Brain Rules for Baby (19 page)

How can you get that kind of effort from your child? Surprisingly, it’s how you
praise
him. What you praise defines what your child perceives success to be. Here is where parents make a common mistake—one that often creates the saddest sight a teacher can behold: a bright child who hates learning. Like Ethan, the wiry son of a highly educated professor in Seattle.

Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic.

Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement
that required no effort
was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed.

 

Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen:

First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort.

Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.)

Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure.

 

What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

More than 30 years of study show that children raised in growth-mindset homes consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievement. They do better in adult life, too. That’s not surprising. Children with a growth mindset tend to have a refreshing attitude toward failure. They do not ruminate over their mistakes. They simply perceive errors as problems to be solved, then go to work.
In the lab as well as in school, they spend much more time banging away at harder tasks than fixed-mindset students. They solve those problems more often, too. Kids regularly praised for effort successfully complete 50 percent to 60 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence. Carol Dweck, a noted researcher in the field, would check in on students taking her tests. Comments like “I should slow down and try to figure this out” were common, as was the delightful “I love a challenge.” Because they believe mistakes occur from of lack of effort, not from a lack of ability, the kids realize mistakes can be remedied simply by applying more cognitive elbow grease.

If you’ve already gone down the path of fixed-mindset praise, is it too late to switch? That specific question needs more study, but research has shown that even limited exposure to growth-mindset praise has positive effects.

Praise isn’t the only factor, of course. We’re starting to see that genes may play a role in effort, too. A group of researchers in London studied the self-perceived abilities (termed SPA) of nearly 4,000 twins. SPA measures a child’s perceived ability to handle tough academic challenges. The twins shared home environment, where growth-mindset behaviors would presumably be a factor, accounted for only 2 percent of the variance in SPA. The researchers concluded that there was a better-than-even chance that an SPA gene could be isolated. These observations require a great deal more research. If such a gene were characterized, it wouldn’t let parents off the hook. It would simply change the strategies needed to raise certain kids. Some wouldn’t need much instruction; others would need constant supervision, something we already know.

Maybe effort simply allows children to better mobilize whatever
intelligence they were born with. Either way, you want effort as the fourth nutrient in your fertilizer.

And then are things you want to limit.

I had just finished a lecture to a group of educators and parents on visual processing and the high priority the brain gives it. As I paused for questions, a middle-aged mom blurted out, “So is TV good for the brain, then? There was some grumbling in the room. An older gentleman joined in. “And what about all those newfangled video games? (Yes, he said “newfangled.”) And that
Internet?
” A young man stood up, a bit defensive: “There’s nothing wrong with gaming. And there is nothing wrong with the Internet. This exchange got increasingly heated, older folks on one side, younger on the other. Eventually, someone said loudly, “Let’s ask the brain scientist.” Turning to me, he said, “What do
you
think?”

“I like to quote my old 19th-century friend J. Watson, I began, hesitant to enter the fray. It’s a quote I always pull out when controversies erupt. “He was a member of Congress, and he was something of a diplomat. Watson was once asked how he was going to vote on some controversial piece of legislation. His response was clever: ‘I have friends on both sides of the issue, and I like to stand with my friends’”. Everybody laughed, and that seemed to defuse the tension in the room. It also ducked the question.

It’s not a question that should be ignored, however. From smart TVs to even smarter cell phones, the digital age has affected virtually every student on the planet, and screen time is now a regular part of children’s developmental experience. Should parents be concerned about TV? Video games? The Internet? I will tell you flatly: Except for some of the television work we’ll discuss in a moment, I have never seen messier research literature in my life, particularly regarding brains, behaviors, and video games. Even a cursory review of the work
that’s out there reveals shoddy designs, biased agendas, lack of controls, non-randomized cohorts, too-few sample sizes, too few experiments—and lots of loud, even angry, opinions. Promising studies are in the pipeline regarding video games and the Internet, but, as is typical for any new research effort, early findings show mixed results. Which means there’s enough to make everyone, and no one, happy.

The main thing to consider when you think of exposing your kids to Screen World is the content of what your child will be consuming, for two reasons.

The first is that kids are really good at imitation. (Remember the light box and the baby touching her forehead to it?) This ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation. Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure. By the time she is almost a year and a half, she can imitate an event
four months
after a single exposure. The skill never leaves children, something the advertising industry has known for decades. The implications are powerful. If toddlers can embed into memory a complex series of events after one exposure, imagine what they can consume in hours spent online and watching TV. (Not to mention what children are consuming as they view their parents behaviors 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Deferred imitation helps explain why we are still so prone to imitating our parent’s behaviors years after we leave the nest, as I was doing with my wife and the car keys.)

With children, deferred imitation can reveal itself in unexpected ways, as this tale from a young mother reveals.

This story reveals a lot about how children acquire information. The little girl had apprehended the general idea of “pooping places” and had created an expectation, and a plan, for her own resulting behavior. Gross topic. Delightful stuff.

The second reason content is so important is that our expectations and assumptions profoundly influence our perception of reality. This is because of the brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing—then fool you into thinking this hybrid is the actual reality. It may disturb you to know this, but your perception of reality is not like a camcorder recording verbatim information to some cellular hard drive. Your perception of reality is a handshake agreement between what your senses bring to your brain and what your brain thinks ought to be there.
And what you expect to be out there is directly tied to what you allowed into your brain in the first place
.

Experiences morph into expectations, which can, in turn, influence your behavior. Yale psychologist John Bargh did an experiment illustrating this exquisite sensitivity. He told a bunch of healthy undergraduates that he was testing their language abilities. He presented them with a list of words and asked them to create a coherent sentence from it. You can try this right now. Make a sentence out of the following scramble:

Easy to do? You bet. “Bitterly, the lonely old man with the wrinkled face sat down” is one quick suggestion. But this was no linguistics test. Note how many words in the scramble are related to old age. Bargh was not interested in his subject’s creative use of grammar. He
was interested in how long it took the students to leave the lab and walk down the hall after they were exposed to the words.

What he found was extraordinary. Those students who had been exposed to an “elderly mix of words took almost 40 percent longer to walk down the hall than those who had been exposed to “random” words. Some students even stooped and shuffled as they left, as if they were 50 years older than they actually were. To cite Bargh’s clinical observation, these words “activated the elderly stereotype in memory, and participants acted in ways consistent with that activated stereotype.”

Bargh’s result is just one in a long line of data demonstrating what a powerful force immediate, external influences can exert over internal behavior. What you allow into your child’s brain influences his expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he is capable of perceiving but his very behavior. This is true whether you are looking at infants only a month old or undergrads 20 years later.

How do deferred imitation and expectations manifest themselves in the digital world? Television has the best research behind it.

The issue of kids exposure to TV doesn’t throw off as many sparks as it used to. There is general agreement that a child’s exposure to television of any type should be limited. There is also general agreement that we are completely ignoring this advice.

I remember as a kid waiting every Sunday night for Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color
to come on, and loving it. I also remember my parents turning off the television when it was over. We don’t do that anymore. Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes
per day
in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the
wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 77 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of “screen time” with TVs and computers per day. I mentioned earlier that the average American is exposed to about 100,000 words per day outside of work. Fully 45 percent of those words come from television.

The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

 

For decades we have known of the connection between hostile peer interactions and the amount of kids exposure to television. The linkage used to be controversial (maybe aggressive people watch more TV than others?), but we now see that it’s an issue of our deferred-imitation abilities coupled with a loss of impulse control. One personal example:

When I was in kindergarten, my best friend and I were watching
The Three Stooges,
a 1950s TV show. The program involved lots of physical comedy, including people sticking their fingers in other people’s eyes. When the show was over, my friend fashioned his little fingers into a “V,” then quickly poked me in both eyes. I couldn’t see anything for the next hour and was soon whisked to the emergency room. Diagnosis: scratched corneas and a torn eye muscle.