IN THIS CHAPTER I remind you of some things you already know about how to increase the intelligence of your child and yourself, point out some things that you may believe to be true but for which there is little evidence, and describe some ways to increase intelligence that may be surprising to you. By intelligence, I mean ability to solve problems and to reason, which is measured, if only imperfectly, by IQ scores and academic achievement.
The Obvious
First, the things you probably do instinctively with your child, without much conscious consideration of strategy, can increase intelligence: Talk to your child, using high-level vocabulary. Include your child in adult conversations. Read to your child. Minimize reprimands and maximize comments that will encourage your child to explore the environment. Avoid undue stress, which you would do anyway, but probably not for the reasons given in this book. Stress can result in poor learning ability and ability to solve novel problems as it can damage pathways between the limbic lobe and the prefrontal cortex. At extremes, stress can interfere with memory capacity as well.
Teach your child how to categorize objects and events and how to make comparisons among them. Encourage your child to analyze and evaluate interesting aspects of the world. Give your child intellectually stimulating after-school and summertime activities. (Though I have to admit that I do think some parents overprogram their kids. The forced suburban march from hockey practice to piano class to Cub Scout meetings is not something I would personally recommend.) Try to steer your child toward peers who will promote intellectual interests.
These are the sorts of things that people of higher socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to do than people of lower SES, and they are all correlated with children’s ultimate intelligence. Admittedly though, the data are just that—correlational—for the most part. We do not know the extent to which activities like these cause greater intelligence as opposed to just being the sorts of activities that smarter parents carry out with their children—who are destined to be smarter than average because of their parents’ good genes and not their exemplary behavior. On the other hand, common sense indicates that these things ought to be beneficial and it’s hard to see how they could do harm. And we do know that when poor children are raised by higher-SES parents, who are inclined to do these things, the children end up having higher IQs and better academic performance.
The Dubious
Despite what you may have heard bandied about in the press, some things do not affect intelligence much—or at any rate there is not very good evidence that they do. Baby Einstein educational toys that move around and communicate with the child may be as likely to induce passivity as to encourage exploration. There is no evidence that playing Mozart to your child—whether born yet or not—will increase intelligence. The research suggesting that extra stimulation in the early years results in more growth of neurons and better problem-solving ability is based strictly on animal studies comparing rats that had absolute minimal stimulation—sitting in the dark in small cages—with animals that were allowed to play in interesting environments and given a companion to do it with. We find the same kind of huge gains with infants who are drastically understimulated and then brought into normal environments. We do not know whether stimulation at unusually high levels using fancy toys does much for human infants.
But lots of other things do seem to matter, and for many of them we have very good evidence about their usefulness.
The Physical
Bigger babies grow up to be smarter adults than do smaller babies. We do not know whether size at birth causes higher intelligence or is merely correlated with it. But why take a chance when there is something you can do to increase the size of the baby? Namely, exercise. Women who exercise on a treadmill twenty minutes a day a few times a week have bigger babies, and bigger babies are certainly healthier and may well grow up to be smarter because of some variable associated with their size. That variable could be brain size. The babies born to exercising mothers have larger heads. We know that people with larger brains are more intelligent on average.
Exercise is good for the baby, for mothers-to-be, and for everybody else. Exercising large muscle groups actually increases growth of neurons, and exercise, at least in animals, adds to the blood supply of the brain. Even introducing exercise relatively late in life is good for intelligence. Experiments show that elderly people who are encouraged to exercise maintain good problem-solving skills longer than people who are not encouraged to exercise. The effect of exercising thirty minutes or more per day on fluid intelligence–based tasks is .50 SD across all studies. Strength training plus cardiac training is better than cardiac training alone. People who exercise regularly in middle age are one-third as likely to get Alzheimer’s disease in their seventies as people who do not exercise. You can even start exercise in your sixties and reduce the likelihood of Alzheimer’s by half.
A possibly very important thing a mother can do for her child’s intelligence is to breast-feed. For children with the most common kinds of genetic makeup, breast-feeding for up to nine months may increase IQ as much as 6 points. (Breast-feeding beyond nine months seems to have no beneficial effect.) It seems to be particularly important to breast-feed premature babies.
Fluid-Intelligence Exercises
Several types of activities can improve fluid intelligence, and not just for children. Recall that fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems that are novel and for which previously learned rules or concepts are not necessarily helpful. The prototypical example is the Raven Progressive Matrices test. You see various geometric figures that have been changed in particular ways and you have to develop on the spot a rule that will allow you to determine what the next transformation of the figures should be. The activities that increase fluid intelligence include computer games that teach attention control and exercise working-memory capacity.
Neuroscientist Rosario Rueda and her colleagues described several types of games that exercise fluid-intelligence functions for young children. One was anticipation exercises. An exercise they used for this involved teaching children to anticipate where a duck that had submerged itself in a pond would emerge. The children used a joystick to manipulate a cat to the position where they expected the duck to turn up. Another exercise involved stimulus discrimination. Children had to remember the attributes of cartoon portraits so that they could pick the portrait out of an array of several other portraits. Other tasks, described in Chapter 3, included a conflict-resolution exercise and an inhibitory-control exercise. These exercises improved performance on the Raven Progressive Matrices test, which makes heavy demands on attention control and working memory. These fluid-intelligence functions are particularly important for children’s learning in the years before adolescence. For a demonstration of these exercises, go to http://www.teach-the-brain.org/learn/attention/index.htm
Child neurologist Torkel Klingberg and his coworkers found that various working-memory and attention-control tasks improved the concentration of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Some of these tasks are easy to duplicate without using a computer. For example, experimenters read to children a series of digits (perhaps 4, 7, 2 9, 5) and then ask them to repeat the digits back in the reverse order in which they were read. Other tasks require computer administration, such as a “go–no go” task in which the child is shown two gray circles and has to press a key if a circle turns green and refrain from pressing it when it becomes red. Such exercises improved reaction times and reduced errors even on tasks for which the children had not been trained, and improved scores on the Raven IQ test. The Raven scores for almost all the trained children exceeded the average for the untrained children. Similar exercises improved working memory and Raven performance in normal, healthy adults.
Finally, meditation exercises typical of the kind used in Chinese traditional medicine (breathing exercises, postural training, body awareness) conducted over a period of just five days improved executive functioning and performance on Raven Progressive Matrices. If this seems dubious to you, it would to me too, except that the authors of the study include highly respected neuroscientists Yi-Yuan Tang and Michael Posner, so I believe it.
Self-Control
The best evidence we have indicates that children with above-average self-control have higher intelligence, and higher academic achievement whatever their level of intelligence. Personality psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues found that the largely upper-middle-class children at Stanford University’s nursery school who could delay gratification in the here and now (one cookie) for better rewards later (two cookies) got higher grades and substantially higher SAT scores when they were teenagers. Lower-SES minority children in New York also got higher grades if they had greater ability to delay gratification. We do not know, however, whether the ability to delay gratification is associated with later scores on ability tests merely because children with more intelligence at age four incidentally happen to have better ability to delay gratification, and then become smarter teenagers not because their ability to delay gratification helped them to learn but because they were destined to be smarter owing to other inherited or environmental reasons. But it does seem likely that the ability to delay gratification in itself increases ability because greater self-control makes studying easier. Recall that psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman found that junior high school students in a magnet school in Philadelphia who had greater self-control had higher grade point averages. In fact, the correlation between self-control and grade point average was twice as great as the correlation between IQ and grade point average. Here we are on safer causal ground. Self-control almost surely contributes to achievement over and above the intelligence level that a person happens to have.
Unfortunately, we are not confident about knowing ways to increase self-control in children, but the research provides some hints. We do know that if children watch adults who reward themselves regardless of their performance, they are more likely to do the same for themselves. But if they watch adults reward themselves only for high-quality performance, children do that themselves. Also, Mischel and his coworkers had a few tricks that helped the children in their study to delay consuming a goodie immediately as opposed to waiting for a bigger reward. When researchers had the children “think fun thoughts” instead of thinking about the rewards, the children were able to delay longer. When researchers encouraged them to put the rewards away, out of their line of sight, they also delayed longer. We do not know whether these kinds of suggestions would generalize to behavior outside the lab session where they were taught, but they might. And if parents were to look for occasions to encourage children to be patient, and especially if they gave suggestions about how to be patient, this might be effective. Parents might also try modeling delay of gratification. Mischel’s group found that children behaved like the adults they watched. Some children saw an adult take an immediate reward instead of waiting for a larger one later. The adult said things like, “You probably have noticed that I am a person who likes things now. One can spend so much time in life waiting that one never gets around to really living.” Even children who were inclined to delay gratification, but who watched such a model, subsequently took the immediate reward most of the times they were offered it.
Teach Malleability—and Praise Children for Hard Work
It is crucial for parents to teach children that their intelligence is under their control. Asians are particularly likely to believe that ability is something you have to work for. Not surprisingly, Asian Americans work harder to achieve academic goals than European Americans. And Asians work harder after failure than after success—unlike North Americans of European descent who work harder after success than after failure. It is important to teach children that if at first you don’t succeed, try again harder.
It is probably a bad idea to praise children for being intelligent. Instead, praise hard work, which is under their direct control. The problem with praising children for their intelligence is that it makes them focus on trying to show how smart they are by working on tasks they do well on and avoiding working on tasks they are having trouble with. When children are praised for intelligence, in other words, they resist accepting a challenge and doing things from which they can learn a lot.
In a clever experiment illustrating this point, developmental psychologists Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck told children that they had done very well on problems from the Raven Progressive Matrices test and praised them either for being bright or for working hard. They then offered the children the opportunity to work on another set of problems—either easy ones (“so I’ll do well”) or hard problems that would challenge them (“so I’ll learn a lot from them, even if I won’t look so smart”). Sixty-six percent of the children who were praised for their intelligence chose to work on easy problems that would show that they were smart; over 90 percent of children praised for hard work chose problems that they would learn a lot from. If the children did well because they were smart, they did not want to risk finding out that they were not so smart after all. If they did well because they worked hard, they wanted problems that would test their limits and teach them how to do even better.
Before the children actually got a chance to work on a problem set of their choice, Mueller and Dweck required them to work on a second set of problems that were much more difficult than the first set. The children were then asked to explain why they had performed poorly on the second set of problems. The children praised for intelligence based on performance on the first set of problems were more likely to think that their failure on the second set of problems reflected lack of ability; children praised for hard work initially were more likely to think that their failure on the second set of problems was due to lack of effort. Children praised for ability were less likely to want to continue to work on the problems and reported enjoying working on the second set of tasks less than did those praised for hard work. As icing on the cake, Mueller and Dweck then had the children work on a third set of problems. Children who had initially been praised for intelligence solved fewer problems than those initially praised for hard work. The moral of this experimental parable seems clear: praise for effort, not smarts.
Avoid “Contracts” to Give Rewards for Activities That Are Intrinsically Rewarding
It is not a great idea to promise your child a reward for doing something you want to encourage, if your child already has some interest in it. With developmental psychologists Mark Lepper and David Green, I watched nursery school children engage in a novel activity—drawing with magic markers. Most of the children drew with the markers and clearly enjoyed the activity. We later promised some children a reward if they would draw something with the magic markers for us, which they gladly did. Then a couple of weeks later the magic markers were put out for children to play with again. Children who had been rewarded for playing with the magic markers drew with them less than children who had not been rewarded—and their drawings were of lower quality. In effect, the “contract” had turned play into work. We praised the products of other children, who were not promised a reward, and these children subsequently played with the magic markers more than did children who were neither promised a reward nor praised. So if you want children to do something, praise them for doing it. Don’t promise them a reward for doing it.
Sometimes, however, contracting for rewards can be a good idea. If the child is not going to do something without being offered an extrinsic reward, then rewards may have to be the order of the day. If a child has low initial interest in an activity, the reward may serve to get the child to try it and perhaps find that there are genuine attractions to it. I suspect that the reward aspect of the KIPP charter schools may be a good idea for their children, many of whom will have found little to interest them in their previous schools.
Effective Tutoring
When you tutor your children, try to keep in mind Mark Lepper’s five Cs tutoring guide from Chapter 4: encourage a sense of control, challenge your child, instill confidence, foster curiosity, and contextualize by relating the task to the real world or to a movie or TV show. In addition, don’t sweat the small errors like forgetting to write down the minus sign; try to prevent the child from making a mistake unless there is a good lesson to be learned from it; don’t dumb down the material for the sake of the child’s self-esteem but rather change the way it is presented; ask leading questions; and don’t give much praise so as to avoid making the child feel evaluated.
The Schools
Finally—some suggestions about dealing with the schools. To the extent you can, try to get your child into classrooms with the best teachers, especially for the first grade. Avoid rookie teachers. If your school does not use proven computer programs for teaching reading, math, and science, try to get it to consider doing so. Go to the U.S. Department of Education’s Web site for What Works Clearinghouse so that you can cite chapter and verse for why certain programs should be used at your child’s grade level. If your child’s school doesn’t use any of the cooperative learning tools, where children work on solving problems and creating knowledge together, encourage the school to do so, again citing the What Works Clearinghouse. Find out if the principal at your child’s school is aware of who the good teachers are and ask if it is possible to reward the better ones. If it’s not possible to reward teacher quality, press your school board to make it possible. (Union contracts may forbid rewarding on the basis of anything but seniority. In that case, you can encourage your school board to reward all teachers at high-performing schools.) Discourage your school board from putting a lot of emphasis on teachers getting certification and higher degrees, because there is no evidence that teachers with certificates or higher degrees are any better at their jobs. Teacher time is better spent working on teaching skills, with the help of peers and experts who observe them and give them feedback.
In short, you can use many of the lessons in this book to improve your children’s intelligence—and your own.