Last week, I brushed my teeth with sunscreen. I had my reasons. The sunscreen tube is the same shape as the toothpaste tube. The stuff squeezes out thick, like toothpaste. It was in the top drawer, where the toothpaste is kept. And my mind was on other, far more important things. So I grabbed the tube, squeezed out the goop, and started brushing. My mind quickly rejoined my body the instant my taste buds were assaulted with sunscreen.
Stuff like this happens when we don’t pay attention. A friend of mine used hairspray as deodorant—talk about a sticky situation. Another used instant coffee to make gravy. Her kids said nothing because—even more worrying—they didn’t notice.
Maybe you’ve never brushed your teeth with sunscreen, but I bet you’ve had the experience of your body engaging in actions while your mind was elsewhere. Perhaps you’ve reached the end of a page in this book only to realize that while your eyes scanned all the words, your mind didn’t process their meaning (I forgive you). Maybe you’ve hopped in your car and driven to the end of your driveway—or down your street—before your mind registered you were driving.
In fact, the wandering mind is engaging in a particular type of attention, as is the focused one. Both are essential to getting us safely and wisely through life. We can actually train ourselves to maximize the benefits of each through enjoyable processes that can become treasured parts of our day and make us more effective, too. Teaching your child how to visit and dwell in both domains of attention is an important foundation you can provide as part of strength-based parenting. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to help your child:
Daily life on planet Earth is hugely complex for us humans. Just think about every action you take on any given day. Every word you speak. Every thought you have. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Yet all of this, viewed in terms of where and how we place our attention, really boils down to two types of applied attention. At any given moment, we are engaged in one of them, and we constantly toggle between them.
Directed attention is the process of deliberately and consciously focusing the mind on something. It’s “top-down,” as if your brain is acting as a company CEO, directing the workers (your neurons) to get busy on a task: OK, time to fold the laundry/make school lunches/drive to work/write that memo/make that call, et cetera.
You can think of directed attention as being made up of two dimensions: direction and maintenance,1 which I call “aim and sustain.” Directing or aiming our attention helps us focus on a specific task, idea, or challenge. Maintaining or sustaining our attention allows us to stay focused on it.
Directed attention involves effort. It’s all about screening out other input that could be distracting—like paying attention to doing homework even though the TV is on in the background. Or making sure we brush our teeth with toothpaste even when we’ve got a lot on our mind.
It might seem counterintuitive, but attention is also built through rest.2 I’m talking about times when the mind simply wanders, without a fixed agenda. In contrast to the top-down nature of directed attention, free-form attention is undirected and bottom-up: insights, ideas, and solutions bubble up from the depths of the wandering mind in a fascinating process that has captivated spiritualists and scientists and still mystifies us all.
Our mind needs this state the way our body needs sleep: for restoration and renewal. It happens when we give ourselves what we think of as “downtime.” A good example is when we’re in that flow state I mentioned in Chapter 3. Strength-based parents know their kids need this time, and they build downtime into their child’s life despite social pressure to hop on the overscheduling bandwagon.
• • •
Now that you know the two main types of attention, we’ll take a deeper dive into each and what they mean for SBP.
Here’s the truth: We’re not very good at paying attention. Adults max out at somewhere between twenty to thirty-five minutes3 (I couldn’t write this page without thinking about checking my e-mail, remembering something we need from the grocery store, and being distracted by thoughts of a work project). Yet we expect hours of sustained attention from ourselves, and too often we expect far more than our kids can deliver.
You may be saying, “I can sit at my desk working for an entire morning.” I know you’re not lying. But it isn’t true. You probably do sit for hours and work hard, but you, like me, are thinking about e-mails, to-do lists, weekend plans, errands, bills due, and so on.
We start out focused, but then after nine minutes or so, our vigilance declines4 and our attention shifts, if only briefly, elsewhere before we aim it back on task again.5 Rather than focusing for hours, we’re actually constantly re-aiming and re-sustaining our attention.
When we ask our kids to pay directed attention, we’re asking them to narrow and aim their field of attention to one thing. Then we’re asking them to sustain their attention on that one thing and not get distracted by anything else. That’s not so easy for us to do, so we need to ease up on our expectations of our kids.
Research results vary and there are potentially large differences between individuals, but here are a few ground rules and a reality check about human attention capacity:
This last point may seem pathetic to us today, but there’s an evolutionary reason for it. Out on the savannah, it wouldn’t have been safe to get engrossed in something for hours because then we wouldn’t be flicking our attention around to see if there’s a predator about to attack us.
These research results on attention span come from what are called Continuous Performance Tasks, which allow psychologists to measure how accurate we are about information that comes at us and how long we can sustain attention on it. The tasks usually involve watching a computer screen on which flash a series of letters, shapes, or numbers, and having to hit a button each time a particular pattern is seen—say, for example, seeing the number 9 immediately preceded by the number 1. This entails 1) aiming attention at the screen, 2) sustaining attention after seeing the number 1 to see if it’s followed by the number 9, 3) hitting the button only when we see the number 9, 4) screening out all other sequences, and 5) continuing this process while accuracy is measured over time. Six-year-olds have about a 71 percent hit rate (correct response). At age fifteen, that jumps to 96 percent.11 Adults do about the same (actually, a little worse) at 94 percent.12
How many of your frustrations and conflicts with your children come from their lack of attention? As I hope the section above shows, none of us has the corner on attention. But focusing on your child’s strengths fosters the positive, engaged mood that enhances attention. This family used a toddler’s strengths of perseverance and blossoming creativity to support his powers of attention:
I had to leave my two-year-old son, Ari, at home to travel regularly over the course of a year. In the hope of lessening the impact of Mommy going away, Ari went home from the airport that first trip with his very first set of Lego. So the love affair began. His dad helped him at first, but after a couple of trips, Ari was building things on his own. This blew us away. At age three, he was doing “big boy” Lego and showing such perseverance: interpreting instructions, maintaining concentration, fixing his mistakes. Once when I called, the Lego session had been going on for four solid hours, with food consumed on the side. His perseverance certainly shone through, but the creativity he also showed was awesome to see. We really made an effort during this time to praise the process and reaffirm the strengths we could spot. It is so beautiful to see strengths evolve in your child and I’m so grateful I have the language of strengths to encourage and nurture his development in this way.
When we direct our child toward developing a core strength or a growth strength, we’re helping her aim her attention. Sustaining attention enables our child to stay engaged in the activities that help her grow her strengths—or constructively address her weaknesses—such as effort, practice, problem solving, and the like.
Although children are born with a genetic predisposition for their strengths, it’s only through sustained practice, which requires sustained attention, that their strengths will reach full potential. Helping your child exert directed attention helps him aim his attention on his strengths instead of veering into fixation on his weaknesses, as our evolutionary wiring predisposes us to do. It helps him tap his inborn strengths when addressing weaknesses. And it will help him sustain these efforts for longer periods of time.
SBP improves your attentional capacity, too. As you practice the Strength Switch—the simple yet powerful attention-aiming tool you learned in Chapter 2—you’ll notice it gets easier to shift your attention away from your child’s weaknesses and toward her strengths, and to model that shift to your child. She, too, will find it easier to see and act from her strengths.
In all of these ways, directed attention both builds and is built by strength-based parenting.
I’m often asked if strength-based parenting can help kids with attentional challenges.13 What I can say is that, by helping the parent to focus on what the child does well, SBP creates a more positive, supportive parent-child relationship. That means less tension and frustration for both parent and child around the attention lapses. When the attentional problems no longer become the defining element for the child’s identity or of the parent-child relationship, this frees up room for the child’s strengths to take center stage.
June Pimm, PhD,14 who has worked with parents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for more than two decades, is a big advocate for taking a strength-based, developmental parenting approach and for setting up situations and relationships where the child can be at his best. Her ideas align with the Early Start Denver Model, an approach to ASD that’s based on the child’s developmental level and unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses.15 The program uses positive interpersonal relationships to build social skills and adaptability. In a trial of the program, 30 percent of children in the program achieved decreases in ASD symptoms, moving their diagnosis from ASD to the less serious diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Disorder–Not Otherwise Specified.
Research on positive parenting with children who have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shows that while it doesn’t change their deficit disorder, it does improve their behavior.16 ADHD children whose parents use praise, positive emotions, physical affection, and positive engagement as regular features of their parenting have fewer conduct problems, fewer mood issues, fewer sociability problems, and less hyperactivity. The researchers haven’t framed these positive parenting practices as strength-based parenting, but I would.
One mother describes how discovering the core strengths of her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, allowed her to see his powers of observation (attention) of others’ emotions that hadn’t been as noticeable before:
Fin has Asperger’s syndrome, so it was a surprise to me that he has social intelligence as a signature strength. I didn’t really believe it until I asked others who know him well. His teachers said it made perfect sense to them—Fin notices details that others don’t and is very perceptive of others’ emotions, even though he may not always respond or know what to do with that emotion.
Seeing that this was a strength for Fin helped me to understand that he could observe people’s emotions but needed help on appropriate responses. Sometimes when he has a friend over, he’ll tell me the friend feels “uncomfortable” and he’ll explain what he sees in the friend’s face. Then we talk and he can think about how to help resolve the situation.
Whether or not your child has these kinds of issues, if you know her strengths, you’ll be better able to help her pay attention because you can more carefully calibrate the match between a particular task and her strengths. If a task is too easy or too hard, our mind wanders. Positive emotions, confidence levels about the task, interest in the task, and enjoyment of the task also affect the ability to aim and sustain attention.17 Knowing your child’s strengths improves your insight into what will satisfy those criteria and where she may struggle and need more breaks, downtime, or support from you.
A common scene of frustration in my household at the moment is encouraging nine-year-old Emily to put on her shoes before we go to school. The scene goes something like this: I let Emily know that Matt will be taking her to school in five minutes and ask her to please put her shoes on. Emily is an agreeable girl and says yes—but more often than not, no shoes are put on. It’s not unusual for this scene to end with me raising my voice and Emily still barefooted, looking totally confused about why I’ve become so frustrated. After all, she said yes—and she fully intended to follow through.
When Emily says she’s going to put her shoes on, she genuinely means it, but in the blink of an eye, her attention shifts elsewhere, and she promptly forgets about her shoes. With SBP, we can transform these moments of frustration into opportunities for attention training.
The first shift of attention has to be mine as the parent: I use the Strength Switch to flip my attention from frustration to seeing the opportunity to help Emily pay attention. The shoe request then becomes a moment for me to tap into her strengths of adherence, cooperation, and service, helping her stay focused on her task by connecting with her genuine desire to please me by doing what I ask. My request goes from “Em, can you please put your shoes on?” to “OK, Emmy-Bemmy, now’s the time to show me how strong your attention muscle is getting by putting your shoes on without getting distracted. Do you think you can do that? How about we have some fun and I’ll time how fast you can do it?”
Beyond that, it doesn’t require anything more complicated than turning off the TV and staying near her to keep her focused. Each time she aims and sustains her attention on the shoes long enough to get them on, she’s developing her capacity for attention. Soon enough, I’ll be able to ask, “Em, can you please put your shoes on?” and she’ll do it because her attention span has grown.
When your child engages in activities requiring dedicated focus like sports training or chess practice, these are actually forms of attention training. He’s not only building his athletic or thinking skills; he’s also developing his capacity to sustain attention on a task—a core skill needed for strengths development. Nick and Emily attend a weekly circus club, where they learn acrobatics and other circus skills. Juggling and swinging on the trapeze are lots of fun, but they also require intense focus. One tiny lapse of attention and my kids drop the ball . . . or themselves.
Savoring is an enjoyable form of attentional training that captures moments of good experiences to build positivity in real time and create a “bank account” of goodness to draw on in tough times.18 It involves concentrating attention on events and situations that make you feel good. When things are going great, there’s plenty to savor. In tough times, being practiced at savoring lets you more easily switch gears to find and savor the positives in situations and in people—including your child and yourself.
I’ve made savoring a recommended practice for strength-based parenting because it teaches you and your children how to sidestep negative bias by aiming attention on positive things. Also, as it involves pausing to let our attention linger on what makes us feel good, it helps us sustain our attention.
Moments to savor are everywhere. For example, I love the smell of coffee. Luckily for me, there’s a café on the ground floor of my university building. The aroma of coffee wafts into the lobby each morning, giving me the opportunity for a hit of olfactory pleasure as I come to work. The café also bakes its own cakes and pastries. The only thing better than the smell of a freshly baked blueberry muffin is the taste of a freshly baked blueberry muffin, don’t you think?
Some days, I’m so preoccupied with work that although my nose registers the delectable smells, my mind doesn’t notice. Before I know it, I’m in the elevator without even realizing I’ve passed the café, robbing myself of a small moment of pleasure.
Other days, I remember I can train my attention by savoring the aromas coming from the café. For just the moments I spend crossing the lobby, I switch my attention from work thoughts and place my full attention on my sense of smell. I try to guess what coffee bean has been brewing (Arabica? Robusta?) and what the fresh cake is (Blueberry? Cinnamon?). I relish the pleasure that just these aromas give me. It takes no time away from my busy schedule, but it helps me to aim and sustain my attention and it starts my day on a positive note.
You can build savoring moments into your day as games or activities with your kids. Nick, Emily, and I enjoy looking at the clouds and saying what we think the shapes look like. Savoring has become a big part of our everyday interactions. We luxuriate in the feel of sunshine on our backs, we appreciate the smell of pancakes that Matt sometimes cooks for us on Sunday mornings, we notice sunsets, and we literally stop to smell the roses in our neighborhood.
Savoring not only helps to train your child’s attentional skills but it also boosts happiness, positive mood, and life satisfaction.19 Your child’s day is likely to have many little “moments of good” that, until now, have passed unnoticed. Once she learns how to focus on them, she can use them to build her positive bank account. And children with positive bank accounts have healthy reserves to draw from during challenging times:
My freshman year of college has been a huge adjustment for me. It’s the longest I’ve been away from home and the most challenging academics I’ve ever had. The social scene is super exciting but also intimidating. Sometimes I’m really afraid I won’t be able to perform up to the standards here. I’ve found that one way to help me stay calm is, before falling asleep, I’ll picture summer evenings at home. I imagine being with my parents and going over to hang out with the neighbors on their back porch in the dark, looking out into the woods, listening to the sounds of the summer night, talking about this and that, with their springer spaniel lying underfoot for cuddles. This picture of home calms me so much. It reminds me that home will always be there for me, because I carry it in my mind.
Here are some ways you can help your child learn to stop and savor the moment or the feeling:
Scrapbooking is one of my downtime activities and is also an effective form of savoring. As I look over the photos and assemble the pages depicting various significant family events, I reminisce about the event, and it makes me feel happy. Sometimes Nick and Emily join in and make a scrapbook page about events in their life, such as their birthday parties or family holidays. I love it when this happens, because we have wonderful conversations as they savor the moment aloud.
• • •
One night recently, Nick came into the kitchen and urged me outside to show me the sunset. It was a beautiful pink sky, shot with purple and orange. He had noticed it from his bedroom window. I savored that moment, and not just because the sunset was beautiful. Over the years, as we have practiced savoring, Nick’s brain is now wired to notice and savor these moments of good. His positive bank account is well stocked. That’s what I savored.
Whenever I feel like we’re having a good moment, I’ve formed the habit of saying “Life’s pretty good.” It’s a verbal cue for savoring that I use to highlight and extend the moment for all of us. Recently, I was bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard with Emily. She suggested we lie on the trampoline and do some cloud watching. As we told each other what we were seeing in the clouds, she spontaneously said, “Life’s pretty good.” My heart soared as high as the clouds we were looking at because both of my children are learning how to direct their attention toward positive experiences of their own accord. Mission accomplished.
You can probably see how savoring, by sharpening our powers of positive attention, gives rise to gratitude. As a positive psychologist, I have my pick of positive emotions to study, and I like them all. But after love, gratitude is my favorite for the huge wallop (now there’s a scientific term) of positivity it brings.
Gratitude is about noticing and actively appreciating the good things in your life. It’s a mash-up of attention and savoring—with an extra kick of action. Just noticing a good thing (“Oh, there’s steak for dinner”) isn’t gratitude. Noticing and savoring (“Oh, there’s steak for dinner and it smells great!”) is the next level—the “two-fer” aspect of gratitude. But the extra kick—the three-fer—comes when you add action to the equation: You actively appreciate that good thing by expressing your appreciation. In this case, it’s by saying to whoever’s cooking that steak, “Wow, thank you for making that steak. It smells great!”
Think for a moment about what really happened here. You’ve turned your attention toward a positive focus and provided yourself with the cascade of neurochemistry that good feelings bring. But by expressing gratitude, you’ve created an environment where someone else can notice that good moment, savor it, and experience that same flood of positive sensation, too. Three-fer exchanges like these give both parties a huge shot of positive feelings. It’s this pro-social aspect of gratitude that makes it so powerful for your family.
We can bring kids and parents into the lab, sit them in front of a computer, and do attentional training with them of the kind I described earlier in this chapter, every day for a month. They’d dutifully press the little red button every time they saw the number combination that they’re supposed to focus on. And they’d get better and better at building their attentional muscle.
But it’s no fun. Much more fun is to start practicing gratitude. Not only are we improving attention skills and boosting our positive emotions, but we’re also spreading that improvement to others.
Gratitude can take the form of words—“thank you” being the most obvious and always effective—but you can be more elaborate in commenting on the particular strength a person is showing, be it cooking skills, thoughtfulness, creativity, or any of the 118 strengths developed by psychologists and listed on my website (www.strengthswitch.com). SBP itself is a way of raising your child in a manner that shows appreciation and gratitude for who she is and helps her appreciate the strengths in others, too.
Or your appreciation can take the form of an action: appreciating that a restaurant server has to clear hundreds of plates a day and as a family stacking up the plates on the restaurant table to help her clear them, bringing a coworker a cup of coffee because you notice he’s having a super-busy day, saying hi to the new kid at school who’s looking a bit forlorn, writing a thank-you note to an advisor for writing a college recommendation letter. These are little actions of gratitude that say “I see and appreciate you.”
Practicing gratitude as you go about your daily life models appreciation in action for your child. Praising your child is a beautiful way to show him exactly how wonderful it feels to receive expressions of gratitude. We’ll talk about the most effective way to praise in Chapter 8.
Gratitude is other-directed: We notice something, it stirs us, and we feel compelled to communicate that sensation to another—whether to a person, a spiritual entity, or the universe. When we feel appreciation without communicating it, we might call that awe or wonder. In a paper I wrote last year with one of my PhD students, together with Dianne Vella-Brodrick, PhD, we called it gratefulness, as distinct from the social quality of gratitude.22
We all want to feel noticed and appreciated. When we’re truly experiencing gratitude, I feel that we are expressing our higher selves. It costs so little, but it means so much to so many.
Learning how to direct my attention toward gratitude played an important part in my own healing journey from anxiety and depression by helping me reframe events, find and appreciate the lessons, and discover benefits I might not otherwise have discovered.
There’s a bucket load of research showing the importance of gratitude for our psychological health. It’s linked to a host of positive indicators such as self-discipline, emotional warmth, altruism, positive mood, self-esteem, and life satisfaction.23 People who practice gratitude report feeling less bitterness and depression over time (I dare you to try to feel bitter and grateful in exactly the same moment).
Alex Wood, PhD, of the University of Stirling has found that people who feel grateful just prior to sleep fall into slumber more quickly, stay asleep longer, and report better sleep quality.24 For my family and me, that study was life-changing.
I used to go to bed with so many things on my mind that I’d repeatedly turn on the light to write items on a to-do list that I kept next to the bed, afraid I’d forget them by the next day. Going to sleep took hours. That was the “pre-gratitude Lea.”
But after reading about Dr. Wood’s work, I started doing a simple exercise to change what researchers call “pre-sleep cognition”—that is, what we think about just before we fall asleep. Instead of thinking about all the things I was worried about, I swapped in a pre-sleep cognition of gratitude by thinking of the many things I’m grateful for: the hug Emily gave me that day . . . the joke Nick told that made the whole family laugh . . . a good conversation with Matt . . . the roof over my head. Instead of “I haven’t done enough,” the mental message is “Things are OK. Life’s pretty good.”
Aiming and sustaining my attention on things I’m grateful for calms my body and mind. Often I fall asleep in the middle of making my mental gratitude list! It feels lovely. But underneath it all, I’m changing my brain, building a new attentional pattern of noticing the good things. The more I train my brain to see the good, the easier it becomes to see my kids’ strengths and my own.
For years, I’ve done this exercise with Nick and Emily at bedtime, inviting them to tell me some things that made them feel thankful during the day. I want them to be able to cultivate this strength of gratitude because it makes them better as people, and it makes them feel better about themselves.
Gratitude also builds our relationships.25 Psychologists classify gratitude as a pro-social emotion: it has positive effects on you and others. It’s deeply programmed into us because there was a primal evolutionary reason for it. Fear makes us flee the predator. Anger makes us fight back. Curiosity makes us search out a new food source. Love makes us bond, mate, and procreate to perpetuate the species. Why did gratitude get built into our emotional highway?
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that gratitude created a bond between individuals who weren’t in the same family/genetic circle,26 building a stronger community by fostering cooperative behavior. Suppose you and I are hanging out on the savannah and you offer me some tasty food you’ve gathered. You didn’t have to do that, since I’m not related to you. If I get a warm glow of gratitude and am compelled to share that with you, whether through words or actions27—known as reciprocity, or returning the favor in some way—this exchange fosters positive feelings in both of us, making us likely to share resources again. The more we do that, the stronger and more effective our community becomes.
Perhaps that’s why every major discipline that has studied society and humanity has mentioned the importance of gratitude. Every major religion preaches its importance, whether toward God or one another. Sociologists say we cannot function as a society without the cooperative behavior cemented by gratitude. Roman philosopher Cicero called it “the parent” of all the virtues.
As I mentioned earlier, every night when Nick and Emily are tucked into bed, just before they go to sleep, I invite them to tell me three things that made them feel thankful that day. This is referred to as the “What Went Well” (WWW) technique. It’s a popular exercise in many families:
My nine-year-old daughter has core strengths of humility, bravery, forgiveness, fairness, gratitude, and perseverance. She often clashes with her older sisters, frequently ending up the odd one out and feeling overly sensitive about things. We talked about gratitude and I introduced her to WWW and suggested she do it every day so she could use this strength more often. We decided that she would lead WWW each day at family mealtimes. It’s been four months, and she still asks to do WWW. She’s much happier at school and her teacher is proud of how she’s stepping up to help the younger kids.
| | | | | | | | |
Jamie, age nine, has ADHD. He does WWW with me each night before bed. It exercises his strength of gratitude. It also allows me to reflect on his day with him and pull out which strengths he or others have used to help work through a situation. He asks me about my day, too. Of all three of my children, he is the one who loves this activity and asks to do it.
Each Thursday at our house we make time to talk about things we feel thankful for, from big items like completing assignments, winning awards, and getting support from others to everyday events like eating a meal together, having a laugh in the car, and enjoying good weather.
If you’re short on ideas for what to say on Thankful Thursday, the website 1000 Awesome Things is really helpful28 for reminding you of all the small things that put a smile on your face—like finding the chocolate with the particular filling you wanted in the chocolate box. I love looking at this site for a quick emotional pick-me-up.
Set out an empty jar and ask your family to put in notes about the things they feel grateful for. Once the jar is full, you can thank your family by taking them to a café for a treat and tipping out all the notes to re-read and re-live the good times. This is a great exercise in reminiscent savoring. Or try a gratitude graffiti board: a whiteboard you can place in your kitchen or family room for all family members to write or draw the things they feel grateful for. You can also do this using a corkboard and sticky notes.
Speaking of sticky notes, in my house I use them as “gratitude surprises.” When I feel thankful for something that Matt, Nick, or Emily have done or simply thankful for who they are, I leave a note for them on their pillow (the stickies don’t really stick to the pillows, but I bend them a bit so they’ll stay—and my family has learned to be on the lookout for them). In a lovely example of the value of role modeling, Emily recently left a gratitude sticky note on my pillow thanking me for helping her bake cookies, complete with a drawing of a cookie.
A longer form of the sticky note is the gratitude letter. You can encourage your children to write a thank-you letter to someone who has made a difference in her life. It might be a relative, friend, mentor, teacher, or someone else she knows. Ask her to really think about the unique thing that person did for her and to write about that specifically. Encourage your child to personally deliver the letter and read it to the other person (or read it on the phone or over Skype if the person lives far away).
Numerous studies have confirmed the power of the gratitude letter for increasing life satisfaction and positive feelings, including with teens and younger kids. Martin Seligman did the first such study; then Jeffrey Froh, PhD, repeated it with teenagers.29 You will find guidance on how to write a gratitude letter from the Greater Good Science Center, University of California at Berkeley, in the Appendix.
For kids writing a thank-you letter, it’s fine to keep it simple, specific, and heartfelt. It might start with saying thank you for whatever it was. Then with how the child felt when receiving the good thing from that person. Then something specific about why that thing was so wonderful. And ending with thank you again, with the child’s signature.
Think of a gratitude journal as an extended version of a gratitude letter but written for your eyes only, to put your attention on the things you are grateful for in your life. The Greater Good Center has tips to show you how to make the process both easier (don’t worry, it’s not about writing copious entries or taking lots of time—in fact, just the opposite) and maximally effective. And if words aren’t your first choice for expression, get creative, as this teenager did:
I did a photo gratitude journal for an art project at school. It started out just as a project, but I’ve kept it going for over a year now. It’s made me realize what an amazing life I have.
Go for a walk around your neighborhood with your kids and together point out the things you feel grateful for in the area where you live. The park where you picnic, jog, or play that is also home to songbirds, gardens, and beautiful trees; the stop for the bus that takes the family to work or school each day; the bakery that sells tasty cakes; the market with the friendly grocer; the lovely flowers in a neighbor’s garden; your local school or church—all can trigger feelings of gratitude and thankfulness. Try this with your older children as a fifteen-minute study break to get the attention-sharpening benefits of moderate aerobic exercise30 and to train their brain for gratitude. I also do this with Nick and Emily when we travel so we can remember the great places we’ve visited on our vacations.
We’ve talked about how gratitude can be actions as well as words of thanks. Talk with your children about things they can do to show appreciation for others:
Jess gets energized by acts of kindness, and it is something that we value as a family. I want the kids to know that doing kindness for others gives them a big boost in their own well-being. Jess decided she wanted to use her strengths of kindness and creativity more often. First we went to a café and bought a stranger a coffee (we sat back and watched—we used a kindness card from the Wake Up Project). Then Jess had the idea to do something more creative, also involving her brothers.
We went to the flower shop and bought flowers. Jess wrapped her flowers individually and creatively and put them in a basket. Her brothers kept the flowers in one bunch. At first they left the flowers on neighbors’ doorsteps, knocked, and ran away. But the impact wasn’t there. We then went around the neighborhood and knocked on doors, giving residents flowers and saying, “These are to brighten up your day.” The kids got such an amazing lift from people’s comments and reactions.
When we got home, I wanted them to write down the comments so they could savor them a little longer and really let them sink in. One of the best was “My mother has died and I was sitting in my chair feeling so depressed—and you brought me these flowers to make me happy.” Someone else said, “Just for nothing? For no money?!” Someone else said, “Thank you. Now I will go and do something kind for someone else!”
That night Jess told her friend (our neighbors) about the project. They got excited and wanted to do it. So the girls made cupcakes and delivered them to people in the neighborhood.
The kids still talk about this and the impact it had, and they want to do it again. I encourage everyday acts of kindness. Most weekends they walk to the bakery and I ask them to go in past Des, who’s ninety-six years old. They ask him how he is and what cake he feels like today. Then they buy it for him and bring it to him. He tells them the same stories every time about his wife and the war, but they know it lifts his day.
Savoring and gratitude are both forms of directed attention. But there’s a second type of attention that I described early in this chapter. In contrast to the on-task focus of directed attention, free-form attention is what the brain defaults to when it’s off-task, allowed to move in any direction it wants. It happens when the brain is in what scientists call the resting state. In the 1990s, neuropsychologists began to delve into free-form attention and found that it has many benefits. If you want to shift instantly into free-form attention, all you have to do is goof off.
Now I’m not talking about just any kind of goofing off. There’s a constructive form of goofing off that is restorative to the brain and therefore important for our purposes of strength-based parenting. Let’s call it “good goofing off.”
Good goofing off has three characteristics:
This may sound complicated, but in fact good goofing off is the easiest, most fun state to slip into. We love going there. It happens when we’re reading, doing artwork or crafts, cooking a recipe we know well, shooting baskets or pursuing other noncompetitive athletics, doing puzzles, tinkering enjoyably with something or building something, doing free-association writing, or simply daydreaming.
It’s not making a recipe you’ve never made before for a houseful of dinner guests coming that night, zoning out in front of the TV or on the Internet, doing chores (unless you enjoy them), playing competitive sports or pursuing intense athletic training, or anything else that doesn’t let your mind wander somewhere above the task while you’re ably performing it. Sometimes activities begin by requiring focused attention and then become good goof-off activities as we get proficient at them.
As I said at the start of this chapter, we toggle between directed attention and free-form attention all day long. In fact, good goofing off acts as a bridge between directed attention, where we’re laser focused on something specific, and mindfulness, where we actively notice the thoughts that arise during free-form attention—something we’ll discuss in the next chapter.
Research now shows that when we’re in this so-called resting state, our brain is still highly active.31 Functional magnetic resonance imaging depicting the brain in a resting state reveals multiple brain regions lighting up, indicating activity. That’s why I prefer to think of free-form attention not as a resting state, but as “deliberate rest.” Although it might seem counterintuitive, deliberate rest plays an important role in building our powers of attention.
For one thing, deliberate rest refreshes and restores our capacity for directed attention, so when we shift back into directed attention, we can pay closer attention to whatever is happening. Downtime in the form of exercise may even help us aim our attention faster. It turns out there’s a tiny lag time—about three hundred milliseconds—between when an event happens (your e-mail pings, your cat meows, or your child calls to you) and when you register that event in your brain, as seen by an electrical change in the brain. This measurement is called Event Related Potential (ERP). Essentially, it’s our brain updating itself in response to reality. We’re always a tiny bit behind. Scientists have found that ERP improves immediately after people engage in moderate aerobic exercise.32 Perhaps evolution rewarded those whose brains got sharper at the same time that their bodies got fitter. What I do know is that when a teenager has three hours of homework but can only really sustain attention for about twenty minutes at a time, he’s going to need breaks to help him attend to his work. Spending fifteen minutes every hour or so doing some physical activity he enjoys doesn’t look like a time waster to me.
For another, our brain uses deliberate rest to consolidate learning and free up resources for new learning (including new strength development). Has your computer ever slowed down or crashed because you’re running too many applications at once? The brain gets overloaded, too. So much information gets taken in through directed attention that it can result in “cerebral congestion”33 as input competes for our neural connections. Our brains need downtime to process and sort through the information.
Researchers did an interesting study in which they tested electrical patterns in rats’ brains while the rats explored a maze. Then they gave the rats some downtime and continued the electrical testing on their brains. The researchers observed that even while the rats were resting, the electrical patterns that were zipping around their brains were the same as while they were running the maze. The researchers concluded that what they were seeing was memory consolidation34 (yep, goofing off even has benefits for rats).
Stepping up from rats in mazes, in another study on downtime processing, a group of university students in Amsterdam was given data on the size, mileage, maneuverability, and other features of a series of cars. Each student’s task was to select the best car, based on analysis of this data. Half were given four minutes to review the specifications and make a decision in a focused way. The other half were given a little anagram puzzle to do for four minutes instead. It turned out that the students who were, in a sense, distracted from analysis of the specifications by doing the puzzle were more likely to choose the best car, compared to the students who had actively focused on the data. Their brains processed the information more effectively when they were goofing off. Once again, it seems there’s something to be said for stepping away from the problem.35
We’ve all had the experience of having a sudden insight into a problem after we’ve literally gotten away from it for a while—in the shower, during a walk, after a workout, or while working on a hobby. Somehow, a solution filters up from our brain without our conscious effort. Downtime gives us the mental space that allows the brain to dive into itself and uncover what it knows.
Finally, our ability to toggle between directed attention and free-form attention improves with practice, making us maximally effective. We need to be able to snap to attention when necessary and then downshift to deliberate rest mode whenever we can, to maximize mental alertness, process what we’ve learned, and bring forward that knowledge to apply to the next attentive time.
These ideas are supported in the findings from a series of studies performed by Columbia University researchers, who partnered with schools to trial an unstructured play-based curriculum that involved activities such as computer games that progressively set tasks to build the child’s working memory, noncomputerized games, aerobics, martial arts, yoga, and mindfulness for students ranging from four to thirteen years.36 The researchers wanted to see what would happen if schools gave students a break from intense learning by injecting a play-based (i.e., downtime) curriculum. In a classic case of “less is more,” the students showed significant improvements in attentional skills and cognitive functioning after the play curriculum, compared to having a full day of traditional academic classes. Attention is built through rest and play.37
For all of these reasons, when parents seek my advice about what activities their child should be doing, they’re often surprised when I pare down their proposed list and prescribe free time during the week for good goofing off.38 It’s not that kids aren’t paying attention during this time, it’s that their attention has shifted within. Important things are going on in there. We know that even adults can only pay attention for about twenty minutes at a time before getting less effective. We know that when your daughter has finished her math homework and is taking time between assignments to make a smoothie or read a chapter in a book, or when your son comes home after school and blows off steam by shooting baskets in the backyard for an hour before starting his homework, their brains are still processing information very effectively. They’re sorting through what they’ve taken in, attaching emotional meaning to it, cementing it in memory, integrating it into their core selves. It’s all part of building their identity, about learning who they are apart from what they do.39
Being a smart strength-based parent means holding firm against the pressure to constantly schedule your kids so they look busy on the outside. Rest assured (pun intended) they’re always busy, even when they don’t look it. Let your child press the pause button so she can reboot her attentional resources and come back strong to continue building her strengths. Fearlessly feature downtime in your kids’ schedules. Encourage them to see good goofing off as an important part of becoming who they are:
My daughter Jasmine’s core strength is appreciation of beauty and excellence. She now sees that taking the time to enjoy what she sees around her—and taking photos of sunsets, flowers, and animals—isn’t “weird” or wasting time. She really enjoys doing this and has done a lot more photography in the last year, including enrolling in an elective subject at school.
What should kids do during good goofing off? Anything that allows them to have softly focused inward attention. The key is that it’s not about performance; they should feel relaxed while doing it. And just in case they ask: No, good goofing off is not texting or talking on the phone, which pulls us into the external world (one study found reduced empathic responses after just asking study participants—teens and young adults—to describe and draw an image of their cell phone!).40