Chapter 1: The Inverse Power of Praise
Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
Carol Dweck says, "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control...Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."
Research is concluding that having high self-esteem doesn't improve grades or career achievement. In other words, praise, self-esteem, and performance don't rise and fall together. It is the kind of praise given that matters.
Children scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Excessive praise can cause children to interpret it as meritless. They may also start doing things merely to hear the praise and lose sight of intrinsic enjoyment. They may come to see failure is something to avoid at all costs and "seriously consider cheating."
People with persistence can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. One who grows up getting too frequent praise and rewards will not have persistence because they quit when the praise or reward disappears.
The brain is a muscle. Therefore, when it deals with something hard, it gets bigger. This is what children (and adults!) need to understand.
Chapter 2: The Last Hour
Research is showing not merely that sleep matters--but how much it matters not just to academic performance and emotional stability, but to phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of ADHD.
Sadeh's found from his research, "A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development."
Another researcher, Dr. Matthew Walker, explains that during sleep, the brain shifts what was learned during the day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night. During sleep, the gene that is essential for synaptic plasticity, is activated. This results in new inferences, associations, and insights the next day.
Research is concluding that there is no statistical correlation between obesity and media us. If the television is turned off, children usually choose other sedentary behavior. Studies point to that on average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more. This is even truer for children than for adults.
Chapter 3: Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race
Some important research findings:
- Children aren't color-blind, even those who attend diverse schools.
- Parents who explicitly talk about race with their children as early as age 3, the children have better attitudes about differences.
- Children are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism; they're going to form these preferences on their own. The attribute they rely on to categorize is the one which is most clearly visible. Once a child identifies someone as most closely resembling himself, the child likes that person the most.
- Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them. Children can self-segregate within the school. Diverse schools don't necessarily lead to more cross-race friendships. Often it is the opposite. In other words, sending a child to a diverse school is no guarantee that he or she will have better racial attitudes than children in homogeneous schools. The more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school. More diversity translates into more division between students.
- To be effective, conversations have to be explicit, in unmistakable terms that children understand.
- Minority children who hear messages of ethnic pride are more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability.
- The more a culture emphasizes individualism (like in the U.S.), the more children form and join distinctive subgroups (cliques) to meet the need to belong.
- Light-skinned blacks and Anglo-appearing Hispanics feel their status within the minority group to be more precarious. Therefore, they act more in keeping with their image of the minority identity, even if it is a negative stereotype.
- If minority children hear preparation-for-bias warnings too often, they are less likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on others (such as teachers) who they perceive as biased against them.
People simply cannot tell when kids are lying. Kids learn to lie much earlier than we presumed., and they grow into lying. In studies where children are observed in their homes, four year olds lie once every two hours, while a six year old will be about once every hour. Few kids are an exception.
The qualifying role of intent seems to be the most difficult variable for children to grasp. Any false statement--regardless of intent or belief--is a lie.
Lying is an advanced skill. It demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills. Lying usually starts out to avoid punishment so children, at first, lie indiscriminately whenever punishment might be a possibility. Children become hooked to lying by about age 7 if it has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations.
For children, the problem with lying is that you get punished. Young children believe profanity (swearing) is lying because you get punished for it. This association of lying and getting punished can distract the child from learning how his lies impact others.
Young children lie to make the adult happy. They feel that good news--not the truth--is what will please the adult.
Children learn from adults that honesty can create conflict. Encouraged by so many white lies, children learn to become comfortable with being disingenuous.
Adults need to be careful how they handle tattling. While it may appear that the tattling is incessant, it may very well be that the child has dealt with the issue numerous time by himself and just reached a saturation point. Children soon learn the power of "Don't Tell" and silence one another with it.
Chapter 5: The Search of Intelligent Life in Kindergarten
A number of scholars have warned of classifying young children on the basis of a single early test result. This admonition came most strongly from those actually writing the tests.
In a meta-analysis of some studies, scholars concluded that the correlation between emotional intelligence and academic achievement was only 10 percent.
IQ scores show some variability in the early years. From age 3 to age 10, two-thirds of children's IQ scores will improve, or drop, more than 15 points. This is especially true among bright kids--their intelligence is more variable than among slower children.
Chapter 6: The Sibling Effect
One of the best predictors of how well two siblings get along is predetermined before the birth of the younger child. It has nothing to do with parents. The predictive factor is the quality of the older child's relationship with his best friend. Kids who can play in a reciprocal, mutual style with their best friend are the ones who have a good rapport with their young siblings, years. later. In other words, older friends train on then friends and apply it to their siblings rather than the other way around.
The skills needed to get along with one's best friend is a stronger predictor of a strong sibling relationship than age spacing or gender.
Chapter 7: The Science of Teen Rebellion
The most common reason teens lie is to protect their relationship with their parents--they don't want to disappoint them.
Kids who go wild and get into the most trouble have parents who don't set rules or standards.
It's essential for teens to have some things that "none of your business" in order to help them develop autonomy.
As far as rules, parents need to set a few rules over which they have some influence, explain why these rules are necessary, and then be consistent in enforcing them. Effective parents also find ways to be flexible with rules if the child presents a good argument as to why a rule needs to be changed.
The teen brain can think abstractly, but not feel abstractly--at least, until it has had more experience to draw upon. Therefore, saying to a teen, "Why did you do it?
Didn't you know it was a bad idea?" doesn't mean much because feeling is what would make them realize it would be a bad idea.
Chapter 8: Can Self-Control Be Taught?
Good intentions must not be mistaken for good ideas. Examples are the D.A.R.E. drug prevention program and many dropout prevention programs. Interventions inspire few people to change their behavior. Interventions for children are even more of a challenge since developmentally, children are a moving target.
The program Tools of the Mind [http://www.toolsofthemind.org/] suggests that during playtime, children learn basic developmental building blocks necessary for academic success. Through this program children learn how to concentrate.
Chapter 9: Plays Well With Others
The more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were.
Not surprising, research finds that the more a child is spanked, the more aggressive she becomes. Yet, this doesn't hold true for black children. Research has discovered that when spanking is an accepted practice, it becomes "the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something wrong." Conversely, in the white community, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. In other words, children respond to the intent of the parent that the physical discipline itself.
According to the science of peer relations, there's one big problem with lumping all childhood aggression under the rubric of bullying. It's that most of the meanness, cruelty, and torment that goes on at schools isn't inflicted by those we commonly think of as bullies, or "bad" kids. Instead most of it is meted out by children who are popular, well-liked, and admired. The "zero tolerance" is not the answer to address bullying. Kids make mistakes because they are still young--neurological immaturity. It does not do any good to label nonaggressive kids as "good" kids as they might lack the savvy and confidence to assert themselves as often.
Kids who are "bistrategic controllers" meaning that they achieve the right balance and the right timing for kindness and cruelty are the most popular and most well-liked kids. Children who watched a lot of educational television are far more relationally aggressive, but they are also most prosocial with classmates as well.
While overwhelming kids' schedules with activities, predominantly segregated by age, they are being fed the need for peer status and social ranking...and not eliminating peer rejection and aggression.
Chapter 10: Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn't
Infants need a live human speaker to learn language. This is why language learning can't be left to DVDs.
New research is indicating the central role of the parent is not to push massive amounts of language into the baby's ears; rather the central role of the parent is to notice what's coming from the baby, and respond accordingly. In other words, notice how the baby is contributing to the conversation! How a parent responds to a child's vocalizations--right in the moment--seems to be the most powerful mechanist pulling a child from babble to fluent speech.
Although Hart and Risley's research emphasized the difference in vocabulary used in different socioeconomic homes, it also supports these findings. They found that there was a real gap in how parents responded to their children's actions and speech.
Another critical finding--grammar teaches vocabulary, not the other way around.
Conclusion:
We need to drop two assumptions: 1) all things work in children in the same way they work in adults--Fallacy of Similar Effect and 2) positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative behavior in children--Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy. Because of this kids can be walking contradictions. Yet, by studying these contradictions closely, we can find deeper understanding about kids.
