Boosting Life Skills – Page 2 – Families and Work Institute

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

Beyond ‘Good Job’ – Praise that Pulls for a Child’s Growth and Development

By K.C. Compton

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field, Latest Research

Praise is a funny thing. Words of acknowledgment can be the water and sunshine that help children grow into sturdy, confident and capable adults, or they can be the stifling hyperbole that sets a child up to seek approval rather than true accomplishment.

Even from an early age, it matters whether a parent says, “Whoa! You hit that ball really hard,” or “Good job! World’s Best Tee-Baller!” in response to their child’s effort.

There is a lot being written about praising children these days, but some recent literature has also focused on criticizing parents, calling this “world’s-best” language, “overpraising the child” or “overparenting.” According to Ellen Galinsky, chief science officer for the Bezos Family Foundation and author of Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, labelling parents not only doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, it diminishes the efforts of parents who almost always are trying to do what’s best for their children.

“We live in a world where it’s pretty easy to blame parents,” Galinsky says. “So, I always try to be conscious that we as parents want our children to have as good a life as possible, though we might not always go about it in the most effective way. The most important question for us as parents—or as adults in children’s lives—is to step back and ask ourselves, ‘What do we want for our children—not just right now, but years down the line?’

“I think the role of praise is that of being a facilitator, a prompter of their learning.”

An observer in any public space, anywhere in the country, will hear the Good Job! chorus resounding as parents and caregivers do their best to cheerlead children into a sense of self-worth. The problem with all the “good jobs,” Galinsky says, is that it’s become rote with repetition, an automatic response that can become meaningless to the parents and ultimately meaningless to the child.

The more serious problem with the line of praise that merely tells a child how wonderful their accomplishment is: it isn’t specific to the child’s actual efforts or strategies. Similarly, saying things like “You’re so smart! Look how smart you are!” addresses aspects of the child’s feel-like traits (being smart) and therefore provides little access to action. You’re either smart or you’re not; you’re either the best little athlete in the world or you’re not. The praise of traits and characteristics fosters the child’s desire to hang onto their smartness or cuteness or cleverness that earned the praise, rather than building an eagerness for mastery, a drive to keep taking on new challenges.

“There has been a lot of emphasis in recent years in building a child’s self-esteem and resiliency,” she says. “But I want to see us go a step beyond that. Remember those little figures that, no matter what you did, they would always pop back up? (“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” Who could forget?)

“Well, all that bouncing back and bouncing up again really isn’t taking anyone forward. I’m interested in kids who take the next step forward, who try harder. The challenges we encounter in life aren’t predictable—I mean, look at this pandemic year—and we want kids who can take on those challenges.”

In considering the relationship of praise to a child’s development, Galinsky points to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Carol S. Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, whose decades-long work on mindsets and motivation has distinguished the types of feedback that can encourage a child to seek challenge and pursue accomplishment, or to seek praise and look for the easy way out.

“Carol Dweck started doing her work during the whole self-esteem movement in the 1990s. She told me that at that time, the self-esteem gurus were telling parents and teachers, ‘You must praise your child at every opportunity. Tell them how talented and brilliant they are. This is going to give them confidence and motivation.’ Dweck was actually interested in students’ attitudes toward failure. She asked the question, ‘Who are the children who wilt in the face of challenge?’” From that seminal question and many studies, Dweck coined the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” to describe why some students were devastated by even modest setbacks and some would persevere when challenged.

As it turns out, telling a child “You’re so beautiful. You’re so smart. You’re such a good athlete” actually had the opposite effect from what was intended. Rather than building self-esteem, it created a fear of risking the inevitable mistakes humans make when they’re learning something new. The child digs in and hangs on, developing a fixed mindset that resists risk, which is a part of all learning.

Parental hyperbole can actually increase a child’s insecurity—and may reflect their own. The parent may be afraid that the day their child stops being amazing, they’re toast. That’s a lot of freight for tiny shoulders. The grandiosity can also make cynics of children who have keen built-in baloney detectors and know Grandma is making stuff up when she says they’re the genius of all geniuses. What else is she being insincere about?

Sometimes a parent’s endless praise can also push the child away from what started out being a pleasurable activity. The child is painting and just wants to keep exploring with textures and colors, but suddenly Mom is telling everyone what a brilliant artist she is and showing everyone who walks in the house the amazing pictures the child has created. The kid just wants to see if mixing yellow and blue together actually will make green and suddenly, it’s all performance art and zero fun.

Galinsky says this doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t say anything or that caregivers should ignore achievement.

“Children want to learn. They want to explore, and we don’t need to step completely out of the way, but we need to see if we can help them figure out what they did and what they’ve learned from it. How can they do it again? Let them do things for themselves and ask questions about their strategy. ‘You worked really hard to figure out what happened when you mixed colors together. What did you do to get that new color?’ underscores their agency in a way that ‘You tried so hard’ really doesn’t.

“Prompting them to consider how they accomplished something helps keep the fire for learning burning in children’s eyes,” she says. “When we look at newborns and try to figure out what they’re learning, we (researchers) notice what they’re looking at. When they’ve had enough, they move on to something new. Children explore. They don’t need to be taught to be creative or rewarded for their explorations. The learning is the reward.”

And that, she says, is the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic reward. Babies who are encouraged to maintain their own motivation will usually stay self-motivated, lifetime learners as they go through life. Little ones who get a reward for solving a puzzle, for example, may then want to be rewarded as they get older.

“There are endless books about the number of kids in college who are struggling. Some of them may have gone from a life where they were always praised for being wonderful and they were used to having people fix problems for them, rather than helping them learn to fix things for themselves. Suddenly, there may be no one around at college who’s going to do that for them, and they can feel very lost.”

It’s important to remember that none of the habits we as parents and caregivers have picked up are set in stone. Advances in neuroscience have revealed just how plastic and malleable even adult brains are and how all of us can learn new ways of doing things. For big people as well as little ones, mindsets can change and an orientation for growth can become just as much a part of the wiring as those less-effective approaches have been. As is evident on every page of Mind in the Making, Galinsky is a major cheerleader for those who are doing their best to raise healthy, well-rounded children.

She’s just not likely to be yelling, “Good JOB!” from the sidelines.

Reprinted from Early Learning Nation

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Praising Children

By Mind in the Making

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

Praising Children

Question: I have read that praising my child is important for her self-esteem, but then I have also read that too much praise can spoil my child. I’m confused. How should I praise my child?

Kids are amazing and it’s easy to find ways to authentically praise your child while, at the same time, promote the life skill of Taking on Challenges.

Taking on Challenges: Life is full of stresses and challenges. Children who are willing to take on challenges (instead of avoiding them or simply coping with them) do better in school and in life.

We typically think that children who are praised a lot will feel better about themselves, but this is not necessarily true. It’s how we praise children that matters. Carol Dweck of Stanford University found that adults who praise children for their personality (“you are smart” or “you are so talented”) develop what she calls a fixed mindset. They begin to believe that these characteristics are inborn and can’t be changed.

As a result, they want to hold onto these labels and then become less willing to try things that are hard, where they might not seem as smart. On the other hand, children who are praised for their effort (“you tried so hard”) or their strategies (“you figured out how to put on your sock by yourself”), develop a growth mindset, where they see their abilities and intelligence as something that can be changed.

Children who hold a growth mindset are more likely to try really hard in the face of challenges.

Praise effort and strategies, not intelligence or personality. Rather than praising your child’s personality or intelligence (“You’re so ‘artistic’ or ‘athletic’”), criticizing him or her (“You’re lazy”), or attributing their accomplishments to luck, instead praise your child’s efforts or strategies. When your child sees that she or he can try and learn something new, your child will learn to feel good about herself.

Help your daughter set her own challenging goals and to work toward them. Taking on Challenges includes believing that we can do things even when they are hard. Encouraging her when she’s working hard toward meaningful goals is important. It’s best not to praise your child all of the time for everything because the praise becomes less special and thus has less impact. Children will learn to work diligently on a goal when they are intrinsically motivated rather than doing something for approval.

1. Be a role model and promote curiosity.

Set goals and work toward them and share your experiences, strategies and feelings about the process with your child. It’s important to share why you are working toward the goals (personal satisfaction, new knowledge, etc.) so your child can see that praise is not the reward, but rather, the experience and process.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests the importance of setting appropriate expectations for success.

2. Set appropriate expectations.

Setting expectations for goals that are not too low or too high is critical to developing competence and confidence. If you are overprotecting your child, and she is too dependent on you, or if expectations are so high she’ll never can succeed, she may feel powerless and incapable of controlling the circumstances in her life.

3. Help your child find ways to contribute.

Self-esteem is a key feature of leading a fulfilling life. Children develop a positive  sense of self if they think they’re making a contribution. Help your child find things to  do that makes her feel good, like taking care of the dog or making a card for someone who feels sick.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

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

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field

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.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Focus and Self Control . . . Maybe as Important as IQ

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, From the Field

Focus and Self Control . . . Maybe as Important as IQ

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University and a group of other academics reviewed six studies that followed children over time, offering a rare opportunity to evaluate what kinds of skills or knowledge acquired early in life matter most to children’s later success. They compared children’s school achievement in math and reading between the ages of eight and thirteen to assessments of these same children when they were between ages four and six.

What did they conclude? Out of literally hundreds of analyses, only three skills that children had when they entered school were strongly related to their later success in reading and math. Two are obvious: the children who had good math and reading skills when they entered school had good math and reading skills years later.

But the third skill is less obvious. It was attention skills—the more penetrating our attention, the richer and deeper our learning. As Brooks-Gunn says:

Attention skills allow children to focus on something in a way that maximizes the information they get out of it.

Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia has been a pioneer in studying what scientists call the executive functions of the brain—because these are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. She believes that executive functions predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests:

Executive functions are different than what people usually think of when they think of IQ. 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. There’s a big overlap between fluid intelligence and executive functions.

Executive functions, which emerge during the preschool years and don’t fully mature until early adulthood, appear to have a bearing on school success, too:

If you look at what predicts how well children will do later in school, more and more evidence is showing that executive functions—working memory and inhibition—actually predict success better than IQ tests.

Philip David Zelazo of the University of Minnesota, also a leading researcher studying executive functions of the brain, sees more of an overlap between IQ and executive functions. For example, we might not do well on an IQ test because we’re distracted and can’t pay attention. Also, having a good working memory matters in both IQ and executive functions. Like Diamond, Zelazo notes that executive functions enable us to use our knowledge:

If you ask what is the difference between these two constructs, I think it would be that it is possible to have knowledge of what one’s supposed to do—but for various reasons to have difficulty acting in light of that knowledge.

Executive functions take place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. I love the term that Stanislas Dehaene uses to describe this part of the brain—a global neuronal workspace:

It’s a theoretical construct, but the human brain contains a set of areas that are much more tightly interconnected to each other—like hubs in airports.

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the ability to exchange information across the high-level areas of the brain, Dehaene says, so that our behavior can be guided by our accumulated knowledge.

That’s the beauty and the purpose of executive functions: they enable us to control ourselves, to reflect deeply, and to consider things from multiple points of view.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

Perspective Taking: Reducing Conflict in Children: Lessons from Larry Aber

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills, Latest Research

J. Lawrence (Larry) Aber’s studies provide important insights into reducing conflict and aggression in children, an issue of great importance in our conflict-laden world. But I am also sharing his story because it illustrates the principle that in research—as in life—there can be many missteps before the right path is found.

In fact, this is one of the things that I most love about conducting research myself: it is an adventure. Like scaling a mountain peak or kayaking in rough waters, the researcher sets out on a journey, armed with experience and knowledge, but never fully knowing what he or she might find. Sometimes the path is clear, but usually it’s fraught with uncertainty, unexpected challenges, and wrong turns.

The experiences of Larry Aber of New York University illustrate this point. In studying aggression in children, Larry Aber had findings from his and others’ research, but they weren’t very strong findings. So he too kept looking.

Aber has been especially interested in aggression in younger children because it can escalate into greater aggression during the teen and adult years—and interfere with children’s learning. He wanted to know: What are the roots of aggression in children? When in a child’s life is aggression likely to flare up? Does it continue to escalate or can it be prevented, and if so, how? In other words, can more constructive ways of dealing with conflict be taught? He says:

Children who get in fights with other children, children who disobey—who are constantly in conflict with other children and teachers—are on a path where they’re not learning now and they’re going to learn less in the future.

The focus of the early research was that children who were aggressive simply hadn’t learned constructive ways to solve problems. As Aber says: When one child pushes another, the early thinking was that children who responded aggressively to that push had an impoverished repertoire of options—they only knew how to push back or to push harder.

As a result, there were 20 years of attempts to improve children’s “repertoire” of problem-solving skills. Did these efforts yield results? Yes, but “only a little bit,” according to Aber. So the question became why.

Building on the prior laboratory work of Kenneth Dodge, Aber and his colleagues began to investigate what goes on in children’s minds when they are provoked. To do so, they asked children how they would respond to ambiguous hypothetical situations—such as one child bumping into another in a school cafeteria and spilling a drink on the second child. Which children would decide to push back harder? And which children would decide to use other problem-solving skills, and why?

They discovered a missing link, a link they call an “appraisal process.” In the spilled-drink scenario above, for example, the child who has been bumped makes an immediate assessment of the situation, such as: Maybe this kid doesn’t like me? Maybe this kid is trying to hurt me? For the children who assume that others are out to get them, having skills to handle conflict are relatively worthless. They have what researchers call “a hostile attribution bias.” These words are a mouthful, but what they mean is that some children immediately interpret ambiguous situations as hostile. When there isn’t enough information to be certain, they jump to conclusions.

Given this insight, efforts to curb aggression in children of all ages have moved to include what Larry Aber calls “attributional retraining;” that is, helping children step back when something happens to them and make sense of the situation. Teachers using this approach help children gain perspective on the situation, to realize that they don’t have enough information to know why they were bumped, and to look for clues to understand whether this was an accident or a hostile act.

Larry Aber and his colleagues have experimented with how teachers can teach appraisal skills in order to reduce aggression. Their research holds many lessons.

In their first studies, they followed children from the first through the sixth grades in the New York City public schools. They picked this period in childhood because they’ve found that aggression can escalate during this time. Initially, they evaluated a curriculum called the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), developed by Educators for Social Responsibility. This curriculum teaches children appraisal skills—how to figure out someone else’s intention. It also shows children that they have choices about how they handle conflict and gives them skills for making those choices in their everyday lives. Not surprisingly, Aber found that the more RCCP lessons children were taught, the more competently they handled conflict.

But Aber suspected that the results could be even stronger, so they began work on a second series of evaluation studies in the New York public schools with a successor program to RCCP called the 4 Rs Program—Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution. This program doesn’t separate teaching children to handle conflict from other kinds of academic teaching; it combines what I see as social, emotional and intellectual (SEI) skills. Each unit is based on a children’s book selected for its literary quality and its relevance to the theme.

Through discussions, writing exercises and role-play, children explore the meaning of the book, learn how to appraise complex situations and then are taught how to resolve conflicts in these situations.

The early results of this research are even more promising. Children are less likely to jump to conclusions about others’ behavior. Their mental health is better. And the reading scores for those who initially showed the most substantial behavioral problems have improved.

Aber’s research further confirms that children need to learn how to figure out the intent and perspectives of others when they’re in conflicts. Once you’ve helped children do that, as he puts it, “you’ve opened the gate to them using problem-solving skills—that also needed to be developed.” He says: “That is an issue of learning; it is not just a side affair. That affects the environment in which children learn.”

This story is taken from Mind in the Making.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

When to Teach Letters, Colors and Numbers to Babie

By Ellen Galinsky

Boosting Life Skills

When should I start teaching letters, colors and numbers to my nine-month-old daughter?

First of all, what a wondrous time! Children are born learning and, in these early years, you are laying the foundation for their lifelong learning.

Noting that the brain grows from one pound to its full size in the first five to six years of life, neuroscientist Sam Wang of Princeton University compares brain development to building a house:

A baby’s brain is like a house that’s being built. If you think about all the things that babies have happen to them—we feed them, we love them, we talk to them, they have other experiences with other kids, whatever it is that they encounter—all of those are learning experiences. So, there’s this constant construction project where babies and small children are putting together the basic foundations for who they are going to become later.

Because babies learn so much in these early years—with 700 trillion connections among the neurons in the brain being formed during that time—you’re not alone in wondering when and how to teach kids about letters, colors and numbers.

Even very young children can learn to memorize the names of numbers, letters and colors. What’s important is that they don’t just memorize the words, which they may do to please adults, with little to no understanding of what these concepts mean. When you use everyday moments to help children understand the concepts of colors, letters and numbers, they learn what these ideas mean, and they learn the life skill of Making Connections.

Making Connections is at the heart of learning—figuring out what’s the same and what’s different—and sorting these things into categories. Making unusual connections is at the core of creativity. In a world where people can “Google” information, people who can see connections are able to go beyond knowing information to using this information well.

Be a partner in your child’s explorations and play.

During the early years, kids learn by touching, tasting and playing with everything around them. Get involved, but let your child take the lead in choosing activities and objects that interest her. Instead of taking over or telling your child what to do, be a guide.

Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University have found that children learn more when their parents are involved in what they do:

When a parent joins in, we call it “guided play,” and it always elevates the level of play. So, parents shouldn’t feel like they have to stay out and let the kids play on their own—they should join in, but they can’t be the boss. They have to follow the child’s lead and talk about the kind of things that the child is interested in.

This is where you can add concepts naturally, such as letters, colors and numbers. For example, you can say:

“You are playing with the yellow duck in the bath.”
“I gave you two pieces of banana.”

Even though your child at nine months is just making sounds as a step into learning to talk, she hears and increasingly understands what you are saying. Over time, she will begin to understand these and other more abstract concepts.

Build on your child’s interests.

Sam Wang states that the key to learning is play.

Play is where active learning takes place—where the baby is engaged or the child is engaged and just wants more and more of that. As long as that element of fun and play are present, then that enhances learning.

Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington adds:

As I’ve watched my own child grow, there are various times and various things that light her up. As parents and as caretakers of a whole generation of kids, we have to be tuned into that engagement process.

What makes your baby’s eyes light up? Karen Wynn of Yale University finds that adults promote children’s learning on the deepest level when they tap into children’s passion and enthusiasm, then build on it.

The best way to do that is through back and forth conversations. ‘Take Turns Talk’ are conversations, with and without words.

Pay attention to where your baby is looking or pointing and describe it: “Do you see the big yellow school bus? Beep beep!” Children are more likely to learn the names of things that they find interesting.
Add on to your child’s ideas. Watch her play closely and see if you can help her take it even further. If your child is stacking objects, provide a choice of two different things to add on top: “Do you want the blue cup or the orange one? You chose the orange cup to stack next. You now have two cups. Let’s see what happens!”

Extend your child’s early understanding of big ideas.

A series of studies over the past three decades has found that early foundations of knowledge and skills emerge in babies’ first months of life. Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University describes these as core cognitive capacities that “come online” before they could possibly have been taught, and these capacities need developing.

As amazing as it may seem, babies are born with an ability to grasp many big ideas like numbers, space, objects, even people! These are the foundations upon which children build learning as they grow and develop.

Listen carefully to your words when you guide your child’s play. One of the things you do—maybe without even being aware of it—is help your child make connections. In a sentence as simple as: “Look at the big red fire truck,” you help your child connect her experiences to ideas like space, size, numbers and colors.
Play finger games or sing songs and nursery rhymes that use numbers and rhyming like “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” or “The Ants Go Marching.”
Talk about math everyday. For instance, when you change your child’s diaper or wash her in the bath, count her fingers and toes. Talk about amounts like “more” and “less” and ideas like “empty” and “full” during meal times.
When watching your child play or helping her get dressed, talk about how her body is moving, using words like “up,” “down.” This helps her develop her sense of space, a skill she’ll need later for science and math learning.

As your child grows into her second year and begins to understand these big ideas even more, don’t be surprised if the learning is uneven. Your child may be able to sing a number song and say all of the numbers in order, but if you ask how many pretzels you are holding in your hand, she may say: “two, five.” Or, your child may get stuck on a certain color. Whenever you say the word color, your child may say: “yellow.” Learning these big ideas takes time, but when learned in everyday ways, they’ll have a much deeper meaning.

Create a supportive environment for learning.

Children learn what they see and live, so it’s up to you to create an environment where words, reading, listening and learning are important. Take time in your everyday routines to:

Point out signs, letters and numbers at home and on the go. Show your child different street signs or traffic symbols: “There’s the red stop sign. It tells all of the cars to stop.” This helps her make connections between letters, words and what they stand for, an important piece of early literacy learning.
Tell stories and sing songs. Encourage your child’s love of language by using lots of descriptive words, telling favorite stories over and over, and exploring the rhythm and music of song. Make a family story time part of your day.

July 21, 2025August 24, 2025

When Should We Begin Promoting Focus and Self Control?

By Ellen Galinsky and the MITM Team

Boosting Life Skills

When Should We Begin Promoting Focus and Self Control?

The skill of focus and self control begins to develop in the early childhood years, but it doesn’t fully become established until the later teen and early adult years. The prefrontal cortex is among the last parts of the brain to mature. Adele Diamond says she is repeatedly asked:

How can you say that a three-year-old or a four-year-old is capable of any kind of executive function? The prefrontal cortex is too immature. The analogy I like to use is: Think about a two-year-old’s legs. Your legs at age two are not at their full adult length; it may take ten or fifteen years to reach their full adult length—they’re very immature. But even with those immature legs, a two-year-old can walk; a two-year-old can even run. So the legs, even in their immature two-year-old state, are capable of serving a lot of the functions that legs are supposed to serve.

She concludes:

An immature prefrontal cortex is capable of supporting a lot of the functions it’s supposed to support. So even babies, toddlers, and kindergarten children are capable of exercising executive functions to some extent.

How Can Focus and Self Control Be Improved?

I find Adele Diamond’s analogy to walking and running very logical. How well would we walk and run if we weren’t allowed to do so until our legs were fully grown? When we see children crawling, pulling themselves to stand, and demonstrating other cues of readiness, don’t we naturally encourage them to strengthen and train their muscles, nerves, and bones to perform these complex skills by helping them to (literally) take “baby steps”? It should be no different with the skills of focus and self control—and the good news is, it’s possible.

It’s a fast-moving modern world and we’re easily distracted, but staying on task is important. Focus and Self Control involves Executive Functions of the brain. These are the skills used to manage our attention, our emotions and our behavior in order to meet goals. These skills begin to develop when children reach preschool age and continue to develop through the school-age years and into adulthood.

Children learn to focus over time and with practice.

Be aware of typical child development.

Your preschooler is still working on developing the skill of attention and self-control. At this age, it’s common for children to get distracted or disinterested in an activity.

Watch your child and ask questions.

To learn how to help him develop focus and self-control, it’s important to understand what your child is telling you with his behavior. Be a detective and watch your child in these moments. Ask yourself questions like:

Praise your child’s strategies.

At the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University, when children are given a hard puzzle, teachers reinforce the children’s problem-solving strategies using words like: “Look, you turned that piece around and around to see where it would fit.” Although the children struggled, they didn’t give up. Based on studies of what helps children continue to work hard in the face of challenges, parents and other adults praised their efforts or strategies, not their personalities or intelligence.

When you recognize your child’s strategies, regardless of the length of time he spends on an activity, you encourage him to keep trying, even when things are hard. Tell your child things like:

“You were using the materials so creatively on that picture. I wonder if you can finish it.”

“It looked like you were matching colors on that puzzle. Can you show me how?”

Encourage exploration.

Your child is still exploring the world through his senses and testing out his ideas. This exploration may seem chaotic to you, but your child may be taking the lead in his own learning. Here are some things to do with him to promote Focus and Self Control:

Extend your child’s learning by looking for toys or reading material that build on his interests. Make sure to rotate these items so he doesn’t get bored. He’s more likely to stay focused when he’s fascinated by something.
Limit distractions. Don’t put too many toys out at once. In addition, eliminate distractions. The studies of Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst showed that children are more unfocused when the television is on, even it is in the background.
Offer a variety of ways for expression. Does he prefer to write, draw, sing or have hands-on experiences? When he’s engaged, he’s more likely to be motivated and pay attention.
Promote your child’s curiosity by asking lots of questions and encouraging him to ask them, too. “Wh” questions, like “who,” “what,” “why,” and “when” are great prompts for discussions.

Doing things over and over helps build your child’s memory. Even if he only plays with the same puzzle for a few minutes at a time, he’s learning to master a task while building his abilities to focus and remember. The more experiences your child has, especially with things that interest him, the more likely he is to build skills of focus, memory, creative thinking and self control.

Play games that promote Focus and Self Control.

The more experiences your child has, especially with things that interest him, the more likely he is to build skills of focus, memory, creative thinking and self-control.

Play games like “I Spy,” “Simon Says,” and “Red Light/Green Light.”
Play games with rules, like board games and sports.

Even when you play pretend with your child, he is required to use his Focus and Self Control to stay true to his character and his memory to recall what he is supposed to do.

Category: Boosting Life Skills

Beyond ‘Good Job’ – Praise that Pulls for a Child’s Growth and Development

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