As I have been reading Nurture Shock, something jumped out at me.
One of my daughters, age seven, is a reading fiend. She has read over sixty books since the school year started and those are just the ones I’ve monitored and counted. Without any prompting, she sits down and writes stories and diary entries and poems in her multiple notebooks. We have noticed this and made comment of it, even calling her ‘Our Little Writer.’ But, once we started doing this, she started bucking, insisting, “I am NOT going to be a writer!”
Fine, we say, not understanding what’s going on in her little story-filled head.
After reading the research on praise, I wonder if, by ‘labeling’ her (albeit in a positive way), we are somehow pressuring her, somehow making her feel this is her only option, or somehow taking away from her the ownership of her work or the joy of her internal rewards for reading and writing.
Subsequently, I am backing off on even mentioning her reading/writing and seeing what will happen. I’ll keep you posted.
Question: Has your child lost an interest in something that you have been praising them for? Is it possible they might be feeling pressured and lost the joy somewhere along the way? What can you do about it?
Can one measly hour of sleep really be that important?
Absolutely, say Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.
Sixty percent of high schoolers say they experience extreme daytime sleepiness.
Fifty percent of adolescents sleep less than seven hours per night.
Elementary children are averaging one hour less sleep per night than they did thirty years ago.
Why is this? Too many activities. Too much homework. Television. Cell phones in kids’ rooms. Parents who feel guilty for being gone all day and keep the kids up later in order to spend time with them.
But what’s the big deal about one lost hour?
A bunch. According to Nurture Shock, “Because children’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.”
An impact that includes moodiness, depression, and obesity.
Dr. Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University gave some fourth graders directions to go to bed thirty minutes earlier and some directions to go to bed thirty minutes later. He was worried that depriving children of one measly hour of sleep might not have any effect at all. He needn’t have worried.
The performance gap that lost hour caused was huge. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” said Sadeh. In other words, a tired fourth grader performs like a second grader.
In fact, every study done on this topic shows a correlation between sleep and grades, especially in high school: Teens who averaged A’s slept 15 minutes more than those who received B’s. B students 15 more minutes than C’s, proving that every fifteen minutes counts.
What exactly happens when a child is tired?
1. Neuron plasticity is lost. Kids cannot encode new memory.
2. With sleep loss, the body cannot extract glucose from the blood. The prefontal cortex suffers, and with it, a child’s ability to complete a goal, or contemplate the consequences of actions. They become impulsive, stuck on wrong answers, and lose the ability to come up with creative alternatives to those wrong answers.
3. Without enough sleep, children cannot embed memorized material like vocabulary words, multiplication tables, and historical dates.
4. Sleep deprived children become more negative: Negative stimuli gets processed in one part of the brain, positive in another. Sleep deprivation hits the area with positive stimuli the most, resulting in a tired child being able to recall the negative memories better than the good ones.
Teens: A Special Case
During puberty, a teen’s biological clock shifts. Melatonin keeps flowing for 90 minutes past the point when it stops for children and adults. That’s what makes teens want to stay up later. At dawn, when teens need to get up for school, melatonin is still being released all the way through their first period in school. (Teens are responsible for half of the 100,000 sleep related crashes each year). Some high schools have adjusted start times to accommodate these findings and have had startling results: SAT scores in tested areas rose from 683/605 to 739/761 in one year. That’s a 56 point boost in math and a 156 boost in verbal scores. Teens with more sleep report more motivation and less depression. Typical ‘teen’ traits like being negative, withdrawn, disengaged, bored to tears, or moody are also symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. “Might our culture-wise perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”
Additionally, a study in KY showed that later start times resulted in a 25% decrease in car accidents among teens. But, despite the growing evidence, school districts are wary of change: Moving start times later would mean doubling bus drivers and the bus fleet.
Sleep and Obesity:
Sleep loss increases ghrelin, our hunger signal, while depressing leptin, our appetite suppressant. It increases our stress hormone cortisol, which in turn stimulates our bodies to make us fat. Your child’s growth hormone, necessary for the breakdown of fat, is disrupted. Studies show tired children are fatter than children who sleep more. In fact, kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have a 300% higher rate of obesity than children who get ten hours. In one Houston study, obesity in middle-schoolers and teens increased 80% for every hour of lost sleep.
Convinced yet?
I asked a friend of mine, a manager at a local sleep center, what his recommendations are:
1. Give kids a consistent, seven-day a week bedtime.
2. If possible (as in the case of homeschooling), allow your teens to stay up later and sleep in until they wake up naturally. Again, set a bedtime, even if it is 11:30.
3. If your child wakes up, seems confused, and appears to still be ‘asleep,’ do not touch or talk to the child. Hand him a blankie of some kind and he will go back to sleep.
4. Remove clocks and light sources from bedrooms. Turn off electronics, especially those with lights on them.
On a personal note, I’ve noticed that this past year, with my husband out of work, our family has slept more than ever before and we’ve hardly been sick at all. If the above reasons don’t convince you, perhaps the prospect of having healthier kids will!
Question: What practical steps can you put in place to help your children get that magical extra hour of sleep each night?
Nurture Shock’s chapter on praise offers perhaps the most boat-rocking information of all:
The Self-Esteem Myth
Perhaps the biggest finding Bronson and Merryman illuminate is the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister. Results of self-esteem studies from 1970 to 2000 wildly vascillated or were inconclusive, prompting the Association of Psychological Studies to ask Dr. Baumeister to review the literature involved. He did so and concluded that self-esteem research was, according to Bronson, ‘polluted with flawed science.’ He concluded that high self-esteem didn’t lead to improved grades, or career achievement Neither did it reduce alcohol use or violence. Baumeister calls his findings, “the biggest disappointment of my career” and has moved over to Dweck’s side, recently publishing an article showing that for college students struggling in a class, ‘esteem-building praise cause[d] their grades to sink further.” Further, he concludes that parental focus on their child’s self-esteem is related to their own pride in their child’s accomplishments, saying that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”
Question: Have you bought into the self-esteem myth? How can this new research impact your parenting?
Next time: How lost sleep leads to higher obesity, harms emotional well-being, and lowers IQ points. Parents of grouchy kids tune in:)
…that is the question. Calvin College’s Marjorie Gunnoe’s new study found what parents who spank have known all along: Teenagers who were spanked as children are happier than those who weren’t.
Read a few thoughts on the spanking debate at my WORLD blog here.
This week I’m summarizing the book, Nurture Shock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Yesterday’s post was about how praising our children the wrong way can backfire, actually making our children less confidant. Today, fifteen ways to properly encourage children, Nurture Shock style.
Fifteen Ways to Encourage Children
1. Praise the effort rather than the intelligence.
2. Help kids understand that intelligence can be developed. Research shows that students who believe this do better in study habits and grades. Math scores improved with a test group who were given a short lesson on how the brain is a muscle and can grow smarter with exercise.
3. Praise for something specific.
4. Praise must be sincere.
5. Children age 12 and up feel that praise means you aren’t doing well, but are actually lacking in ability, thus the need for more encouragement. Ironically, teens feel a teacher’s criticism “conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.”
6. Praise a skill or talent, and realize that if you have praised your child insincerely in the past, they will suspect even genuine praise.
7. “Excessive praise also distorts children’s motivation; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of intrinsic enjoyment.” Praised students will drop a class rather than receive an average grade and are more dependent on teacher clues of their progress.
8. High praise by parents leads to students who are burdened by the pressure this causes to the point a child can’t concentrate on much besides the grade they are going to receive.
9. Overly praised kids become highly competitive and often tear each other down. “Image maintenance becomes their primary concern.”
10. Cheating may become the only perceived solution when the student is faced with the option of increasing effort (which is felt to be a sign of failure), and failing. They need tools for dealing with failure. One group of students given a hard test meant to induce failure were given five minutes with their mothers (who had been told their child was performing below average) before a second test was taken. These interactions were recorded by hidden cameras. American mothers stayed positive and upbeat, while Chinese mothers kindly, but firmly admonished their children to look over their test or to concentrate better. On the second test, Chinese kids scored 33% better, while the American children had only half that gain.
11. Children need to learn to try, try again. Learning to regularly rebound from failure is something our children need to learn.
12. Intermittent reinforcement is a great motivator. A reward at every success UNmotivates children and undermines their persistence.
13. Don’t be a ‘praise junkie.’ By doing so, you set up your children’s brains for a chemical need for praise.
14. Recognize that overpraising your children can be one way to deal with parenting guilt.
15. “Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem–it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.”
Question: Are you a praise junkie? How can you tweak your parenting style to incorporate the Bronson/Merryman research?
As promised, this week I want to give you some sound bytes for a book called Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.
Bronson and Merryman were researching the subject of adult motivation when they stumbled across some information that took them by surprise. This information became the subject of a Feb., 2007 New York Magazine article.
What was it they discovered that was so profound? That telling kids they were smart was backfiring.
Case in point: Thomas, a fifth-grade student in New York City. Precocious, with an intellect statistically confirmed, Thomas was praised by everyone. But, rather than making him more confidant, this praise began to backfire. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father said, “Some things canme very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’”
Praising children is a good thing, right? “Early and often,” said one mother. Kids get notes of encouragement in their lunchboxes and star charts on the frig. According to Bronson and Merryman, the assumption is that if a child thinks he is smart, he will approach new academic challenges with confidence. Growing research, on the contrary, shows that calling children ’smart’ may cause underperformance.
One group tested 400 fifth graders, dividing them into two groups, one praised for their intelligence and one praised for their effort. A second test was given and the children given the option between a harder test which would teach them a lot and an easier test, like the first one. 90% of the children praised for their effort chose the harder test. The majority of the children praised for intelligence chose the easier one. Researcher Dr. Carol Dweck explains the reason: “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” The children who picked the easier test were doing just this, choosing to look smart rather than risk looking embarrassed.
Tomorrow: Fifteen Ways to Encourage Children, Nurture Shock style
Want to know what the latest research is on praising your children, sibling rivalry, kids and sleep? This week I’m going to be featuring book bytes from the book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman focusing on these topics. Stay tuned…
Writers, artists, and other professional procrastinators beware! Reading this post may ruin all your perfectly construed, finely honed excuses for staring at blank pages, empty canvasses, and nearby walls:
The Problem
SARK introduced me to this embarrassingly simple concept, which I will illustrate using a purely hypothetical example. Take, for instance, a writer who has huge visions of literary greatness, but cannot seem to find the strength to boot up her computer. This (again, purely hypothetical) writer has a great post/article/story/novel idea, yet summoning the courage to find notebook and pen is like summoning the courage to tell the five-year-old it’s time to put the See’s chocolates away and eat his broccoli.
What’s the Big Deal?
Good question, for those of you who aren’t plagued with procrastination (perfectionism’s comfy bed partner), but the rest of you know exactly what the Big Deal is. It is getting started. Getting started (on your day, your diet, your run, your blog post, your new reading regime) is the hardest part. Think of a huge boulder at the top of a hill. It’s been sitting there since Tess of the Durberville’s day, sunk halfway into the gooey muck, and is covered with a blanket of moss. Getting that thing budged is 99% of the battle. Incorporate a wedge, a lever, whatever it takes to start the boulder rolling. From there, we get the over-used phrase, “It’s downhill all the way,” otherwise known as the final 1% of the effort.
How Do I Start?
Back to our stuck writer. She throws away her old list (Buy laptop. Write best-seller.) She writes a new list.
1. Take out three pens and see if they work. Place on desk.
2. Find red notebook. Place on desk.
3. Read through that pile of articles and gather ideas.
4. Make huge mess writing ideas on large white paper with colored pens.
5. Take a nap.
6. Decide on blog post idea. Make a cup of tea.
7. Set out clothes for tomorrow.
8. Open WordPress dashboard and open a new post draft. Title it, leave it open, and go to bed.
9. The next morning, open computer and write blog post. That’s what I did:)
The Result
SARK says that micromovements work because they establish a ‘habit of completion.’ Setting out the pens may seem laughable compared to the tasks that need to be done, but give it a try. If you meet resistance, try breaking tasks down even further, until resistance is almost zero.
How do you see micromovements moving you from procrastination to productivity? I’m curious to hear your stories.
Here are a couple of tips I found helpful and posted over at WORLD.
I’m married to a Real Man. You know the kind: clean cut, stands up straight, takes off his hat indoors. And I hope I am raising Real Men, three of them.
We teach them to look people in the eye, shake hands firmly, and do what they say they are going to do. We make them work when it’s hot out, when it’s cold out, when it’s early in the morning, and when they don’t want to. We make them do inside (read, girl’s) work as well as the outside work. We make them do jobs that aren’t theirs to teach them that responsibility isn’t about doing their half of the yard and not an inch more. Responsibility means the whole thing gets done and to heck with the splitting of hairs over who does what.
They resist at times, which is to be expected. Life is about resistance. I resist every time I have to get up early, work out, put down the cake, or tell the baby a story when I’m worn to a nub. Given to my own devices I would atrophy so badly that within a month I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. It’s about what my mother always says, ‘going against the grain.’
The other day we went to a fast food restaurant and one of my boys held the door for a couple on their way out. We thought nothing of it. Holding the door is something we’ve expected of them since they were about three. But this lady went on and on, commending them for their ‘chivalrous’ act. Have we come to a point where the mere opening of a door for a lady is so rare as to warrant such a response?
More to come on the subject of boys becoming men. I’m all fired up now.
