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Happy Holidays!
- December 24, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski
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Categories: Family Focus
How to Re-Wire your Burned-Out Brain
- October 16, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
So it is only October and the buzz and excitement of starting a new school year has already fizzled. Life is a little boring, the holidays seem too far away, you are more tired than usual, and you are having a little trouble getting enthusiastic about your job or your children’s upcoming book reports and science projects, or whatever. What’s going on? Of course you know, burn-out.
What exactly is burn-out? Does it come from working too hard, not being appreciated? Perhaps, but from the standpoint of the brain, burn-out occurs when motivation declines. The human brain is designed to keep motivation levels high for activities we need to survive, those that are very rewarding, and those that involve novelty. Hence we are usually very motivated to escape a dangerous situation, eat chocolate cake and watch a new movie we just purchased. We tend to associate reward and novelty with play and leisure – video games, a golf or tennis match, watching a new TV show or a sports event, playing a new board game, or visiting a new vacation spot – even though we might work very hard at those activities. Rarely do you hear avid golfers complain about golf burnout. But you also rarely hear CEOs talk about being burned out. They may retire to relieve the stress of their job or spend more time with their family, but rarely do they complain about their workload or burnout. Why not? Because the excitement of a new round of golf and the reward that might come from winning or achieving a greater profit margin motivates the golfer and the CEO. However, when your daily life becomes repetitive, unexciting or non-rewarding, motivation decreases. Burn-out is really the symptom of a brain that has lost its motivation. And motivation declines when two important aspects of life are missing – earned reward and novelty.
So, what can you do about burn-out? The answer actually comes from neuroscience research. Whether your burn-out is associated with a job in or out of the home, the solution is not to work less and play more (because poverty is not very rewarding). Rather, the solution is to turn work into play. And the way to do that is to imbue your day with novelty and challenges where there is an expectation of reward.
Reward thyself: If your work is not very rewarding or your boss is not good at showing appreciation, one important key to avoiding burnout is to build in self rewards for a job well done. Each morning, next to your to-do list, make a “reward when completed list”.
- After I work out I will…buy myself a little treat (a new pen, some fun post-it notes or allow myself a small ice cream cone)
- After I finish my major work project I will…do something nice for myself (set aside time to watch the football game I recorded last week but never had a chance to watch, take a long hot shower with a special soap or set aside an evening with a few close friends)
- After the house is cleaned I will…do something that makes me feel better (take a short walk to the park, check out some of the new houses for sale in my neighborhood, call a high school friend I haven’t talked to for months)
Keep it new: If a job largely involves repetitive routines, try to come up with something new to add.
- Long boring commute – add something different each week
- Try a slightly new route
- Add a new song or pod-cast to your iPod to listen to
- Rent audio books from the library
- Hours at a computer – add something new to look forward to
- Listen to music in the background using headphones
- Make a contest or start a pool with workmates over your most boring tasks. Guessing the number of junk mail messages each of you has to delete each week – the losers take the winner out to lunch on Friday
- Start a company softball or volleyball team, a duplicate bridge competition, a bowling league, a game of cards at lunch
- Change it up – change your routine
- If you always eat lunch at noon, eat a late breakfast and take a mid-afternoon walk
- If you always get in at 8:30 and leave at 4:30 pm, try a few days of getting in at 7:45, leave by 3:45 and go for a swim or a late afternoon hike
- Do it a new way – rotate the pillows on each of the beds you make each morning, move the living room furniture around, try one new recipe for dinner each week, learn a new technology to make your life a work simpler, take a management course and implement one new idea a week
Delay gratification: Make your work schedule its own reward by scheduling your most boring task first each day and your favorite task last so all day you are looking forward to the activity you enjoy the most.
Finally, build in healthy brain-building activities to your week. A happy brain is a brain that is thinking, creating, planning, solving, and learning new things. Schedule activities outside of work that make you feel good about yourself and keep your mind sharp:
- Bridge
- Chess
- Sewing
- A musical instrument
- Dancing
- A class at the local junior college
- A new hobby: furniture upholstering, furniture refinishing, water color painting, crafts
- A new language!
Related reading:
Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain
Creating the Optimal "Internal" Learning Environment
To learn more about the brain, view our free recorded webinar!
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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Reading & Learning
Demystifying Executive Functions in Preschool Children
- October 9, 2012 by Scott Sterling
In a recent webinar, Dr. William Jenkins, a leader in the field of childhood brain development and one of the founders of Scientific Learning, presented on the importance of executive functions in the development of preschool students.
As described by Dr. Jenkins, the executive functions of the brain consist of:
- Working memory: the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind for short periods of time (e.g., remembering what happened in the beginning of a story by the time the ending comes around)
- Inhibitory control: the ability to control inappropriate behaviors or responses (e.g., not stealing a toy from a classmate)
- Cognitive/mental flexibility: the ability to transition from one activity to another with ease (e.g., going from a matching task to an opposites task or from playing inside to outside)
In other words, these processes are the ones that allow a small child to develop good learning habits, pay attention in class, ignore distractions, and think creatively when unexpected outcomes occur.
Where do they come from?
One of the misconceptions among preschool teachers and parents is that executive functions are inherently developed rather than taught, a product of the genetic lottery rather than learned behaviors. This is a dangerous proposition.
Studies show that these skills need to be introduced early in life and practiced in preschool in order for students to have a greater chance at academic success later in their school careers. “These skills support the process (i.e., the HOW) of learning – focusing, remembering, planning – that enables children to effectively and efficiently master the content (i.e., the WHAT),” Dr. Jenkins said.
What can an educator do?
The good news for educators is that we already have the tools to help address executive functions. They tend to be grouped under the heading “classroom management”.
Think about it. It requires working memory to be able to follow directions. It takes cognitive and mental flexibility to understand why we behave differently out on the playground than we do in the classroom. And nearly every classroom rule ever written is either aided or hindered by a child’s ability to inhibit their immediate needs and desires.
According to the webinar and an accompanying white paper authored by Alexandra Main, it’s never too late to address these skills with students. The prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain that tends to govern executive functions - continues to develop in humans well after their twentieth birthday. Of course, by then the child is either about to graduate college or has already ended their scholastic careers.
With all of this evidence, it’s imperative that teachers in early childhood education – especially preschool teachers – rededicate themselves to instruction in these executive skills using the best practices and patience that they use during reading and math skills instruction. There are remediation opportunities for children that have fallen behind in their executive functions, including some software programs discussed in the white paper.
But if you wait too long to address these skills, their lack of success in executive functions will translate into a lack of success in the academic skills in which they will be measured later in their school careers.
For further reading:
InBrief: Executive Function: Skills for Life and Learning
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Categories: Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning
Help Us Congratulate Eddy on His Silver Medal!
- June 28, 2012 by Chrissie Denniston
Have you heard? Someone we know and love has won an award and we couldn’t be prouder! Parents’ Choice® Children’s Media and Toy Reviews has awarded Eddy the dog a silver medal for his Eddy’s Number Party! kindergarten readiness app for iPad!
In Eddy’s Number Party!, kids collect balloons, track party hats, toss presents, and gather friends to bring to Eddy’s big surprise party. Along the way, they practice counting, number matching, and more, while the app continuously individualizes the level of challenge for each child. Fun, in-app sticker play helps extend the learning.
Parents’ Choice found Eddy’s Number Party! to be “appealing and user-friendly” and noted the progressive challenge as a plus. And it’s not just Parents’ Choice that loves the app; Common Sense Media loves it, too (“a hidden gem”).
Join us in sending Eddy big congratulations!
Related Reading:
Kindergarten Math Readiness & The Cardinal Principle
The Motor-Cognitive Connection: Early Fine Motor Skills as an Indicator of Future Success
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning
The Motor-Cognitive Connection: Early Fine Motor Skills as an Indicator of Future Success
- April 19, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.
We generally don’t consider the development of manual dexterity like hand-eye coordination in babies to be an essential element of cognitive development. In fact, the scientific terminology itself – “motor skills” for movement and “cognitive skills” for mental processing – draws a clear and definite separation between these two types of functions.
As it turns out, such thinking may be holding us back from innovations in education that might truly be able to make a difference for a great many young learners.
Recent research has demonstrated a clear connection between the development of fine motor skills in early life and later success in math, science and reading. Such skills – those as simple as how an infant can use her eyes to track her mother’s face and then reach her hand out and touch her mother’s nose – may just help us understand how ready that child will be for kindergarten, as well as what kind of achiever she’ll be over the next few years.
The Motor-Cognition Connection
To arrive at such a conclusion, we first need to understand the connection between the motor and cognitive centers of the brain. Through neuroimaging and neuroanatomical analysis, Adele Diamond (2000) uncovered “significant evidence” for a number of motor-cognition links in the brain. Prior to such analysis, these abilities were attributed to separate areas of the brain: motor skills were centered in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, and cognition in the prefrontal cortex. But Diamond’s research showed that both could be activated during certain motor or cognitive tasks. Further research also showed that “individuals with brain damage to either the primary motor or primary cognitive areas often show impairment in both skill areas.” (p. 1013)
In fact, Karen Adolph (2005, 2008; Adolph & Berger, 2006) suggested that a complex relationship exists between cognitive and motor skills development in infants. Since infants are learning to process a complex and changing world at the same time that they are learning gross and fine motor skills, they are in a state of constant adaptation. Their bodies are changing simultaneously as the world around them is presenting new information. Thus, their physical existence in the world – and their movement through it – is one that requires constant cognitive problem solving. In short, infants spend the vast majority of their existence, when they are not sleeping, learning how to learn.
Motor Skills as a Predictor
Talk about factors that predict future achievement in reading, math and science most often includes discussions of early math skills, early reading skills, social skills, attention skills, and attention-related measures like curiosity, interest and a desire to learn. Note that none of the aforementioned abilities has a motor physical component.
Yet, from the motor-cognition connection, researchers like David Grissmer, Sophie Aiyer, William Murrah, Kevin Grimm and Joel Steele (2010) have brought the issue of motor skills development to the fore. They went back and analyzed data from six data sets, and found that, indeed, fine motor skills were a strong predictor of later achievement. In fact, they conclude that taken together, “attention, fine motor skills and general knowledge are much stronger overall predictors of later math, reading and science scores than early math and reading scores alone.” (p. 1008)
Toward Better Interventions
According to this team of researchers (Grissimer, et al, 2010), “There are few interventions directly testing whether strengthening early attention, fine motor skills, or knowledge of the world would improve later math and reading achievement.” That said, some facts are quite clear:
- There is a clear connection in the circuitry of the brain between areas controlling fine motor skills and areas controlling cognition.
- These areas are developing simultaneously, with exceptional speed during early brain development.
- Motor skills are a proven indicator of future math and reading success.
Ultimately, with that understanding in hand, we clearly have a research opportunity to more comprehensively pursue an understanding of these connections. Findings from such research could put us in a position to create more novel, more effective interventions that strategically integrate motor and cognitive skill building, and continue to hone how we help our youngest learners prepare for future success.
For further reading:
Grissmer, D., Grimm, K., Aiyer S., Murrah, W., Steele, J. Fine Motor Skills and Early Comprehension of the World: Two New School Readiness Indicators. Developmental Psychology. 2010. Vol. 46, No. 5. 1008-1017.
Related Reading:
Sensory-Motor Development and Learning in Children
5 Reasons Every Parent Should Be Familiar with Executive Function
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus
Using Poetry to Teach Reading: Rhythm, Rhyme, and Choral Reading
- April 5, 2012 by PC Munoz
Poetry is a powerful vehicle to teach children to learn and love language, reading, and writing. In some ways, using poetry to teach reading is analogous to sneaking highly nutritious (and occasionally child-repellent) vegetables into otherwise kid-friendly dishes. By making use of creative devices like rhythm, rhyme and choral reading, educators can help students learn about phonemes, morphemes, grammar, and other language-based skills, all while having a great time with poetry.
RHYTHM
Many poems written for children have some sort of meter, or basic rhythmic structure, that is catchy and relatively easy for kids to copy orally. This provides a great opportunity for classroom teachers (particularly at the primary-grade level) to go line by line through a poem and focus on the number of syllables (or "beats") in a given word, and demonstrate how each sound and word plays a part in maintaining the meter of the poem. Asking students to swap out one of the words in a highly rhythmic poem for an appropriate new word (which has the same number of beats and a similar sound as the original) is a fun activity that exercises phoneme awareness, vocabulary, and creative writing skills. Haiku and its established structural confines, which require detailed syllable counting on the part of students, is a favorite for students of all ages to read and write.
RHYME
Rhyming poems are ripe with abundant classroom activities. Students can examine the sounds in each rhyming line, identifying the rhyming sounds and coming up with alternate rhyming words that could work in the poem. As an oral activity, creating "silly" substitute rhymes that have the correct matching sound but make absolutely no sense within the poem can also be a lot of fun for students of all ages, while flexing their phoneme awareness and vocabulary skills.
CHORAL READING
Choral reading of a poem (reading aloud in unison with a group of students or whole class) gets students to use their voices, collaborate with their classmates, gain an understanding of the potential dramatic power of the written word, and strengthen their understanding of punctuation. Leading students through a choral reading session can include a significant emphasis on punctuation and how it affects oral reading (pausing when there's a period, inflecting upwards in pitch when there's a question mark, etc.) and affords opportunity to work on enunciation skills as well. Breaking up a choral reading poem so all students have a chance to read a line or phrase on their own can also get the whole class to participate and feel positive about their relationship to the written word.
Using poetry to teach reading is a fun way to inspire students of all skill levels to engage with the subtle beauty and nuances of a language, encourage expression and creativity, and become excited about words, reading, and writing. The possibilities for using poetry in the classroom to teach valuable concepts and skills are almost as boundless as the potential combinations of words in a poem.
*I am the author of the haiku in this post. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my second grade teachers, Tina McCarter and Sharon Kamimoto, helped kick-start a lifelong love of words...for which I am grateful.
Related Reading:
Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom
5 Reasons Why Your Students Should Write Every Day
About the author: PC Muñoz is a San Francisco-based writer, recording artist, and educator. Information on his past and future projects can be found at http://www.pcmunoz.com
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Reading & Learning
How to Support Social Development in Young Children
- March 29, 2012 by Corey Fitzgerald
As early as first grade, a child’s social skills are a compelling predictor of his future success both in and out of school. Like any developing skill, burgeoning social skills require support, practice and repetition. The desired behaviors are learned and taught through a variety of accumulating experiences stemming from the earliest years of childhood, between birth and age 6, when children grow and develop faster than during any other stage in their lives.
Children rely heavily on adults and other caregivers to help them acquire social skills and establish pathways for meaningful learning. To that end, researchers have found that when children are provided with positive and caring experiences in these early years, the connections in the brain for feeling good and learning are strengthened, self-esteem and confidence rise, and children are more equipped to cope with life’s challenges.
So whether you’re a parent or an educator, the following strategies will help promote social development in young children, while helping them learn to use their own minds:
Model Appropriate Social Behavior
Take advantage of everyday routines to “show and tell” children what your expectations are for appropriate behavior—for example, how to greet someone new or how to share a toy during play. By talking about what you’re doing as you’re doing it the child will better understand how to manage the situation and replicate it, even when you’re not there.
Support Self-Esteem
Positive self-esteem is critical to healthy social development. Make it a point to compliment children on their behavior, how they look, and progress they have made toward goals. When you acknowledge these attributes, children learn how to perceive and act upon their feelings in a healthy way.
Build Problem Solving Skills
Problem solving is a skill that employs reasoning, creativity, inhibitory control and decision making. Because children do not have fully mature executive functions, they are prone to making mistakes as their abilities emerge and the frontal lobe develops. Exploring solutions to problems by asking children “What would you do?” or offering alternative strategies will help them develop effective reasoning skills and mental flexibility.
Encourage Exploration
Infants and young children explore their environment through movement and interaction. As a child develops confidence and control over her body in motion, she becomes more and more eager to venture into the world around her. Aid her natural curiosity by organizing activities that promote safe exploration, both at home and while out. Examples include asking children for help while preparing a meal or tasking them with finding an item at the grocery store. When you gradually extend opportunities to be involved with more complex activities, children will rise to the occasion.
Play!
Time spent playing with children can be one of the best investments you make in their educational future. One of the easiest ways to help children develop socially is by the simple act of playing. Joining in play builds relationships in a climate of fun and puts you in a great position to teach skills for sharing and cooperation, introducing concepts like winning or losing, and it also gives children a chance to learn about more subtle social cues, like body language and vocal intonations. So don’t be afraid to turn up the music for a little song and dance, put on a puppet show, or pull out some favorite board games and have fun!
References:
Bierman, K.L., et al., Promoting academic and social-emotional school readiness: The Head Start REDI Program. Child Development, 79(6), 1802-1817, 2008.
Katz, Lilian and Diane McClellan. Young Children’s Social Development: A Checklist. World of Education. March 26, 2012.
Knitzer, Jane and C. Cybele Raver. What Research Tells Policymakers About Strategies to Promote Social and Emotional School Readiness Among Three- and Four-Year-Old Children. National Center for Children in Poverty. July, 2002.
Peters, Zrinka. Support Social and Emotional Development – Through Play! Education.com. March 26, 2012.
Supporting Social Development. Best Beginnings: Alaska's Early Childhood Investment. March 29, 2012.
Related Reading:
Building Your Child’s Self-Confidence
Recognizing Emotions After Brain Injury: Re-Learning a Critical Social Skill
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning
Oh, What A Day! 4 Fantastic Ways to Celebrate Dr. Seuss’ Birthday
- March 1, 2012 by Josefina Rodriguez
It is no surprise that we commemorate the birthday of one of America’s most well-known children’s authors by dedicating a day filled with fun reading and literacy activities. On March 2nd, readers across the country will celebrate Theodore Geisel’s birthday (notably known as Dr. Seuss) by participating in Read Across America Day – a project created by the National Education Association.
Are you interested in celebrating Read Across America Day? Here are some ways you can get involved:
- Take the pledge to build a nation of readers: How will you inspire literacy? Share how you plan to participate on Read Across America’s official website, and see how others in your area are celebrating.
- Download these Dr. Seuss-inspired printable activities for the classroom or home play.
- Check with your local library to see if your branch is celebrating the day, or click here to find an event in your area.
- Follow the official Read Across America Facebook and Twitter pages for more ideas and to stay in the loop on ways you can promote reading and literacy.
So, grab your favorite Dr. Seuss classic, or any book for that matter, and celebrate the big day. As Dr. Seuss said, “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.”
Related Reading:
Building Fluent Readers: How Oral Reading Practice Helps Reading Comprehension
The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Reading & Learning
The Mirror Neuron System
- February 21, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
What is a parent to do to get a child’s brain started out on the right path – to be able to concentrate on one task for extended periods, be able to handle rapidly changing information, and be flexible enough to switch tasks easily?
Well, it turns out the human brain seems to have a strategy: by developing two core capacities during the first few years of life, interactive play and language, the brain seems to become uniquely equipped to build a range of cognitive capacities. Recent research suggests that a specific area in the frontal lobe – ‘the doing part of the brain’ - begins to wire itself very early in development through imitation of the movements and sounds made by others. This area, the so-called mirror neuron region, allows an infant to watch or listen to other people and respond with imitative or complementary movements or sounds.
Because this area is the same region, in the left hemisphere, that is responsible for fluent, easy articulated, speech, researchers have speculated that it might have been an evolutionary starting point for development of human language. But, because it is also active in the right hemisphere, it seems to play an important role in social, and perhaps athletic, interaction. In fact, Miella Dapretto and her colleagues at UCLA recently reported research showing that children with autism spectrum disorders, which include a range of disturbances that impact, among other things, social skill development, have observable deficiencies in the mirror neuron system.
There is reason to speculate, based on the research now available, that exercising the mirror system in general, can build a brain that is better equipped for socialization, school, music and athletics. At this time existing research has demonstrated that exercising Broca’s area of the brain (and other areas that are connected to this area through complex cognitive networks), either through natural parental stimulation in infants or through intense specific practice in school-aged children or adults, one can systematically build a brain that is better equipped for many cognitive tasks including language, reading, writing, and math as well as remediate a brain that seems to have deficits or learning disabilities in one or more of these areas.
Every time a parent plays a game like “Patty-cake, Patty-cake” where the child and parent duplicate a routine with actions and a poem or song, the parent is helping the child to exercise the mirror neuron system. Parents have been doing these action/nursery sequences for years, and there are many similar routines in many cultures. Examples of “mirror neuron” routines that have been around and passed on for generations in Western cultures include – “So Big!” where a parent ask the child something like, “How big are you?” and the child and parent respond together holding up their arms in like fashion, “SO BIG!” or, with older children, “Eensie Weensie Spider” where parent and child imitate each other by alternately touching the thumb of one hand to the forefinger of the other hand to emulate the spider climbing up a water spout.
The wonderful thing about these types of routines is that they illustrate how intuitive parents have been for centuries, at identifying and exploiting the natural directions and priorities of brain development. What worries many of us in neuroscience is when parents abandon these time-tested and intuitive interactions with our young children, swayed by technological advances that enhance productivity and drive positive cognitive changes in a mature brain but by abandoning natural parental interactive routines may actually jeopardize the delicate balance of stimulation in the developing brain.
We must exercise caution when adults develop products that appeal to parents with names that inspire confidence like, “Baby Einstein”, if the products have not been subjected to reasonable controlled studies that will help us understand the impact of these activities on young brains. Most companies that develop products for young children do not conduct this type of research because the assumption is that toys and play activities that engage infants and keep them entertained are not harmful. But, unfortunately, that assumption is not warranted. Many of us who put our children in “walkers” or “swings” in the latter part of the twentieth century learned that these “toys” had unintended consequences (i.e., negative effects, on early motor development).
As developmental neuroscientists and other specialists have begun to understand the implications, both positive and negative, of early stimulation on later brain development, those of us in the sciences need to better inform parents and “toy” makers may need to attempt more accountable to parents. In all fairness, however, it may be unreasonable to expect toy makers to conduct independent controlled research studies that we have not even demanded of drug companies. So, the view held by many scientists is that an educated parent can look beyond the hype of advertising and provide for the young child in their care, a fostering environment that is calmly yet convincingly brain-enhancing.
For Further Reading:
The Mirror Neuron System and the Consequences of Its Dysfunction. Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Depretto. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience Volume 7, December 2006
The Mirror Neuron System is More Active During Complementary Compared with Imitative Action. Roger Newman-Norlund, Hein T van Schie, Alexander M J van Zuijlen, and Harold Bekkering. Nature Neuroscience Vol. 10, May 2007
Using Human Brain Lesions to Infer Function: A Relic from a Past Era in the fMRI age? Chris Rorden and Hans-Otto Karnath. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience Vol. 5, October 2004
Understanding Emotions in Others: Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Mirella Depretto, Mari S. Davies, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, Ashley A. Scott, Marian Sigman, Susan Y. Bookheimer, and Marco Iacoboni. Nature Neuroscience Vol. 9, December 2005
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Daniel Goleman. NY, NY: Bantam Books, 2006.
Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience). Peter R. Huttenlocher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002
Neural Mechanisms of Selective Auditory Attention are Enhanced by Computerized Training: Electrophysiological Evidence from Language-Impaired and Typically Developing Children. Courtney Stevens, Jessica Fanning, Donna Coch, Lisa Sanders,and Helen Neville. Brain Research Vol. 1205, April 2008.
Related Reading:
5 Things Every Parent and Educator Should Know About Early Childhood brain Development
What Does The Marshmallow Experiment Tell Us About Self-Control?
Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!
Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning
Building Your Child’s Self-Confidence
- January 10, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D
As parents, we want our children to have confidence but not conceit. That is, we want our children to monitor the outcomes of their behaviors realistically, to be polite and considerate of others, but retain a sense of self that is positive and assured. I believe the mistake parents often make is thinking that constant praise of a child is the route to self-confidence. It is an easy mistake to make, especially in a society in which so much emphasis is placed on making our children feel loved and building feelings of self-worth.
I, like most new parents, constantly praised my oldest child for everything she did from swinging at the park without falling to reading a stop sign as we drove to preschool. But the problem with that is that excessive praise may create unrealistic expectations for the child when they are in the “real world” where people do not praise them all the time. I did not realize that for my daughter this was creating tremendous pressure to be successful at everything she did. Conversely, some children who hear constant praise at home may feel confused or dejected when others are not as enthusiastic about their feats and develop a fear of failure.
A young client of mine, whose mother worked very hard to build self-confidence in her children by praising them continuously, developed a host of voice problems associated with stress in elementary school. I have worked with other children who developed a “need” for constant praise that affected their ability to enjoy competition if they could not win.
Since a large component of human brain maturation involves increased self-awareness and improved capacity for self-monitoring of behavior, parents have the opportunity to be instrumental in helping a child develop this advanced skill. By encouraging self-appraisal that is realistic while avoiding being overly judgmental, parents help their child build confidence.
Instead of constant praise, parents can try to use praise more naturally to encourage behaviors the parent believes are worthwhile or beneficial. Statements like, “I like the way you shared your toys today” or “You seemed to be having a lot of fun on the climber, do you feel like you are getting better at that?” may help a child learn to value effort and progress as well as to self-evaluate.
It is important to remind ourselves that to adequately develop the ability to monitor our behavior we have to understand mistakes as well as achievements. It is very difficult for a parent to watch a child fail at something, but as adults most of us are well aware that some of the best lessons we had as we grew up came from our failures, as rough as they may have been at the time.
Building your child’s self-esteem ultimately will help them succeed in endeavors both in school and in life. One of the most important jobs for parents is to help your child successfully through life’s challenges and successes, help them feel good about themselves along the way, and learn to accept mistakes as an opportunity to do better next time.
Related Reading:
Ok, So You Made A Mistake. But Look What You Learned!
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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning
