Author: carlosdanielponce4@gmail.com

When I left the Education Summit in 2012 everyone seemed to be talking about developing life skills, not just basic academics, in children as a way to ready the workforce of the future. That was a good thing. What wasn’t so good was the perception that such skills, including self-control and taking on challenges, were soft, or non-cognitive skills.

These skills require intellect and are indeed cognitive skills as much as they’re social and emotional skills.

If we don’t get the language right we risk seeing the focus on skills end up as an education flavor of the month.

Part of the problem may have been all the recent hype around the premise of Paul Tough, author of a new book titled “How Children Succeed.” Tough, who had been showing up everywhere, including NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and at last week’s Summit, was promulgating the idea that skills, including self-control and persistence, are non-cognitive.

He argued against what he called the “cognitive hypothesis” where what matters most was stuffing information into children’s brains. Instead (the operant word), he called for developing different qualities:

…a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

I, too, investigated these issues by reviewing longitudinal studies from numerous academic disciplines. I found that, in fact, there are a group of skills that predict school and life success, and many are similar to Tough’s. These include focus and self control, perspective taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and being a self directed learner. This is the list of skills I would argue are most important because they are based on numerous studies that follow children as they grow up.

Using the list of skills I identify, it is clear that they are indeed cognitive. They are also social and emotional. All of these skills are based on executive functions of the brain. These are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. Adele Diamond, one of the foremost researchers on executive functions, finds that they predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests, as she explains:

Typical traditional IQ tests measure what’s called crystallized intelligence, which is mostly your recall of what you’ve already learned—like what’s the meaning of this word, or what’s the capital of that country? What executive functions tap is your ability to use what you already know—to be creative with it, to problem-solve with it—so it’s very related to fluid intelligence, because that requires reasoning and using information. 

The skills I think we should promote are not only cognitive-social-and emotional, they reap cognitive results. As just one example, a study by Megan McClelland of Oregon State University and her colleagues found that one aspect of executive function skills in four-year-olds—what the researchers call “attention-span persistence”—is strongly predictive of whether or not these same children graduated from college when they were 25-years-old. The researchers define attention span-persistence as “the ability to focus, attend to relevant information, and persist on a task.”

All this dovetailed nicely into the key theme from the Summit. Amid the familiar educational rhetoric, it became clear that the concept of an achievement gap has evolved into the notion of a workforce readiness or skills gap. Three prominent CEOs—Ellen Kullman of DuPont, John Noseworthy of the Mayo Clinic, and Eric Spiegel of Siemens made this point loud and clear at the Summit, reinforced by many prominent educators, the then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and several of his predecessors, researchers and case studies.

There was the predictable search for a magic bullet to move the United States ahead from its slipping international standing in educational attainment and in workforce readiness. Is parent choice the answer, Common Core State Standards, higher expectations, teacher quality, or parent engagement? These debates were often tied to current events (the Chicago teacher strike, family poverty, etc.) and just as often turned into posturing blame games about who’s really for kids—teachers (as represented by unions) versus parents versus school boards versus business. To use a tag line from the 90s: “who’s for kids and who’s just kidding?”

By rallying around the importance of teaching life skills to our youth we can all say we’re for kids. But we’re all just kidding ourselves yet again if we end up putting key intellectual qualities in a “soft skills” education bucket.

We need to take the essential life skills I’ve identified seriously and realize children need both content and skills. Content is the “what” of learning, content is also the “how.”

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

I am beginning a series to share the findings of child development researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me in my 11-year journey to create “Mind in the Making.” Their research is truly “research to live by.”

The first person I’m writing about is Heidelise Als of Harvard University, because her studies are so instructive in how we can help children deal with challenges and learn to become stronger as a result. Perhaps surprisingly, learning this skill doesn’t just happen when children are older. Als’ research is with pre-term babies born 10 to 12 weeks before their due date—the most fragile babies in neonatal intensive care units. When adults watch what young children do to cope successfully and then create situations where they can do more of the same, the process for learning to take on challenges is seeded.

The insight that led to Als’ research began in her native Germany when she was as a teacher of 3rd grade boys. One of the boys, Reinhart, always came to school early, sat in his seat close to the front of the classroom, lined up all of his pencils and books on the desk and was ready for the day to begin. Since Reinhart was doing very well and got good grades, Als decided to move him farther back in the room so another child who needed extra help could have a seat in the front. She says:

“Reinhart moved promptly, yet the next day he didn’t come in. He had never missed a day of school. I was very concerned. He didn’t come the next day.”

After a few days, Als stopped by the bakery Reinhart’s family ran. His mother told her that the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, but her son had been vomiting. The clue came when Reinhart’s mother mentioned, “He did tell me you moved his seat, and he’s now sitting farther back.” Als says:

“I learned from that that despite (seeing} the image of a very competent child, I should have known from his need to have everything {lined up at the start of the school day}—that he didn’t have the flexibility that other children had.”

Reinhart was given his old seat back when he returned to school, but Als gained even more from that experience. She learned how important it is to “read” the language of children’s behavior, to figure out how they cope best and then build on their own positive coping strategies. This lesson was reinforced after she moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school and had her own child, who is significantly brain damaged. She had to learn to understand the language of his behavior in order to help him.

Als brought that sensitivity into her research on premature babies. Through advances in technology in the 1970s, these babies, who couldn’t yet breathe on their own, could be kept alive with medical ventilators that, in effect, breathed for them. What really interested Als was “to see what these babies were up against” and how they were handling these stressful situations.

As she observed them, it became clear to her that good medical care was coming at the price of good developmental care:

“{The premature babies} would be pinned down, held down, strapped down, and even chemically treated, if needed, so that they would not breathe against the ventilator {in order} to let the ventilator do the work that it needed to do.”

A similar kind of scene took place when a nurse or doctor wanted to check on a baby, listen to the baby’s heart rate or change him or her:

“The baby would just splay out — all four limbs would fly out, and then the baby would try to grasp at something, but the nurse by then would already be {putting her} stethoscope on the chest, listening to the chest sounds. And then she would turn the baby over again and listen to the back, and then she would start to suction (his lungs) and then she would give a nebulizer treatment.”

As the check-up progressed, Als reports, babies would become more and more distraught; finally, they would “go limp and typically stop breathing.” It was clear to Heidelise Als that the medical care was so focused on caring for these premature babies’ hearts or lungs that they were neglecting the care of the whole child:

“It seemed we were wasting a lot of the baby’s energies that were very precious. We were going against the baby. We were pushing the baby to become exhausted and give in.”

When a baby who was initially feisty gave in, the medical charts would record that the baby had become well adjusted. But Als saw a different reality:

“The baby had given up. The baby just let the world happen.”

Als and her colleagues — nurses and doctors — set out to improve developmental care and to document that it can make a difference: They thought of this as listening to their behavioral “language.” She says:

“If we can understand the ‘words’ the baby is saying, maybe we can fill in the meaning of the sentence and understand the message.”

These observations led to solutions. For example, if the baby’s hands splay out, give the baby something to hold onto. If the baby is squirming under the bright lights, make the lighting softer. If the baby is getting agitated, hold the baby until his or her breathing becomes more stable. After documenting and recording behavior, they launched into a study where the nurses “read” and then responded to the baby’s behavior in ways that built on that baby’s coping strategies, and thus gave the baby more control.

The results of this experiment were impressive. There was reduced severity of chronic lung disease in these premature babies, improved brain functioning, improved growth and earlier release from the hospital. In addition, their care was significantly less costly.

Here’s the lesson I take from this. Children, even those as young as premature infants, are less prone to the harmful effects of stress when they are supported in managing their own stress by being helped to use the strategies they have for coping and for calming down.

And when children are older, they can become an even more active part of figuring out themselves how to deal with tough times. Als tells the story of a child for whom any reminders of 9/11 (like fire trucks) would trigger emotionally flooding. With the help of adults, he created his own strategy to calm down. He would put his head down on the table to “think” and would wait until he had “thought enough”—and then he was ready to go on.

From these studies, it is clear that we can help children learn to handle tough times if we enable them to become increasingly active partners in creating their own solutions. It has worked for me and it has worked for my children. What about you?

This story is taken from “Mind in the Making.”

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

As toddlers and preschoolers begin to learn how to manage their strong feelings, sometimes their frustration, anger or sorrow overwhelms them and they kick, they push, they knock things over, they yell, they throw themselves on the floor, wailing.

Their tantrums can overwhelm us, too. It seems as if everyone nearby turns around to watch, like rubberneckers at a highway crash. And our instincts can be to match their tantrums with an equal measure of anger or severity.

If we are being our best selves, we use our own self-control to manage the intensity of our feelings. We tell them that we are not going to allow them to hurt anything and that we will hold them, take them for a walk or sit in a quiet place with them until they calm down. In other words, we give them a “pause.”

There are a few points to underscore in what I just said.

First, children learn what they live. If we can manage the intensity of our feelings to tantrums, we can be role models as our young children learn to manage their own feelings.

Second, you’ll notice that I didn’t use the word “time-out.” There’s understandably a lot of controversy about time-outs.

Why Use The Word Pause?

I use “pause” because a new word is needed to spell out the best —not the worst—of time-outs. As Daniel Siegel, co-author of No Drama Discipline puts it, time-outs are not effective if they punish or isolate the child. With pauses, adults lovingly help children calm down—sometimes by removing them from the scene where the tantrum erupted—and by holding them. They do what researchers call scaffolding. Think of a structure that is being built. As it goes up, scaffolding holds it in place until it can stand on its own. That’s what we need to do for children—help them manage their feelings until they learn to manage them on their own.

Stephanie Carlson, a researcher from the University of Minnesota who studies the development of self-control describes this transition: Self-control begins with control from the outside in. You have parents or teachers who are telling and showing the child how to behave. Eventually, that control becomes internalized—it becomes driven from the child’s own desires and motivation.

What Is Self-Control?

Self-Control is an executive function skill. I know that this can sound like researcher-speak or jargon but executive function skills are critically important in helping all of us thrive. Stephanie Carlson says:

Executive function skills—in their most basic sense—refer to the brain-based skills that we need for self-control—being able to control our behavior, being able to control our emotions, and being able to control how we think.

There are many studies that show that executive function (EF) skills help us thrive. Carlson says:

There’s quite a bit of evidence now that executive function skills in early childhood predict academic achievement later on as well as school graduation, attendance, and graduation from college. And even beyond that, there are longitudinal studies showing that early executive function skills will predict physical health and even financial wellbeing later in life.

How Do We Learn Executive Function Skills, Including Self-Control?

Philip David Zelazo, also of the University of Minnesota, says that we learn EF skills by practicing them.

These are skills that you learn by doing. You can’t simply be told about EF skills and then know how to use them. I like to say that we grow our brains in particular ways by using them in particular ways. So if we want to improve our executive function skills, we need to practice these skills. 

Why Is Autonomy-Supportive Caregiving A New Approach to Helping Children Learn Self-Control?

Studies have found that HOW adults help children practice these skills is important and autonomy-support is one of the best ways. Simply put, autonomy support means that we don’t fix the problems for children (control them) and we don’t stand by and do nothing (laissez-faire) but we involve the children in helping to fix problems for themselves (autonomy-supportive).

That may sound obvious, but it is far from common practice. When I give speeches, I often ask the adults in the audience to name a child’s challenging behavior like a tantrum and then write down what they would do about it. Almost everyone fixes the problem for the child, even with bribes (“if you don’t have a tantrum, I will give you a reward”) or threats (“if you do have a tantrum, no television” or “you can’t go to your friend’s birthday party”).

Autonomy support is different and much more effective. Here’s how it works.

Wait for a time after the tantrum, when things are calm and happy. Then call a family meeting to discuss tactics. You can do with children in the later toddler, in the preschool years and beyond—times when the skill of self-control is developing most rapidly.

5 Steps to Try for Managing Tantrums

• State the problem: When you had a tantrum the other day, you didn’t like it and neither did I.
• Involve the child in coming up with solutions: What ideas do you have that would help you stop when you start to get very upset?
• Have your child list as many ideas as he or she can think of. Write them all down.
• Evaluate each solution and whether it would work for the child and you?
• Pick one to try, write it down and post it. See if it works, and if it doesn’t, without being punitive or judgmental, have another family meeting to come up with another solution.

I know of a child who suggested a secret word. When he heard the secret word that only he and his mother knew, he would stop and calm down. It worked!

Another child typically had tantrums at transition times. She decided to come up with a Plan B—what she would do when one activity was over and it was time to move on. It worked for a while, and when it stopped working, they had another family meeting to create a new idea.

Importantly, helping children create their own idea for managing tantrums is an aspect of “pauses.” Pausing gives us a chance to stop before we act. The other benefit of pauses is to reflect on our experiences and to learn from them.

When you use pauses and autonomy supportive caregiving, you aren’t just managing tantrums‑you are giving children a skill for life!

Reprinted with permission from Early Learning Nation.

Photo Credit: Ambernectar 13 | Flickr

In my travels around the country with Mind in the Making, it seems as if people increasingly understand that heaping indiscriminate praise on children (“good job” or “you are so smart”) is not a good way to promote self-confidence and self-esteem. Perhaps this shift in awareness has occurred because it primarily comes from the work of single researcher, Carol Dweck of Stanford University.

She has shown that praise for intelligence tends to promote a “fixed mindset” whereby children end up believing that their capacities are inborn. Thus, these children are less willing to take on tough challenges because they don’t want to risk losing their label as smart. In contrast, specific and authentic praise for effort (“you worked very hard until you solved that math problem” or for strategy (“you sounded out the letters so you could figure out what that new reading word is”), promotes a “growth mindset” where children are willing to “take on challenges”—one of the life skills I have found is essential in helping children thrive now and in the future.

Sadly, we haven’t come as far in our cultural understanding of another life skill I find essential—”self control.” Perhaps it’s because the findings in this realm of research come from many different researchers and many different studies. Yes, the Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel of Columbia University has gained widespread recognition, but as often as not, I find that people seem to think that adults need to “make” children learn to wait so that they will be able to resist “one marshmallow now for two marshmallows later”—the challenge Mischel posed in this study. In essence, people tend to think that teaching children delayed gratification comes from strict and enforced discipline.

For this reason, I welcomed the New York Times editorial by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang: Building Self-Control, the American Way. They have spent their careers researching and writing about neuroscience. As authors of many books and articles, including Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, (a book for which I wrote the Foreword), they know the multiple studies that conclude that promoting “self control” is not learned by strict discipline, by keeping children at their desks, and by cutting out the so-called frills in curriculum and focusing just on academics.

First, the undeniable importance of self control. As Aamodt and Wang write in the editorial: “childhood self-control is twice as important as intelligence in predicting academic achievement.” Likewise, in Mind in the Making, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia focuses on executive functions of the brain—the basis of life skills—because they enable children to use what they learn. She says that more and more evidence is revealing that executive function skills including self control “actually predict success better than IQ tests.”

So, how do we promote self control? Here are a few ideas from research that show it’s not how we might think.

1. It’s building on what children are doing to control themselves—not imposing strict discipline. Even infants, immediately following birth, have ways of regulating themselves when they get over-stimulated. Watch a baby close his or her eyes if the lights are too bright, or turn away if there is too much noise. We need to watch what calms children down and help them build on their own strategies for self control. Obviously as adults, we provide firm guidance, but we are better served by helping children learn to come up with their own strategies beginning in the preschool and extending into the school-age years rather than simply imposing them. For example, Walter Mischel is now looking at what children did to resist the immediate gratification of “one marshmallow now” for the delayed gratification of “two marshmallows later” and helping children learn those techniques (such as thinking of the marshmallows as puffy clouds rather than yummy marshmallows).

2. It’s providing children opportunities to engage in physical games and experiences—not making them sit still for long hours. We tend to think of promoting self control as making children stay still, yet there is increasing evidence that children learn this skill through active games (like Red Light/Green Light or Simon Says, Do the Opposite) and through focused attention in physical activities. In a time when schools are cutting back on recess and physical education, Aarmodt and Wang write, “Though parents often worry that physical education takes time away from the classroom, an analysis of multiple studies instead found strong evidence that physical activity improved academic performance.”

3. It’s giving children opportunities to play—not just do academics. Though pretend play may be seen as frivolous, it is an essential building block in learning. Think of the concentration in young children when they play doctor or firefighter. And think of the concentration in older children when they learn about another culture by putting on a play about it.

4. It’s encouraging children’s interests—not cutting back on them. I call these interests “lemonade stands” after my daughter’s passion for lemonade stands when she was five and six-years-old. Whatever their interests, we do well to promote them and build on them. Increasingly research is showing that the arts and academic success are linked. And sadly, schools today are also cutting back on the arts.

5. It’s helping children set and achieve goals—not imposing them. Self control draws on executive functions of the brain and as such are always goal-driven. We do well to help children set and achieve their own goals, rather than handing goals to them, whether it’s making a plan for how they will spend Saturday to making plans for getting a school paper done on time. As Aamodt and Wang write in the New York Times, “Helping your children learn to manage themselves, rather than rely on external orders, could pay big dividends in adulthood.”

Reprinted from The Huffington Post