NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

The Inverse Power of Praise

• Praise effort, not intelligence
• From 1970-2000, there were 15,000 studies conducted on self-esteem. Of those, only 200 employed a scientifically-sound way of measuring its outcomes. Those 200 showed no benefits
• High self-esteem did not improve grades or career achievement
• High self-esteem did not reduce alcohol usage or violence 
• Praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy; they drop out of classes to avoid bad grades and have a harder time picking a major
• Frequently-praised students get more competitive and interested in tearing others down
• Praise needs to be specific and sincere
• By age 12, children believe that a teacher's praise is a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement
• Teens believe that a teacher's criticism conveys a positive belief in the student's aptitude
• Criticism is taken as a sign that the teacher believes performance can be improved; praise is a signal of reaching the limits of ability
• The Tiger Mom Study
• Kids were given IQ tests, then their mothers were told (falsely) that their kids had scored poorly. The kids then took the test again
• American mothers avoided negative comments and instead talked about neutral topics
• Chinese mothers discussed the test and its importance, saying things like, "You didn't concentrate when doing it."
• When tested after the break, Chinese kids' test scores rose 33%, more than twice the gain of the American kids
• "A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they'll quit when the rewards disappear."

The Lost Hour

• 60% of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness
• High school seniors average 6.5 hours per night. Only 5% average 8 hours.
• Children of all ages consistently get 1 hour less per night than 30 years ago
• Because children's brains are still developing, lost sleep has a much bigger impact than on adults
• The performance gap associated with 1 hour of lost sleep is greater than the gap between the average 4th grader and 6th grader
• In a U. Minnesota study, A students averaged 15 minutes more sleep per night than B students, who averaged 15 minutes more than C students, and so on.
• During sleep, the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.
• Children spend 40% of their sleep time in slow-wave sleep (10X what adults spend)
• Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala, so sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, but recall gloomy ones just fine.
• Sleep-deprived college students could remember 81% of negative words like "cancer," but only 31% of positive ones like "sunshine."
• Adolescent brains take 90 minutes longer to produce melatonin than children and adults, hence their tendency to late nights and sluggish mornings
• When Edina, MN changed high school start times from 7:25 AM to 8:30 AM, the following happened
• The top 10% of students averaged 683/605 on the SAT before the change, and 739/761 after the change
• Students also reported higher levels of motivation and lower levels of depression
• A similar change in Lexington, KY reduced teenage car accidents 25%
• Sleep loss may be the cause of the rise in childhood obesity
• Increases ghrelin, which stimulates hunger
• Decreases leptin, which suppresses appetite
• Elevates cortisol, which stimulates fat production
• Reduces HGH
• Children who sleep less are fatter (300% in one Japanese study)
• The odds of obesity rise 80% for each hour of lost sleep
• Adults who only slept 6 hours per night for two weeks felt fine, but performed on tests as if they'd stayed awake for 24 hours straight

Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race

• No matter how young, children are not race-blind
• 6-month old infants will stare longer at faces that aren't of the same race as their parents
• 3-year old white children, when shown pictures of random children of different races and asked which one they'd prefer as a friend, 86% will pick a child of their own race
• 5-year old children, asked to split up a deck of pictures of different children, will split the deck by gender 16% of the time, and by race 68% of the time
• The more diverse a school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity
• The odds of a white high-school student having a best friend of a different race is 8%. The odds that a black student's best friend is also black is 85%
• In a study, children were taught about Jackie Robinson. Half were told about how he had been taunted by white fans. The other half weren't. White children who got the whole story had significantly better attitudes toward blacks
• When black parents warned their children about the dangers of discrimination, the children were less likely to connect their academic successes to effort, and more likely to blame failures on biased teachers
• Ethnic pride isn't an unqualified positive: In a study of black Detroit high school students, the darker the self-rated skin tone, the higher the GPA, social acceptance, and academic confidence.  Researchers concluded that light-skinned students were more afraid of seeming to "act white". The same results held for Hispanic students.

Why Kids Lie

• In controlled laboratory tests, people cannot tell when children are lying
• Police officers often score worse than chance (45%)
• The only people who score better are teachers (60%)
• The same tests reveal consistent biases
• People believe that girls tell the truth more often, when they lie as often as boys
• They believe introverts are less trustworthy, even though introverts are less likely to lie (because they lack the social skills to pull it off)
• In another experiment, children were presented with an opportunity to cheat to win a game
• 33% of 3-year-olds cheated, and when asked if they cheated, most admitted it
• 80% of 4-year-olds cheated, and 80% denied cheating when asked
• Children with older siblings seem to learn how to lie earlier
• The children who are best at knowing the difference between truth and lies are the most likely to lie
• In home observation studies, 4-year-olds will lie every 2 hours, 6-year-olds will like once an hour. 96% of children observed lied during the observation period.
• Most lies to parents are part of a cover-up, and parents see through them, but less than 1% of the parents punished the cover-up.  So children learn that lying doesn't have a cost.
• Children and adults view lying differently
• Children are more disapproving--they are more likely to think that a liar is a bad person, and that lying is morally wrong
• Children don't consider intent. Any false statement--regardless of intent or belief--is a lie.
• E.g. Dad promises son he'll take him to the baseball game on Saturday. When they get home, Mom reminds them that he has a swim lesson that afternoon, so he can't go.  A child will consider the Dad a liar, and when he is not punished for it, concludes that lying is okay.
• Kids associate lying with punishment
• 38% of 5-year-olds think that profanity is a lie
• Researchers found that kids who are threatened with punishment for lying become better liars at an earlier age, and learn to get caught less often
• Lying is a sign of intelligence--it takes skill to lie
• Children who are better liars do better on other tests of academic prowess
• If a researcher makes the child promise to tell the truth, lying declines 25%
• Hearing the story about George Washington and the cherry tree cut down lying 50% in girls and 75% in boys
• Meanwhile, hearing "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" actually increased lying
• The key is that George Washington receives immunity from punishment AND is praised for telling the truth
• Parents need to teach kids the value of honesty; kids already know lying is wrong, so reinforcing that message doesn't work.
• Parents encourage lying in the name of politeness
• When researchers presented kids with a bar of soap as a reward for test performance, parents approved of their kids lying to be polite (presumably instead of saying, "Soap? WTF?")
• Children learn that honest creates conflict, and that dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict
• Tattling
• 90% of the time, the tattler is telling the truth
• Children only tattle 7% of the time when they're wronged
• Yet Parents are 10X as likely to chastise a child for tattling as they are for lying.

The Search for Intelligent Life in Kindergarten

• Early intelligence tests are poor predictors of future academic success
• If you select 100 kindergarteners as gifted, by the 3rd grade, only 27% would still qualify if retested
• Meta studies consistently show that IQ tests prior to starting school have only a 40% correlation with future test results
• Ironically enough, this is still better than other tests!
• Attention skills: 20%
• Emotional Quotient: 10%
• Behavior ratings: 8%
• By the third grade, however, test scores are predictive; it's not that tests don't work, but we're testing kids too early.
• A study of 70,000 British children showed a strong correlation between test scores at 11 and 16
• Unfortunately, not one of the America's top 20 school districts (all of whom have a gifted program) waits until the third grade to screen the children, and not one requires children to retest to stay in the program
• From age 3 to 10, 2/3rds of children's IQ scores will change by more than 15 points
• A lot of the variation comes from brain organization; adult brains work very differently from children's.
• Gifted programs have a major impact
• Half of all college graduates have an IQ of 120 or above
• Ph.D.s average 130
• In California, Gifted and Talented programs make 36.7% more progress per year than normal classes
• The correlation between emotional intelligence and academic achievement is only 10%
• Prison inmates tend to have high EQs, for example 

The Sibling Effect

• Only children are not that different
• Do a little better in school
• Average less (15 minutes) physical activity per day
• Have slightly worse physical dexterity
• As a whole, there are few differences; most studies are inconclusive
• Siblings between the ages of 4-7 clash 3.5 times per hour (about 10 minutes out of every 60)
• Only 1/8 of those conflicts are resolved by compromise or reconciliation. The rest of the time, one bullies the other into submission or withdrawal
• In a study of 4-year-olds, children made 7X as many negative/controlling statements to their siblings as they did to their friends
• Sibling relationship quality is remarkably stable; unless a major life event intervenes, the same tone applies until the eldest moves out
• Dr. Laurie Kramer at the University of Illinois has established a program to reduce sibling conflict
• Rather than focusing on parents, she focuses on children
• The program teaches siblings how to play in ways both can enjoy; conflict reduction is the result of prevention, not resolution.
• The program showed much better results than standard children's literature on conflict resolution, which caused relationship quality to decline
• Kramer analyzed 261 common children's books; even though they have happy endings, they illustrated as many negative behaviors as positive ones.  Kids appeared to learn new ways to be mean to their siblings.
• Why siblings fight (Freud was wrong, Shakespeare was right)
• Only 9% of siblings said competition for parental affection was the blame
• The overwhelming reason siblings fight? 80% cited sharing physical possessions
• The second place figure? 39% of younger siblings said their fights were about fights, and trying to stop older siblings from hitting them.
• Age spacing is not a strong predictor
• One factor that is predictive? The older sibling's relationship with his/her best friend
• Kramer: Older siblings train on their friends, then apply what they know to younger siblings

The Science of Teen Rebellion

• What teens lie about
• What they spend their allowance on
• Whether they've started dating
• What clothes they put on away from the house
• What movie they went to and who they went with
• Alcohol and drug use
• Hanging out with friends their parents disapprove of
• How they spend their afternoons if the parent is still at work
• Whether a chaperone was present at a party
• Whether they rode in a car with a drunk driver
• Whether their homework is done
• What music they're listening to
• Teens only use outright lies 25% of the time, mostly to cover up the worst stuff
• 50% of the time, they withhold relevant details that would upset their parent
• 25% of the time, they avoid the topic and hope their parents don't ask
• 96% of teens reported lying to their parents
• It doesn't matter if you're an honors student or an overachiever, the numbers are largely the same
• The most common reason for the deception? "I'm trying to protect my relationship with my parents. I don't want them to be disappointed in me."
• Kids tend to get in trouble when they have permissive parents; the kids take the lack of rules as a sign that their parents don't actually care.
• In Chile, permissive parenting is the norm, and kids like to their parents more than anywhere else
• Resistance to parental authority peaks around 14-15.  It's slightly higher at 11 than at 18.
• Oppressive parents don't have rebellious children.  Instead, their children are obedient and depressed.
• The best parenting style
• The best parents set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence and explain why the rules are there. They expect their children to obey them.
• Other than those areas, they support their child's autonomy and allow the freedom to make his or her own decisions.
• Kids lie the least to these kinds of parents; instead of lying about 12 topics, they only lie about 5.
• Boredom
• Teens turn to drinking and drugs because they're bored
• Boredom sets in around the 7th grade and increases all the way through 12th grade
• Intrinsic motivation drops gradually but consistently over the same period
• Linda Caldwell of Penn State designed an extensive curriculum to teach teens how to not be bored, but it had almost zero effect.  Why?  Teens are biologically inclined to boredom.
• The biology of boredom: The pirate game, with rewards of a single coin, a small stack, and a big pile
• Kids found any reward thrilling; their brains lit up the same regardless of the prize
• Adults brains lit up in proportion to the reward
• Teen brains actually declined in activity with small or medium rewards.  Only the large reward elicited a response, and when that response came, it was larger than either a child or adult's response to a large reward
• This is the same response curve as a seasoned drug addict; the reward center requires a large dosage
• The teen pleasure response appeared to hijack the prefrontal cortex (responsible for weighing risk and consequences).  When experiencing and emotionally-charged excitement, the teen brain has trouble gauging risk and foreseeing consequences
• Teens with higher spikes were more likely to say that risky behaviors like getting drunk seemed fun
• Risk-taking
• Ironically, there are also risks that terrify teens far more than adults--mainly the fear of rejection by peers
• The "Bad Idea" experiment asked adults and teens to decide if certain concepts like "Swallow a cockroach" were bad ideas
• Adults answered almost instantaneously
• Teens took much longer to answer; brain scans showed they had to think through the scenario.  They had no instinctive fear or revulsion
• In contrast, an experiment that (falsely) convinced them that they had to answer questions about their favorite music in front of an audience of other teems caused distress and danger signals to light up like crazy
• The opposite of lying is arguing
• Teens told the truth about things their parents disapproved of if they thought the parent might give in.  Otherwise, they lied to get out of having to argue.
• Filipino teens respect their parents more than American teens...and argue far more.  While they argued about rules, they didn't argue about the parent's right to set the rules, and were far more likely to obey the rules.  American teens just pretended to agree, and did what they wanted to anyways.
• Certain types of fighting are a sign of respect, not disrespect.
• Studies show that over the long term, moderate conflict with parents is associated with better adjustment than no conflict or frequent conflict.
• 46% of mothers see arguing as destructive to their relationship with their daughter; only 23% of daughters felt that way.  Far more believed the fighting strengthened their relationship
• Daughters wanted to feel heard, and to get some small concessions
• Daughters who rated arguing as destructive had parents who stonewalled, rather than collaborated
• "Parents who negotiate appear to be more informed.  Parents with unbending, strict guidelines make it a tactical issue for kids to find a way around them." (Robert Laird, University of New Orleans)
• "If a child's normal curfew is 11 PM, and they explain to the parent that something special is happening, so the parent says, 'Okay, for that night only, you can come home at 1 AM,' that encourages the kid not to lie, and to respect the time."
• Pop culture portrays adolescence as a period of storm and stress, even though social science shows that traumatic adolescence is an exception, not the norm
• It turns out that parents find the teen years very stressful, but the social scientists were polling teens, who didn't find it that traumatic.
• "Parents are more bothered by the bickering and squabbling that takes place during this time than are adolescents."

Can Self-Control be Taught

• Tools of the Mind
• During its first test in the Denver Public Schools, after just 1 year, children were a full grade level ahead of national standards
• 50% of kindergarteners in regular classes scored grade-level proficiency
• 97% of TotM kindergarteners scored as proficient
• In numerous states (New Jersey, Illinois, Texas), TotM tests were ended early because they were too successful; the funding for them covered at-risk students.  After one year, the children's test scores were too high to be deemed "at-risk"
• What makes it distinctive?
• Written play plans and lengthy play periods
• Children draw up plans before they play, and play for an hour
• This teaches children how to sustain their own interest
• One Russian study in the 1950s looked at self control
• Children told to stand still as long as possible lasted 2 minutes
• Children told to pretend they were soldiers on guard who had to stand still lasted 11 minutes
• During playtime, children learn basic developmental building blocks necessary for academic success, better than they would while in a traditional class
• Self-reflection
• Children are encouraged to think out loud.  When learning "C", they say, "Start at the top and go around."
• A teacher might write four versions of "D" on the board and ask the kids to decide which is the best one
• Tools children are frequently responsible for checking each other's work
• Executive Function
• These exercises teach children to attend to background cues and control their impulses
• After just 3 months, Tools teachers in New Mexico went from 40 classroom incidents/month to zero.
• Dr. Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia tested Tools kids on EF
• Only 25% of regular kids could complete a difficult task; over 50% of the Tools kids could
• Being disciplined is more important than being smart.  Being both is exponentially better.
• One Penn State study showed that kids who were above average in IQ and EF were 300% more likely to do well in math than children with just a high IQ
• How to apply these lessons:
• Have children write out a plan for how they're going to spend their time, then refer them back to the plan when they get distracted
• When correcting work, point to the line containing the mistake and ask the child to find it (this makes them think critically about what they're doing)
• Ask children to pick out the best and worst examples

Plays Well With Others

• A Minnesota study showed that the more educational media children watched, the more relationally aggressive they became.  This was a much stronger relationship (2.5X) than the connection between violent media and physical aggression.
• The educational shows spend most of their time establishing the conflict, and only a few minutes resolving it
• 96% of all children's programming includes insults and put-downs (7.7 per 1/2 hour episode)
• Even 66% of "prosocial" programs contained insults
• Of the 2,628 put-downs, in only 50 instances was the insulter reprimanded or corrected (and not once during an educational show)
• The typical married couple has 8 disputes per day, and spouses express anger about 2-3X as much as affection. Children witness the conflict 45% of the time.
• Children's emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between parents than their direct relationship with the child
• In one study, children watched a staged argument
• Afterwards, 1/3 reacted aggressively
• But, if the child was allowed to witness the resolution of the argument, only 4% reacted aggressively
• In other words, if you start arguing, you're better off letting the children witness everything, provide you resolve the issue
• Spanking
• Spanking white children increases their aggressiveness, but spanking black children decreases their aggressiveness
• It turns out that because spanking is taboo in white culture, it was saved for only the worst offenses, when the parent lost their temper
• In the black community, because spanking was viewed as normal, children accepted it.
• The same held true for conservative Protestants; 1/3 spanked their kids 3-4 times per week, with no negative effects
• Children key off their parents' reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself
• Bullying
• Most bullying is perpetrated by the popular, well-liked, and admired
• Popular kids drink more and do more drugs
• Girls are just as aggressive as boys, but use relational rather than physical aggression
• Aggressiveness is most often used as a means of asserting dominance to gain control or protect status.  It is not a breakdown of social skills.  In fact, many acts of aggression require a high degree of skill to pull off.
• The same kids who are high in prosocial behavior are also responsible for antisocial behavior
• Not only are they popular, they're well-liked by kids and teachers (who rate them as agreeable and well-adjusted)
• Fatherhood
• Progressive, Traditional, and Disengaged Dads
• Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality and rated their family functioning lower than Traditional Dads
• The children of Progressive Dads were aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the children of Disengaged Dads

Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn't

• Baby DVDs don't work.  Babies learn from live human teachers.  In fact, you can train American babies to recognize Mandarin phenomes in just 12 20-minute sessions.  But a Mandarin DVD has zero effect.  Why?
• Seeing a person's face makes a big difference.  Lip reading helps babies parse speech.
• The central role of the parent isn't to push language into the baby's ears, it's to notice what's coming from the baby and respond accordingly
• Parent responsiveness
• NYU studied language acquisition in affluent families.
• The children of "high-responders" were 6 months ahead in language development than children of "low-responders"
• How often a mother initiated a conversation was irrelevant; all that mattered was whether the mom responded to the child's attempts to initiate communication
• Re-examining the famous Hart and Risley study (that showed that affluent children were exposed to a larger vocabulary, and developed faster) showed that poor parents initiated conversations just as often as affluent parents.  The real gap was in responsiveness
• Affluent parents responded 200 times per hour
• Poor parents respond less than half as often
• In a Cornell study, parents were triggered to touch their child every time the researchers heard the child vocalize.  This increased vocalizations from 2.5x/minute to 5.5x/minute.
• "The mix of responses a baby gets in a high-quality day care is probably ideal." (Dr. Michael Goldstein, Cornell University)
• Babies learn better from object-labeling when the parent waits for the baby's eyes to naturally be gazing at the object
• Moving the object when talking works, but only up to 15 months
• Hearing language from multiple speakers helps the learning process
• "Variation sets" (e.g. "Bring the book to Daddy. Bring him the book. Give it to Daddy.") help teach both syntax and words, the greater the variation the better
• Identical twin studies show that only 25% of language acquisition is genetic