box downstairs. “Our cockpit!” The next two hours became consumed with crayons and paints and tape and furious scribbling. They fastened the racetrack box to the big box. “Place to store aliens,” one of them solemnly explained. They drew tiny dials. They fashioned laser cannons from wrapping paper tubes. They drew something that could cook French fries. For the rest of the day they flew their spacecraft, making up enemies with such diverse names as Evil Mountain Beaver and Kelp Queen. They were no longer in Seattle. They were in Alpha Quadrant, Captain Toddlerhood with Boy Pull-up in the World of Tomorrow. My wife and I laughed ’til we cried, watching them. Their creativity was a joy to behold for any parent.
But there was something much deeper, too: This kind of open-ended play was fertilizing their brains with the behavioral equivalent of Miracle-Gro. That sentence might seem strange. Open-ended play? Not “open-ended purchase of electronic educational toys”? Not French lessons, followed by hours of militant drilling? Actually, I do believe in a form of disciplined repetition as children begin formal schooling. But many parents are so preoccupied with their young child’s future that they transform every step of the journey into a type of product development, recoiling at open-ended anything. From 1981 to 1997, the amount of free time parents gave their kids shrank by about a quarter. In the Atlantic, Esther Entin details more of that same study: Children “spent 18 percent more time at school, 145 percent more time doing school work, and 168 percent more time shopping with parents. The researchers found that, including computer play, children in 1997 spent only about eleven hours per week at play.”
Children’s free time hasn’t improved since then. Researcher Peter Gray noted in 2011 that the number has been declining for more than half a century. The making-baby-smart product industry—fashioning toys that are the opposite of open-ended (what could be more claustrophobic than a DVD for infants?)—is a multibillion-dollar industry.
We now know that open-ended activities are as important to a child’s neural growth as protein. Indeed, the box the flashcards come in is probably more beneficial to a toddler’s brain than the flashcards themselves. Depending upon what you study and how you measure it, the benefits are stunning. Studies show that, compared with controls, kids allowed a specific type of open-ended playtime were:
• More creative. On tests of divergent thinking (which measure alternative uses for familiar objects), they came up with more than three times as many creative options as did controls.
• Better at language. The children’s use of language was more facile. They displayed a richer store of vocabulary and a more varied use of words.
• Better at problem solving. This is fluid intelligence, one of the basic ingredients in the intelligence stew.
• Less stressed. Children regularly exposed to such activity had half the anxiety levels of controls. This may help explain the problem-solving benefit, as problem-solving skills are notoriously sensitive to anxiety.
• Better at memory. Play situations improved memory scores; for example, kids who pretended they were at the supermarket remembered twice as many words on a grocery list as controls.
• More socially skilled. The social-buffering benefits of play are reflected in the crime statistics of inner-city kids. If low-income kids were exposed to play-oriented preschools in their earliest years, fewer than 10 percent had been arrested for a felony by age 23. For children exposed to instruction-oriented preschools, that figure was more than 33 percent.
Chicken-or-egg questions are plentiful in these data, so we need to keep our grump factor high. Is play the method of learning something, for example, or is it merely practice or consolidation of skills that are already developing? Happily, such controversies triggered an event dear to the heart of any scientist: additional rounds of funding. In new studies, researchers asked: Were there specific behaviors embedded in open-ended play that produced the benefit? That answer, unequivocally, turned out to be yes.
Not just any type of open-ended play will give you the extraordinary findings. The secret sauce is not unstructured, do-anything-you-want play. Advocacy for this hands-off model hearkens back to a romantic notion that children are born with effervescent, perfectly formed imaginations and an unerring instinct to create make-believe worlds. The assumption is that if we just allow children to guide us, then all will be well. I subscribe to parts of this notion deeply. Kids are inventive and curious, and I’ve learned more about imagination from my children than from probably any other single source. But kids are also very inexperienced. They don’t have all of the keys that can unlock their potential; that’s why they need parents.
No, the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation—those executive-function behaviors discussed in the previous chapter as ingredients of intelligence, revealed by the cookie experiment. The data are so clear, you could use them to design the family playroom.
Tools of the Mind: Mature dramatic play
The type of play is called mature dramatic play, or MDP. To get the benefits in those bullet points, MDP has to be engaged in many hours a day. This has been codified into a school program called Tools of the Mind, one of the few programs of its type that has been studied in randomized trials.
The ideas for Tools of the Mind come from Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a handsome polymath who burned out quickly in the early years of the Soviet era. He was an inspiration for all budding geniuses who couldn’t make up their minds about what they wanted to do when they grew up. He started out in literary analysis, writing a famous essay on Hamlet at the age of 18, then decided to go to Moscow University’s medical school to become a doctor. He soon changed his mind, switching to law school, then immediately and simultaneously enrolled at a private university to study literature. Still not satisfied, he got a Ph.D. in psychology. A few years later, at the ripe old age of 38, he was dead. But the 10 years he actively pursued psychology were quite productive and, for the time, groundbreaking. Vygotsky was one of the few researchers of his era to study dramatic play in children. He predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity—including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors.
Hardly the carefree activity we think of in the United States, Vygotsky saw imaginative play as one of the most tightly restrictive behaviors children experience. If little Sasha was going to be a chef, he would have to follow the rules, expectations, and limitations of “chefness.” If this imaginative exercise included friends, they would have to follow the rules, too. They might push and pull and argue with each other until they agreed on what those rules were and how they should be executed. That’s how self-control developed, he posited. In a group setting, such a task is extremely intellectually demanding, even for adults. If this sounds like a prelude to the more modern notion of executive function, you are right on the money. Vygotksy’s followers showed that children acting out imaginative scenes controlled their impulses much better than they did in non-MDP situations. While other parts of Vygotsky’s work are starting to show some intellectual arthritis, his ideas on self-regulation have held up well.
The cascade of confirmatory research that followed these findings led directly to the Tools of the Mind program. It has a number of moving parts, but the three most relevant to our discussion involve planning play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which the instruction takes place. Here’s what happens in a Tools of the Mind classroom:
A play plan
Before the preschoolers take off into a day filled with imaginative play, they take colored markers and fill out a printed form called a play plan. This announces in explicit terms what the activity du jour will be: “I am going to have tea with my dollies at the zoo,” or “I am going to make a Lego castle and pretend I’m the knight.” The kids carry around a clipboard with the activities written on them.
Practice pretending
The children are then coached on dramatic play in a technique called “make-believe play practice.” The kids receive direct, open-ended instruction about the mechanics of pretending! Here’s a sentence from the training manual: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”
The little ones are then let loose to their imaginations. At the end of each week, the children have a short “learning conference” with the instructor, listing what they experienced and learned during the period. They also have group meetings. Any discipline intervention usually becomes a group discussion centered around problem solving.
One big playroom
Most Tools of the Mind classrooms look like the equivalent of a late-Christmas-morning living room. Legos are scattered everywhere. Sandboxes are sprinkled around the room. There are jigsaw puzzles to figure out. Blocks with which to build entire new worlds. Clothes for dress-up. Places for crafts. Boxes! Lots of time—and space—for interaction with other kids. The combinations of situations in which individual imagination and creativity could be deployed are seemingly endless.
Many other activities occur in the course of a Tools of the Mind day, and we don’t yet know which combinations work best. We also don’t know about the long-term effects of the program. As of this writing, no fewer than four long-term, large-scale studies are under way to answer these questions. But we do know this about the program: It works. Kids in the program typically perform 30 percent to 100 percent better than controls on just about any executive function test you throw at them. That means better grades, too, as high executive function is one of the two greatest predictors of academic success that exist in the research literature. And it means the many benefits we described earlier, most of which come from studies of the Tools program.
These data radiate a light that can hurt unaccustomed eyes. They challenge the notion that rote-drilled learning atmospheres always equal better performance. These data flatly state that emotional regulation—reining in impulses—predicts better cognitive performance. That’s a bombshell of an idea. It directly ties intellectual horsepower to emotional processing. I am not dismissing rote drills, as a memorized database is an extremely important part of human learning. But it is clear: Vygotsky was on to something.
4. Praise effort, not IQ
Though their lives are separated by many years, I imagine Vygotsky would have really liked Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie. She is the world’s foremost percussionist and possibly the most versatile. She loves imaginative play, too, though her friends range from entire symphony orchestras, like the New York Philharmonic, to rock groups like Genesis to the performance artist Björk. Glennie studied at Ellon Academy and at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and she won a Grammy in 1989. As accomplished and powerful a musician as Glennie is, her musical talent is not her most remarkable feature.
Glennie is deaf. The effort she must put into her craft cannot be imagined. After her hearing collapsed at the age of 12, she would put her hands against the classroom wall to sense the vibrations when her music teachers played. Born with perfect pitch, she was able to translate what were now only rough sounds, felt in her body. She often plays barefoot onstage, saying it helps her feel the music. Glennie’s genius is revealed through sheer determination, a resolve detectable in the response she once gave to a reporter who was annoyingly dwelling on her hearing loss. “If you want to know about deafness,” she retorted, “you should interview an audiologist. My specialty is music.”
We know accomplishment like that comes from gritty effort, not necessarily from high IQ. As every experienced parent understands, a child with naturally high intelligence is not automatically guaranteed a starting spot on Harvard’s freshman roster. It will not even guarantee her an A on a math test. Though it is a reliable predictor of high academic performance, IQ has a real love-hate relationship with an individual student’s GPA, and it is ambiguously related even to other intellectually rich activities (chess is one surprising example).
What separates high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is, the most recent findings suggest, a much more boring—but ultimately more controllable—factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. Good old-fashioned neural elbow grease. Deliberate practice. From a psychological perspective, effort is in part the willingness to focus one’s attention and then sustain that focus. Effort also involves impulse control and a persistent ability to delay gratification. Sounds like executive function, spiced with a few unique ingredients.
Kids praised for effort complete 50 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.
How can you get that kind of effort from your child? Surprisingly, it’s how you praise him. What you praise defines what your child perceives success to be. Here is where parents make a common mistake—one that often creates the saddest sight a teacher can behold: a bright child who hates learning.
Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you,” they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess.
Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic.
Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed.
What happens when you say, “You’re so smart”
Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen:
First, your child begins to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she starts to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort.
Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she becomes more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.)
Third, she becomes less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure.
What to say instead: “You really worked hard”
What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research reveals a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said, “I’m so proud of you. You’re such a bright kid.” That appeals to a fixed, uncontrollable intellectual trait. It’s called “fixed mindset” praise. His parents should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have studied a lot.” This appeals to controllable effort. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.
More than 30 years of study show that children raised in growth-mindset homes consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievement. They do better in adult life, too. That’s not surprising. Children with a growth mindset tend to have a refreshing attitude toward failure. Rather than seeing mistakes as failures over which to despair, they see mistakes simply as problems to be solved. In the lab as well as in school, they spend much more time banging away at harder tasks than fixed-mindset students. They solve those problems more often, too. Kids regularly praised for effort successfully complete 50 percent to 60 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.
Carol Dweck, a noted researcher in the field, would check in on students taking her tests. She heard comments like “I should slow down and try to figure this out” and the delightful “I love a challenge!” Because they believe mistakes occur from a lack of effort, not from a lack of ability, the kids realize mistakes can be remedied simply by applying more cognitive elbow grease.
If you’ve already gone down the path of fixed-mindset praise, is it too late to switch? That specific question needs more study, but research has shown that even limited exposure to growth-mindset praise has positive effects.
Praise isn’t the only factor, of course. We’re starting to see that genes may play a role in effort, too. A group of researchers in London studied the self-perceived abilities (termed SPA) of nearly 4,000 twins. SPA measures a child’s perceived ability to handle tough academic challenges. The twins’ shared home environment, where growth-mindset behaviors would presumably be a factor, accounted for only 2 percent of the variance in SPA. The researchers concluded that there was a better-than-even chance that an SPA gene could be isolated. These observations require a great deal more research. If such a gene were characterized, it wouldn’t let parents off the hook. It would simply change the strategies needed to raise certain kids. Some wouldn’t need much instruction; others would need constant supervision, something we already know. Maybe effort simply allows children to better mobilize whatever intelligence they were born with. Either way, you want effort as the fourth nutrient in your fertilizer.
And then there are the things you want to limit.
The digital age: TV, video games, and the Internet
I had just finished a lecture to a group of educators and parents on visual processing and the high priority the brain gives it. As I paused for questions, a middle-aged mom blurted out, “So is TV good for the brain, then?” There was some grumbling in the room. An older gentleman joined in. “And what about all those newfangled video games? (Yes, he said “newfangled.”) And that Internet?” A young man stood up, a bit defensive: “There’s nothing wrong with gaming. And there is nothing wrong with the Internet.” This exchange got increasingly heated: older folks on one side, younger on the other. Eventually, someone said loudly, “Let’s ask the brain scientist.” Turning to me, he said, “What do you think?”
“I like to quote my old 19th-century friend J. Watson,” I began, hesitant to enter the fray. It’s a quote I always pull out when controversies erupt. “He was a member of Congress, and he was something of a diplomat. Watson was once asked how he was going to vote on some controversial piece of legislation. His response was clever: ‘I have friends on both sides of the issue, and I like to stand with my friends.’ ” Everybody laughed, and that seemed to defuse the tension in the room. It also ducked the question.
It’s not a question that should be ignored, however. From smart TVs to even smarter cell phones, the digital age has affected virtually every student on the planet, and screen time is now a regular part of children’s developmental experience. Should parents be concerned about TV? Video games? The Internet? I will tell you flatly: Except for some of the television work we’ll discuss in a moment, I have never seen messier research literature in my life, particularly regarding brains, behaviors, and video games. Even a cursory review of the work that’s out there reveals shoddy designs, biased agendas, lack of controls, non-randomized cohorts, too few sample sizes, too few experiments—and lots of loud, even angry, opinions. Promising studies are in the pipeline regarding video games and the Internet, but, as is typical for any new research effort, early findings show mixed results. Which means there’s enough to make everyone, and no one, happy.
The toddler in the litter box
The main thing to consider when you think of exposing your kids to Screen World is the content of what your child will be consuming, for two reasons.
The first is that kids are really good at imitation. Remember the light box and the baby touching her forehead to it? This ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation. Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure. By the time she is almost a year and a half, she can imitate an event four months after a single exposure. The skill never leaves children, something the advertising industry has known for decades. The implications are powerful. If toddlers can embed into memory a complex series of events after one exposure, imagine what they can consume in hours spent online and watching TV. (Not to mention what children are consuming as they view their parents’ behaviors 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Deferred imitation helps explain why we are still so prone to imitating our parents’ behaviors years after we leave the nest, as I was doing with my wife and the car keys.)
With children, deferred imitation can reveal itself in unexpected ways, as this tale from a young mother reveals.
We had a great Christmas. At one point, I noticed that my three year old daughter had disappeared. I went looking for her and I found her in my master bathroom. I asked her why she used my bathroom instead of hers and she said she was “being a kitty.” I look over at the litterbox and sure enough, she had gone poo in the litterbox! I was speechless …
This story reveals a lot about how children acquire information. The little girl had apprehended the general idea of “pooping places” and had created an expectation, and a plan, for her own resulting behavior. Gross topic. Delightful stuff.
The second reason content is so important is that our expectations and assumptions profoundly influence our perception of reality. This is because of the brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing—and then fool you into thinking this hybrid is the actual reality. It may disturb you to know this, but your perception of reality is not like a camcorder recording verbatim information to some cellular hard drive. Your perception of reality is a handshake agreement between what your senses bring to your brain and what your brain thinks ought to be there. And what you expect to be out there is directly tied to what you allowed into your brain in the first place. Experiences morph into expectations, which can, in turn, influence your behavior.
Yale psychologist John Bargh did an experiment illustrating this exquisite sensitivity. He told a bunch of healthy undergraduates that he was testing their language abilities. He presented them with a list of words and asked them to create a coherent sentence from it. You can try this right now. Make a sentence out of the following scramble:
DOWN SAT LONELY THE MAN WRINKLED BITTERLY THE WITH FACE OLD
Easy to do? You bet. “Bitterly, the lonely old man with the wrinkled face sat down” is one quick suggestion. But this was no linguistics test. Note how many words in the scramble are related to old age. Bargh was not interested in his subject’s creative use of grammar. He was interested in how long it took the students to leave the lab and walk down the hall after they were exposed to the words. What he found was extraordinary. Those students who had been exposed to an “elderly” mix of words took almost 40 percent longer to walk down the hall than those who had been exposed to “random” words. Some students even stooped and shuffled as they left, as if they were 50 years older than they actually were. To cite Bargh’s clinical observation, these words “activated the elderly stereotype in memory, and participants acted in ways consistent with that activated stereotype.”
Bargh’s result is just one in a long line of data demonstrating what a powerful force immediate, external influences can exert over internal behavior. What you allow into your child’s brain influences his expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he is capable of perceiving but his very behavior. This is true whether you are looking at infants only a month old or undergrads 20 years later.
How do deferred imitation and expectations manifest themselves in the digital world? Television has the best research behind it.
No boob tube before age 2
The issue of kids’ exposure to TV doesn’t throw off as many sparks as it used to. There is general agreement that a child’s exposure to television of any type should be limited. There is also general agreement that we are completely ignoring this advice.
I remember as a kid waiting every Sunday night for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color to come on, and loving it. I also remember my parents turning off the television when it was over. We don’t do that anymore. Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes per day in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 73 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of “screen time” with TVs and computers per day. I mentioned earlier that the average American is exposed to about 100,000 words per day outside of work. Fully 45 percent of those words come from television.
The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.
TV can lead to hostility, trouble focusing
For decades we have known of the connection between hostile peer interactions and the amount of kids’ exposure to television. The linkage used to be controversial (maybe aggressive people watch more TV than others?), but we now see that it’s an issue of our deferred-imitation abilities coupled with a loss of impulse control. One personal example:
When I was in kindergarten, my best friend and I were watching The Three Stooges, a 1950s TV show. The program involved lots of physical comedy, including people sticking their fingers in other people’s eyes. When the show was over, my friend fashioned his little fingers into a “V,” then quickly poked me in both eyes. I couldn’t see anything for the next hour and was soon whisked to the emergency room. Diagnosis: scratched corneas and a torn eye muscle.
Another example comes from a study that looked at bullying. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school. This is poor emotional regulation at work. Even taking into account chicken-or-egg uncertainties, the American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 percent to 20 percent of real-life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.
TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.
Just having the TV on while no one is watching—secondhand exposure—seemed to do damage, too, possibly because of distraction. In test laboratories, flashing images and a booming sound track continually diverted children from any activity in which they were otherwise engaged, including that marvelous brain-boosting imaginative play we discussed. The effects were so toxic for kids in diapers that the American Association of Pediatrics issued a recommendation that still stands today:
Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers (e.g., child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills.
Current research projects are addressing the potential effect of TV on grades, and preliminary work suggests that it affects both reading scores and language acquisition. But after age 2, the worst effects on kids’ brains may come because television coaxes kids away from exercise, a subject we will examine when we get to video games.
TV aimed at babies not so brainy
What about all those store shelves lined with educational videos and DVDs? They certainly claim to boost cognitive performance in preschool populations. Such boasts inspired a group of researchers at the University of Washington to do their own studies. I remember reading a series of press releases about their work one sunny day—unusual for Seattle. At first I laughed out loud, then suddenly I turned sober. The president of our university had just received a phone call from no less than Robert Iger, head of the Disney Company. The mouse was not happy. The UW scientists had just published research testing a product Disney makes, Baby Einstein DVDs, and the results were damning.
This won’t surprise you, given everything we have discussed so far. The products didn’t work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17 to 24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.
Disney demanded a retraction, citing deficiencies in the studies. After consultations with the original researchers, the university held its ground and issued a press release saying so. After this initial flurry of activity, there was silence. Then, two years later, in October 2009, Disney announced what amounted to a product recall, offering refunds to anyone who had purchased Baby Einstein materials. Responsibly, the company has dropped the word “educational” from the packaging.
After age 5, the jury is out
Since the first studies on television, researchers have discovered that not everything about TV is negative. It depends upon the content of the TV show, the age of the child, and perhaps even the child’s genetics. Before age 2, TV is best avoided completely. But after age 5, the jury is out on this harsh verdict—way out, in fact. Some television shows improve brain performance at this age. Not surprisingly, these shows tend to be the interactive types (Dora the Explorer, good; Barney & Friends, bad, according to certain studies). So although the case is overwhelming that television exposure should be limited, TV cannot be painted with a monolithic brush. Here are a few recommendations for TV viewing the data suggest:
1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I know this is tough to hear for parents who need a break. If you can’t turn it off—if you haven’t created those social networks that can allow you a rest—at least limit your child’s exposure to TV. We live in the real world, after all, and an irritated, overextended parent can be just as harmful to a child’s development as an annoying purple dinosaur.
2. After age 2, help your children choose the shows (and other screen-based exposures) they will experience. Pay special attention to any media that allow intelligent interaction.
3. Watch the chosen TV show with your children, interacting with the media and helping your children to analyze and think critically about what they just experienced. And rethink putting a TV in the kids’ room: Kids with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than kids in households with TVs in the family room.
Video games: Don’t just sit there
First, a disclaimer. I love Myst, an old computer-based video game. I was a graphics artist and professional animator before becoming a scientist, and Myst was love at first byte. Here was this beautifully rendered world, elegantly drawn with digital paint, dripping in what I could only describe as bit-mapped love. I spent hours in this world, exploring, problem solving, reading (there are books in this game!), examining star charts, and manipulating technologies that were visually inspired by equal parts Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, and Gene Roddenberry. Even now, hearing real waves gently lapping against a shoreline sends me back to the dreamy digital world where I first learned the real power of computing. If I sound smitten, then I am communicating correctly. That’s dangerous for a scientist, especially one about to comment on video games. Fortunately, cooler heads are out there; that’s why it’s called refereed literature, after all.
What does that literature say about video games and developing brains in babies? There’s not much, and it paints a decidedly mixed picture. This is understandable. The subject is too new, and the technology undergirding it is changing too rapidly. So what parents of newborns and toddlers should know about gaming comes not from data about what video games do to the mind but from what video games do to the body.
As with television, most video games are consumed in a sedentary position: You sit there. Movement-oriented game consoles such as the Wii, which debuted in 2006, potentially provide an exception, but they seem to have made little dent: Kids’ weight is still rising precipitously. So pronounced is this weight-gain trend that our children are starting to get diseases usually associated with middle and later life—including arthritis! Childhood obesity is three times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.
The brain loves exercise
This rise in pediatric obesity is painful to hear in the brain science community, especially because we know so much about the relationship between physical activity and mental acuity. Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent. This is true across the life span, from young children to members of the golden-parachute crowd. Strengthening exercises, though there are many other reasons to do them, do not give you these numbers.
Parents who start their kids out on a vigorous exercise schedule are more likely to have children for whom exercise becomes a steady, even lifelong, habit—up to 1½ times more likely, depending upon the study. Fit kids score higher on executive function tests than sedentary controls, and those scores remain as long as the exercise does. The best results accrue, by the way, if you do the exercises with your children. Remember that deferred-imitation business? Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts you can give your child. It may mean putting away World of Warcraft, getting off your butt, and providing a good example. This does not make Myst any less beautiful. It simply gives gaming a more nuanced perspective. I still love the genre, always will, but I am increasingly convinced that electronic games should come with a warning label.
Texting: A cautionary tale
How about the Internet and its associated digital communication vassals? Again, real data are few and far between. The little work that’s out there suggests some reason for concern, as illustrated by this story:
A 9-year-old girl decided to invite five or six of her closest friends to her very first slumber party. The girl’s mother, a sociologist by training, was delighted. Remembering her own childhood sleepovers, she anticipated nonstop talking, pillow fights, whispering secrets in the dark, and giggles at 2:00 a.m. None of that happened. As her daughter’s friends gathered together, Mom immediately noticed things that set her sociologist’s Spidey instincts tingling. The discourse between the girls seemed not like that of typical 9-year-olds, whose social exchanges can be surprisingly sophisticated, but more emotionally immature, like that of 4-year-olds. The culprit appeared to be the girls’ consistent misreading and misinterpreting of each other’s nonverbal cues. Mom also saw that within 30 minutes of the start of the party, five of the six girls had pulled out their cell phones. They were busily texting friends who weren’t there, or taking pictures and sending them off. This continued throughout the day. Deep into the night, around 2:00 a.m., everything was absolutely still. Mom snuck upstairs to make sure everything was OK. Half of the girls had gone to sleep. The other half were still on their cell phones, little screens glowing underneath the sheets.
Could the text messaging be related to the social immaturity? It’s not a trivial issue. The average youngster in 2008 sent and received 2,272 texts per month, about 80 per day. By 2009, 27 percent of the words they encountered came directly from a computer. Anything wrong with that? Nobody really knows yet. What we can say has to do with the inherent nature of the medium itself. The Internet and associated media encourage private consumption. This leads to the odd condition, as the slumber party illustrates, that even when we’re together, we’re often far apart. Unless all of their digital interactions involve a video camera, kids won’t get much practice interpreting nonverbal cues. That’s the world autistic kids live in, by the way.
Perfecting nonverbal communication skills takes years of practice, and, as we discussed in the previous chapter, it’s critical that kids do it. Real-life experiences are much messier than life on the Internet and not at all anonymous. Flesh-and-blood people touch each other, get in each other’s way, and constantly telegraph information to each other in a fashion not easily reformatted into emoticons and cute three-letter abbreviations. Recall that from marriages to workplaces, the largest source of conflict comes from the asymmetry between extrospective and introspective information. A great deal of asymmetry can be averted through the correct interpretation of nonverbal cues. The less practice humans get at it, the more immature their social interactions are likely to be, and the implications of that affect everything from future divorce rates to erosion of productivity in the workforce.
The sociologist mom’s anecdotal observation may be a wake-up call. It is certainly fertile ground for research. Given what’s at stake, a healthy skepticism toward a digital-only world is probably best. The best current advice may be keeping those machines mostly in the off position for as long as you can.
For better or for worse, we are social animals. It is probably wired into our DNA. You don’t have to look much further than Theodore Roosevelt to see that human relationships are the number one ingredient for a child’s future success. A culture marinated in technology might readily accuse researchers of being on the wrong side of history. The researchers, in turn, might accuse culture of being on the wrong side of humanity.
Hyper-parenting: “My baby is better than your baby”
I recently overheard this half of a cell-phone conversation while waiting for my plane to take off: “Is Stephanie walking yet? No? Brandon was walking by the time he was 9 months!” Then later: “Stephanie’s still in diapers? Brandon was potty-trained before he was 2!” The conversation went on and on about various milestones Superbaby Brandon was accomplishing in the face of Pathetic Stephanie. I hear versions of this baby competition virtually everywhere I go. They’re an element of hyper-parenting—another ingredient you want to limit in your smart-baby fertilizer. As the conversation ended, I imagined what Stephanie’s mom might feel. Anger? Embarrassment? She may have gone out and bought every developmental toy out there to hasten her little girl’s development. Or she may have just cried. And all for no good reason.
Creating comparisons like these is not only counterproductive (it puts pressure on a child that can be harmful to his or her brain) but also out of step with current neuroscientific understanding.
No two brains develop at the same rate
As you know by now, the brain follows a developmental timetable that is as individual as its owner’s personality. Children do not go through the same developmental milestones in lock step, marching like little brain-soldiers on the path to their future. A child who is a math whiz at age 4 is not necessarily one at age 9. Einstein, arguably as bright as they come, is rumored not to have spoken in complete sentences until he was 3. (His family had christened him “the dopey one!”) This individuality is partially genetic, but it also occurs because neurons are so responsive to the outer environment. They easily form new connections and break off existing ones, a property known as neuroplasticity.
The brain appears to go through some commonly experienced developmental stages. But few in the brain science community completely agree on what they are. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (who worked for a time with Alfred Binet, the IQ guy) came up with four phases of cognitive development in kids, which he called sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Widely influential then, the concept of developmental stages is a contentious idea now. Researchers began to question the notion in the late 20th century when they showed that children acquire skills and concepts at much earlier stages than Piaget posited. Follow-up work revealed that, even within a given category, children go through developmental stages at their own pace. Many don’t follow the order Piaget conceived; they sometimes skip a step or two or repeat the same stage several times in a row. Some go through no definable stages at all. There is nothing wrong with our children’s brains. There is just something wrong with our theories.
Some parents, though, think brain development is like running an Olympic race. They want their child to win at every step, whatever the cost. You can still see the effect of this mindset when these parents’ children get into college. Though I mostly teach graduate students, I occasionally instruct undergraduates who want to get into medical school, and they care about little else. Many describe being hot-housed by pushy parents who seem to see their kids more as merit badges than as people.
This is called hyper-parenting, and it has been studied. Developmental psychologist David Elkind, now professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, has divided overachieving moms and dads into categories. Four of them are:
• Gourmet parents. These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did.
• College-degree parents. Your classic “hot-housers,” these parents are related to Gourmets but believe that the sooner academic training starts, the better.
• Outward-bound parents. Wanting to provide their kids with physical survival skills because the world is such a dangerous place, these parents are often involved in the military and law enforcement.
• Prodigy parents. Financially successful and deeply suspicious about the education system, these parents want to guard their kids against the negative effects of schooling.
Regardless of category, hyper-parents often pursue their child’s intellectual success at the expense of their child’s happiness. Though real numbers are hard to come by, a cautionary tale may exist with high-school students in South Korea, for whom parental pressure to perform well on standardized tests can be enormous. After traffic accidents, suicide is the leading cause of death for 15- to- 19-year-olds.
I understand where parents are coming from. In a competitive world whose winners increasingly are the smartest among us, it is reflexive for loving parents to be concerned about their child’s intelligence. The dirty little secret, however, is that extreme intellectual pressure is usually counterproductive.
Hyper-parenting can actually hurt your child’s intellectual development in several ways:
1. Extreme expectations stunt higher-level thinking
Children are extraordinarily reactive to parental expectations, aching to please and fulfill when little; aching to resist and rebel when older. If little kids sense a parent wants them to accomplish some intellectual feat for which their brains are not yet ready, they are inexorably forced into a corner. This coerces the brain to revert to “lower-level” thinking strategies, creating counterfeit habits that may have to be unlearned later. I saw this in action at a social gathering one evening. A proud parent announced to me that his 2-year-old understood multiplication. He had the little guy perform by reciting the times tables. It became obvious, with some gentle probing, that the boy had no understanding of multiplication and was merely parroting back a few memorized facts. Lower thinking skills had substituted for higher processing features. Elkind disparagingly calls these types of displays “pony tricks” and believes no child should be subjected to them. I agree.
2. Pressure can extinguish curiosity
Children are natural explorers. But if parents supply only rigid educational expectations, interest will be transformed into appeasement. Children will stop asking potent questions like “Am I curious about this?” and start asking, “What will satisfy the powers that be?” Exploratory behavior is not rewarded, so it is soon disregarded. Remember, the brain is a survival organ, and nothing is more important to a child than the safety (approval, in this case) parents can provide.
3. Continual anger or disappointment becomes toxic stress
There’s another harm when parents press their children to perform tasks their little brains aren’t yet capable of executing. Pushy parents often become disappointed, displeased, or angry when their kids don’t perform—reactions children can detect at an astonishingly young age and want desperately to avoid.
This loss of control is toxic. It can create a psychological state called learned helplessness, which can physically damage a child’s brain. The child learns he can’t control the negative stimuli (the parent’s anger or disappointment) coming at him or the situations that cause it. Think of a third-grade boy who comes home from school every night to a drunken dad, who then beats him up. The little guy has to have a home, but it is awful to have a home. He will get the message that there is no way out, and eventually he will not try to escape, even if a way later presents itself. That’s why it is called learned helplessness. And you don’t need a physically abusive situation to create it.
Learned helplessness is a gateway to depression, even in childhood. I knew the parents of a graduate student who killed himself; they were archetypically pushy, demanding, and, frankly, obnoxious. Though depression is a complex subject, the student’s suicide note intimated that his drastic actions were partially a response to his perceived failure to live up to his parents’ expectations. This is a powerful demonstration that the brain is not interested in learning; it is interested in surviving.
Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends’ kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.
You can maximize your child’s brain power in plenty of wonderful ways. After breast-feeding, focus on open-ended play, lots of verbal interaction, and praising effort—fertilizers statistically guaranteed to boost your child’s intellect from almost any starting point. These things aren’t fancy. After all, the brain’s intellectual performance envelope was forged in a world that was not only pre-Internet but pre–Ice Age.
Key points
• The brain is more interested in surviving than in getting good grades in school.
• What helps early learning: breast-feeding, talking to your children—a lot, guided play every day, and praising effort rather than intelligence.
• What hurts early learning: overexposure to television (keep the TV off before age 2), a sedentary lifestyle, and limited face-to-face interaction.
• Pressuring children to learn a subject before their brains are ready is only harmful.
