Boosting Life Skills – Families and Work Institute

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Let’s Take Life-Skills Learning Seriously

By Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills

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

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Helping Children to Learn to Take on Challenges

By Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills

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

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

A New Approach to Managing Tantrums and Helping Children Learn Self-Control

By Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills

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

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Promoting Self Control: It Might Not Be What You Think

By Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills

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

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Strategies to Support Families in Promoting Self-Directed, Engaged Learning

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field

It’s no wonder that “homeschooling” memes are circulating fast and furious on the internet during the pandemic.

A few of the memes I’ve seen over the last few months say:

“It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a distillery to homeschool one.”
“Okay, the schools are closed. So, do we drop the kids off at the teacher’s house or what?”
“Homeschooling Day 3. They all graduated. Done.”

Teaching is hard!

Being a teacher is a job that calls for superpowers — working with groups of diverse children, yet reaching each child as an individual, cultivating, assessing, and continually expanding their learning. One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is that parents and the public are increasingly realizing that being a teacher — the job you do — requires deep knowledge and critical skills. They are appreciating teachers even more!

Homeschooling is the name that has stuck, but it’s the wrong name. Yes, parents and caregivers have to try to ensure that their kids do their schoolwork — and that can be a big challenge — but they aren’t classroom teachers, as you know full well.

Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia puts it well when he says:

Trying to replicate school at home when you’re not trained and you don’t have the materials, that’s like mission impossible.

Similarly, John Merrow, former education correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and founding president of Learning Matters, wrote a blog post called, “Please Don’t Call It Homeschooling.” He proposes we call it “home learning.”

What the coronavirus pandemic offers us is the opportunity to redefine education, to turn young learners into producers of knowledge. Not video game players, but creators of apps. Not watchers of films, but producers of their own documentaries. Not drudges, but dreamers …

A new name for a new role: Life skill builder

I have a new name for this role: life skill builder. Being a life skill builder is one of parents’ most critical and enduring roles, not just during the pandemic, but all the time, and it’s a role you can help promote in them.

I have a specific child development-based definition: Life skills draw on executive functions of the brain. They bring together our social, emotional, and cognitive capacities to problem-solve and achieve goals. Studies show that life skills help children achieve now and in the future, that they are critical to school and life success.

Among the skills that are most important for parents to promote are focus and self-control, perspective taking, communicating, taking on challenges, and self-directed, engaged learning. Especially important is self-directed, engaged learning, which centers on detecting and promoting children’s interests and helping to turn them into a sense of purpose.

What’s purpose got to do with children’s interests?

For the book I’m writing on adolescence, I’m following up on a nationally representative study by interviewing parents who participated in this study and their children age 9 through 18. Something I do first is ask parents and their kids about the child’s interests.

Every child can tell me what they’re interested in, but there is a striking difference in tone between those children who have strong interests and those who don’t. Strong interests give them a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to care about learning. These interests fuel their sense of purpose. My interviews are on the phone, but I can literally hear their voices light up!

I have also found, as each interview progresses, the young people who have strong interests seem to be faring best during the coronavirus quarantine.

I ask about interests, because young people have consistently told me that the children who have interests they care about are the ones who don’t get into trouble — who, in the words of the kids, “turn out well.”

Research bears this out. Stanford University’s William Damon, a leading scholar on the importance of purpose, told me in 2015:

I realized about ten years ago that all of the work I had done was leading me to one master idea. It’s the idea of purpose. It’s the idea that if people have a direction in life and if they have a sense of the kind of person they want to be — what they want to contribute to the world, what difference they want to make, what’s important to them, why it’s important — it will keep them going in good times, in bad times. It will give them energy in good times, resilience in bad times!

That’s a perfect role for you — to help parents detect and promote their children’s interests! You can help parents be life skill builders!

So, how to begin?

How do you help parents detect and promote their children’s interests?

Ask parents to think about: “What makes their children’s eyes light up?,” “What keeps them absorbed?,” and “What are they doing when time seems to stop for them?”

You can also help them create a family culture where interests are valued:

You can give assignments where children interview family members about their interests.
You can suggest family “I wonder” conversations: Each person takes a turn talking about something they wondered about during the day and makes a plan to find answers.

If a family isn’t used to this, “I wonders” may get off to a slow start, so you might have that become a part of your classroom activities. Invite kids to share their “I wonders” and turn some of their questions into journeys of discovery.

Then build on and extend the children’s interests in ways that involve families.

One child likes photographs? See if they can use a family cellphone camera to tell a family story with photos the child takes.
Another child is interested in frogs? Look for books or songs about frogs and share those with the family to promote their learning.
Create challenge book-reading contests and have the children share what they learned from their reading with their classmates and their families.

What if parents don’t like what their children are interested in?

From what I have heard in my interviews, this translates to kids being most interested in playing games on the phone or computer.

Parents don’t have to worry that this is what their children are going to do for the rest of their lives (though it may seem that way). You can help parents reframe this problem into an opportunity to promote the process of learning and enlarging their children’s interests, whatever they are.

So, let’s say the children are interested in video games. You can help by suggesting that families:

Help children find out what goes into creating video games or coding.
Help the family find an online course that moves children from passive consumers into active creators of video games or video stories.
Look at the content of the games children like. If it’s something like Minecraft, the family can look for books that share the same themes of heroism and create a family story time where they read these stories out loud.

What if children are bored?

We all know the sound — it’s a high-pitched whine. The timing is impeccable, too — it’s just when parents finally think they have a moment to themselves: “I’m bored.”

And the whining gets more insistent: “I’m really bored.”

Being bored is a good thing. It gives kids time to let their minds wander, to think creatively. Parents can invite their children to take a few minutes, let anything come into their minds, and then make a list of all the things they thought of.

Here’s another idea for you to share with parents. I did this with my son when he was little. He came to me, saying, “I’m bored.” I saw the immediate danger — that I could turn into “entertainment central,” responsible for ideas to cure his boredom. That could become a bottomless pit, so I had to turn it into his responsibility to come up with ideas.

I said: “That’s wonderful. Being bored is a good thing. Not only does it give you an opportunity to daydream and think creatively, it gives you an opportunity to make a list. I want you to think of five things you want to do when you’re bored.”

At first, he came to me for ideas, but I was resolute: “I know you can think of five or at least two things to do when you’re bored.”

And he did!

We wrote it up and pasted it on the refrigerator. Every time something sparked his interest, I said, “Add it to the list.”

Pretty soon, the list had 20 things on it. So, we changed the name on the list: “100 Things to Do When You’re Bored.”

And the list got longer and longer and he was on the way to becoming a self-directed, engaged learner! It is a skill you can help parents promote in their children, during the pandemic and in the future. It is truly a skill for life.

Reprinted from Common Sense Media

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Executive Function Skills Are Essential to America’s Present and Future

By Ellen Galinsky, Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

There have been an increasing number of highly influential calls for America to wake up to the importance of what are called “executive function skills.”

Take the high school graduation rate. Economics professor at Princeton University and former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse, was recently asked on PBS’s Need to Know what she would do to improve the high school graduation rate (where America is reported as 21st among the top 28 industrialized nations). In addition to stating that she would invest more in the early childhood years and would provide more support, including mentors, for children in the 8th to 9th grade transition, Rouse called for a rigorous curriculum that includes promoting executive function skills. She says:

When you talk to employers, they say that students and job applicants … don’t have the executive functioning kind of skills to really be able to function in today’s workplace.

Noting that machines and computers can now perform routine tasks, she states that we need employees who can do what ONLY people can do, such as problem solve and use their creativity. Unfortunately, however, she concludes:

Many people have argued that our curriculum is stuck back in the 1950s and 1960s and that everyone, soup to nuts, needs to be thinking about what are the skills that we need to be teaching our children going forward.

Because I also conduct research on the workforce and workplace, like Rouse, I am acutely attuned to the fact that employers are concerned that families and schools are not promoting the kind of skills employees will need. Too many young people, they tell me, have a fill-in-the-bubble mentality, where they think that knowledge consists of the one right answer to a multiple-choice question. However, employers know that employees are increasingly called upon to solve problems not yet imagined, and will need out-of-the-box thinking. Employers are also concerned that young people are used to competing, where success in the workplace also increasingly calls for working with diverse teams.

Based on my review, the skills I have identified as most essential are:

Focus and Self Control,
Perspective Taking,
Communicating,
Making Connections,
Critical Thinking,
Taking on Challenges, and
Self-Directed Engaged Learning.

In addition to a concern about the dropout rate, and the achievement gap, I can also see that we have a learning-dropout phenomenon in America. Far too many children lose the fire in their eyes for learning that they are born with. And far too many children see learning as extrinsic — what it can do for them — and are losing the intrinsic connections to learning — the joy, the curiosity, the passion.

In the course of talking about executive function skills for the past two years to audiences across the country, here are some questions I hear frequently.

Just what are executive functions skills?

Executive function skills take place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and other areas of the brain working in concert with it. We use these skills to manage our attention, our emotions, our intellect, and our behavior to reach our goals. They include:

Focus — being able to pay attention;
Working memory — being able to keep information in mind in order to use it;
Cognitive flexibility — being able to adjust to shifting needs and demands; and
Inhibitory control — being able to resist the temptation to go on automatic and do what we need to do to achieve our goals.

As children grow older, these skills include reflecting, analyzing, planning and evaluating. Executive function skills are always goal-driven.

Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia, finds that executive functions predict children’s achievement as well as IQ tests or even better because they go beyond what we know and tap our abilities to USE what we know.

How do these skills differ from the content that children need?

Children need both content and these life skills. The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child says it well:

In practice, these skills support the process (i.e., the how) of learning — focusing, remembering, planning — that enable children to effectively and efficiently master the content (i.e., the what) of learning — reading, writing, computation.

Don’t teachers and families have enough to do to add one more thing to their plate?

Promoting these skills require a different mindset so that families and teachers do what they already do, but in slightly different ways. For example, while young children are waiting, they can play Simon Says, Do the Opposite (to promote Focus and Self Control). Or when they are doing scientific experiments later on, they can be taught to think about what makes a good experiment (to promote Critical Thinking).

Can these skills really be taught?

In a word, yes. There are numerous experiments that show that adults can promote these skills in children. For example, the experiments of Michael Posner of the University of Oregon show it is possible to promote focus and self control. The experiments of Larry Aber of New York University and his colleagues also show that it is possible to reduce aggression in children by helping children learn to understand the perspectives of others through a literacy curriculum.

A final word of hope

As we learn more about executive function skills and as we begin to promote them, it is clear that we can make progress on some of America’s more enduring challenges. However, we need to do so in ways that keep the fire for learning burning brightly in children’s eyes, as we help children thrive! If we do so, then I will have achieved my most enduring dream.

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Dads Spending Time on Baby, Not Baby Talk

By Ellen Galinsky, Co-authored with Jackie Bezos

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

Fathers want to step up at home when it comes to caring for their children.

But stepping up involves speaking up—to their babies—which they may be less likely to do, according to a study published in the December 2014 issues of Pediatrics.

This study, led by director of the Providence, Rhode Island Women & Infants Neonatal Follow-Up Clinic, Betty R. Vohr, MD, FAAP, equipped babies with microphones and asked the parents to turn them on when both were around.

In looking at the data over time, they found that babies heard more words from mothers than fathers, and that fathers were less likely to speak in what researcher Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington calls parentese than mothers. When parents speak parentese, they slow down their speech, their voices are musical, and their facial expressions are dramatic. Babies much prefer parentese, and they learn more when parents speak this way.

Why does this matter? Because fathers may be losing an opportunity to help their babies learn language, which is the single best predictor of how children do in school, according to many, many studies.

Myths about generational difference abound, but there is one change that’s anything but a myth. It is that younger fathers— especially Millennials and Gen Xers—are much more committed to being involved in their children’s lives and are spending more time being with and caring for their children than fathers in other generations.

Fathers don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives!

Unfortunately, so much of the research on children’s learning has been focused on mothers, but that needs to change.

This new study in Pediatrics is unique in that it includes fathers as well as mothers. Yet it like many other studies counted the words that children hear and that is only part of the story.

A study that is being featured today as a keynote at the Annual Conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in Dallas shows that counting words is not enough. The researchers (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University, Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware and Lauren Anderson of Georgia State University) found that the way that mothers (yes, only mothers were studied) talk with children matters more. Three things stand out in predicting children’s later positive language development:

the adult cares—they are engaged in looking at and talking about something that both are interested in;
they have done this before—the child knows what to expect because they have had conversations (with and without words) like this before; and
the conversations are fluid and connected—they go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

It is so important to tell the whole story when reporting research to families and professionals.

From the study in Pediatrics this week, all of us can learn how important men are to the development of children’s language. From the study being featured at NAEYC, all of us can learn that it is HOW we talk to young children that makes all the difference.

Ellen Galinsky has been committed to telling the whole story of child and brain development research through Mind in the Making. She is the Bezos Family Foundation Chief Science Officer and Founder/Executive Director of Mind in the Making. As president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute (FWI), she helped establish the field of work and family life during the time she was at Bank Street College of Education, where she was on the faculty for 25 years. Her more than 100 books and reports include the best-selling Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, Ask The Children, and the now classic The Six Stages of Parenthood. She has published over 300 articles in journals, books and magazines. She co-directs the National Study of the Changing Workforce, the most comprehensive nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce–updated every five to six years.

Jacklyn “Jackie” Bezos is committed to telling the whole story of child and brain development research through Vroom. She is president and co-founder of the Bezos Family Foundation, which supports rigorous, inspired learning environments for young people to put their education into action. Through investments in research, public awareness and programs, the foundation aims to elevate the field of education and improve life outcomes for children. At the core of the foundation’s work is a belief that all young people deserve the chance to achieve their full potential and make a meaningful contribution to society. Through the foundation, Bezos has pioneered collaborative initiatives that give young people a platform to co-create solutions, including the Bezos Scholars Program at the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Challenge and Students Rebuild.

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Critical Thinking—The Gift of Curiosity: Lessons from Laura Schulz

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

Have you ever noticed that your toddler spends more time playing with the gift-wrapping than the present that was wrapped inside? Or that your older children lose interest in a new toy if that toy has just one way to play with it, and instead gravitate back to materials, like blocks, crayons, miniature animals or iPads where the possibilities are endless?

I have been writing on the researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me in my journey to create Mind in the Making, I am sharing the story of Laura Schulz of MIT. Her studies help explain what curiosity is and thus how to promote children’s curiosity in the gifts we give them.

I am not sure about other parents, but I didn’t think too much about curiosity except to assume that my children were naturally curious. They wondered about everything that was new and were bursting with endless questions: “What’s that?” And, “Why, why, why.” Interestingly, however, the research on children’s curiosity reveals that is it far more complex than this.

Laura Schulz has been being curious about curiosity throughout her career and finds not surprisingly, that children—in fact all of us—are curious about what’s new. But there are other drivers of curiosity. Schulz explains:

We often seem to be curious about things that aren’t particularly novel—they just puzzle us.

Her quest to understand curiosity has led to new insights:

I think there are two different things that can provoke curiosity. The simplest one is a violation of your prior beliefs. You go into an experience with a certain expectation that “this is the way the world is,” and then you see some evidence that’s inconsistent with that.

When this happens, Schulz says:

You have to do something with that evidence. You can deny it. You can try to explain it away. You could realize that your beliefs are wrong and that they have to change. But one way or another, you need more information to figure out what to do.

Children also become curious when they have two competing expectations or theories. Schulz elaborates:

The other time you might be curious is if you see evidence that fails to distinguish among competing beliefs. There are many things that might be true, and the evidence just doesn’t determine which one is the case.

In scientific terms, when people are trying to understand how things work, they are typically trying to understand causal relationships—what causes something to happen. A toddler might be trying to understand what happens if she pushes her rubber duck underwater in the bathtub. Does it always rise back up to the surface? Yes, it does. That kind of evidence, in scientific terms, is “unconfounded”—there’s a clear and consistent cause and effect. When Schulz talks about “competing beliefs” where “many things might be true,” she’s talking about “confounded evidence”—it’s not clear exactly what the causes are.

Schulz and one of her graduate students, Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz, created a study to further explore the question of when children remain curious. They designed a red jack-in-the-box toy that has two levers, one on each side. When both levers are pushed at the exact same time, two toys—a straw puppet and a duck—pop up. This toy demonstrates a “confounded” experience: there’s no way to determine how the toy works simply by looking at it. Maybe it takes both levers to make the toy work or maybe it doesn’t.

In the experiment, an experimenter shows preschool-aged children this toy. The experimenter says to each child, “You push down your lever and I’ll push down my lever at the same time.” They count to three and each pushes one of the levers. Both the puppet and the duck pop up. Although they repeat this action several times, the child can’t figure out from this process which lever controls which pop-up toy.

A second group of children is introduced to the toy in a different way. After the experimenter and the child push down the levers at the same time, they each take turns. The child can easily see which lever controls the duck and which lever controls the puppet. Then, as Schulz explains:

We take that jack-in-the-box away. We bring it right back out along with a brand-new box that the children have never played with before.
Normally, children would be drawn to the new yellow toy because children are curious about what’s new. But that didn’t happen for one of the groups of children in the experiment.

The researchers found that the children who knew how the old red jack-in-the-box worked (that is, they had unambiguous or unconfounded information) went to play with the new box. But the children who didn’t know how it worked (they had ambiguous or confounded information) kept playing with it, as you will see in this video of the experiment.

There are some very important lessons for me in this study by Laura Schulz. The first is to give children gifts that puzzle them, that intrigue them, that make them want to find out more. Rather than toys with just one way to use them, give them toys that can be used in many ways–that’s why the classic toys (like materials to use in building and creating or exploring) remain classic.

But the second lesson is far more important. It’s how we respond to children when they ask us their endless questions—”What’s that?” or “Why, why, why.”

Often we are so busy that we want to slough off their questions or tell what we think so we can finish everything on our to-do lists. But if we want our children to remain curious, we will find times when we can stop, notice what they are curious about and then ask them questions to keep them curious and wanting to explore. For example, we might say:

Why do you think that rubber duck always pops up when you push it underwater in the bathtub? Do you think if you put a washcloth on top of it, it would stay underwater? Do you think your empty shampoo bottle would float? Do you think it would float if we filled it with water?

Or with older children, we might say:

Why do you think your friend seemed unhappy at the party? Was it something that might have happened to her? Was it something that happened between you? What might make things better for him?

It is by remaining curious that children learn, whether about the natural world or about people. And that is a gift that lasts!

Reprinted from The Huffington Post

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Taking on Challenges—Helping Children to Learn to Take on Challenges: Lessons from Heidelise Als

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

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

I’m writing about 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Communicating—Helping Children Learn to Communicate: Lessons from Anne Fernald

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

This article continues my series to share the research of child development researchers and neuroscientists who have genuinely inspired me to create Mind in the Making. Their work is truly “research to live by!”

I am sharing the story of Anne Fernald of Stanford University because her studies provide important insights into helping children learn to communicate. This is an increasingly salient issue in our times where there is widespread concern that communicating has been reduced to spitting out sound bites rather than illuminating the complexities of situations, texting rather than connecting, and reducing thoughts to 140 characters.

Anne Fernald has been a pioneering researcher in studying the origins of human communication, but she didn’t start out to do this kind of work. Her original interests were in literature. All of that changed when she went to live in Germany, far from home, surrounded by a language, German, that she initially didn’t understand. The stark contrast in the culture and the language caused her to look back not only on her own culture and language in new ways, but also to begin to probe the very nature of communication. This was accelerated by the birth of her two children. Fernald says, “Our children were born there. Becoming a parent in another language is a wonderful experience because it gave me distance.”

Fernald pulled back and observed what happens in everyday moments. She says:

What drew me to the study of language was a moment of epiphany. One of my dear friends had a baby a few months before our second daughter was about to be born, and I was asked to be the godmother of this child. I went to the hospital on the second day and my friend put her newborn child into my hands to introduce us.

To her own surprise, Fernald introduced herself to her godchild in singsong German, “I immediately thought: now where did that come from? Was this a performance for her German-speaking mother? Or was I just intuitively trying to engage with this newborn baby?”

Not only was Fernald acutely aware of her words, but she was also struck by the fact that she was singing them. When her own baby was born a few weeks later, she found herself singing the same kind of melody to her newborn—this time in English.

Fernald’s experiences in a new country led her into what has become a lifelong study of communication, beginning as a volunteer in a scientific center studying infant development in Germany and continuing to graduate school and then to Stanford University, where she is now a professor.

In her own first study, Fernald recorded German mothers talking to their newborns, analyzing the tones of their voices as one would analyze music. She found that the range of their voices stretched across two octaves. She wondered if infants actually prefer this way of talking (called infant-directed speech) to adult-directed speech and she developed one of the first auditory preference methods to address this question. The technique entailed her recording mothers’ adult-directed and infant-directed speech:

I had the moms speak to me and speak to their four-month-old. So the mom might say to me, ‘Well, I don’t take my children out so much, because it’s been raining a lot,’ but to her baby, she says, ‘Hey, sugar bear! Hey, sugar bear!’ I selected little sections of that speech and put them on tape.

Then she “trained” other four-month-olds so that if they turned their heads one way, they heard infant-directed speech, but if they turned them the other way, they heard adult-directed speech. She alternated the sides, so the findings wouldn’t reflect a preexisting preference for the right or left sides, “We found babies would turn more in the direction that would turn on the infant-directed speech.”

The first lesson from Fernald’s research is that we have to be attuned to our children in order to communicate with them. When we are attuned, we adjust what we say to them and how we say it, not just send out random missives of words.

And it’s not just words that we are communicating. Long before babies can understand words that connote feelings, they begin to differentiate among a range of emotions.

Fernald observed that parents also use their tone of voice to manage their infants’ behavior, typically to praise or to prohibit. Curious to know if the parent’s tone by itself was sufficient to regulate the child, she tape-recorded parents saying things that conveyed approval or prohibition in several different languages—French, German, Italian, Japanese, British English, and American English.

She and her colleagues then tested five-month-old American babies with these “messages” in unfamiliar languages:

These little American babies would hear the praise and they would smile and relax; they would hear the prohibition and they would stiffen a little and their eyes would widen.

These sounds—in a different language, from a total stranger—had predictable effects on babies’ behavior.

The second lesson is that our feelings about our children—of approval or disapproval, for example—are transmitted to them even before they can understand words.

In her most recent research, Fernald has examined how efficiently children process new words. She has created experiments to investigate this: The baby is sitting on mom’s lap in a little booth and there are two pictures on two monitors that the child is looking at, to the left and to the right.

Let’s say that on the left monitor is a picture of a dog and on the right monitor is a picture of a baby, though the positions of these pictures are changed throughout the experiment. When the child hears, “Where’s the baby?” the researchers look at how the child processes this information and when the child begins to shift attention to look at the picture that has just been named. Does the child begin to shift his or her focus upon hearing the first syllable “bay,” or does the child wait until the whole word, “baby,” is said?”

Fernald calls this efficiency of processing or fluency of processing and it develops rapidly from about 12 to 24 months and beyond. She explains that if a child doesn’t need to wait until the end of a word to “grab it,” he or she is ready for the word that comes along next, “When you’re a very young language learner, what comes next is likely to be new, so the more efficiently you can process familiar words, the better able you are to attend to the new information that comes along and potentially make use of it.”

They have found this to be the case. Children who processed language more quickly when they were younger had greater vocabulary growth in their second year.

Children differ in their efficiency in processing language. How parents talk with children matters. In a longitudinal study, Fernald and her colleagues found that the children of mothers who spoke more, used different words for the same object, used different types of words, and spoke in longer phrases to their children at 18 months, not only had larger vocabularies, but were also faster at processing words at twenty-four months. As Fernald puts it, these “little differences can add up to a big effect.”

“For the young child, there are always new things to be learned in almost every sentence they hear. So that advantage, small as it is, can add up to a big advantage later on, because the capacity for learning is then increased,” Fernald says.

The final lesson is that communicating is not talking at children, it is talking with children in a give and take way—the child says something, we elaborate and extend what they say.

In doing so, we are not only providing children with tools for communicating, we are also engaging them in using language to express themselves and to learn about their world. For those who are concerned about communication skills in our society, it is important to remember that having rich and responsive conversations with young children is the foundation for healthy communications in the future.

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

Let’s Take Life-Skills Learning Seriously

Helping Children to Learn to Take on Challenges

A New Approach to Managing Tantrums and Helping Children Learn Self-Control

Why Use The Word Pause?

What Is Self-Control?

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

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

5 Steps to Try for Managing Tantrums

Promoting Self Control: It Might Not Be What You Think

Strategies to Support Families in Promoting Self-Directed, Engaged Learning

Teaching is hard!

A new name for a new role: Life skill builder

What’s purpose got to do with children’s interests?

How do you help parents detect and promote their children’s interests?

What if parents don’t like what their children are interested in?

What if children are bored?

Executive Function Skills Are Essential to America’s Present and Future

Just what are executive functions skills?

How do these skills differ from the content that children need?

Don’t teachers and families have enough to do to add one more thing to their plate?

Can these skills really be taught?

A final word of hope

Dads Spending Time on Baby, Not Baby Talk

Critical Thinking—The Gift of Curiosity: Lessons from Laura Schulz

Taking on Challenges—Helping Children to Learn to Take on Challenges: Lessons from Heidelise Als

Communicating—Helping Children Learn to Communicate: Lessons from Anne Fernald

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