// BLOG
Praise Hard Work
August 8, 2008
Keep in mind the advice from Carol Dweck: “Don’t praise your child’s intelligence or talent!” That was her top advice in Expert Tips: Parenting. She goes on to say:
Instead, try to praise your children’s effort, strategies, choices, persistence, or improvement. Praise the process they engage in. Focus them on the process of learning, not the goal of being smart. My research shows that when you do this, children love challenges and thrive on them. And, when they hit difficulty or setbacks, they don’t panic—they just apply their effort and strategies.
I know this advice, and I believe it. Still, I often find myself falling into calling a kid smart or saying that they have great athletic ability. But then I remind myself: Praise their hard work. As Dweck says:
It may seem awkward at first, but if you really try, I think you’ll like the results!
No Pill for Exercise
August 7, 2008
Don’t encourage kids to chase every “free lunch” that comes along. Still, it happens all the time. In fact, people even turn things into free-lunch fantasies. Here’s an example.
In a recent online article at Cell, Ronald M. Evans and his colleagues reported that they gave mice specific chemical compounds that gave the mice more endurance on a treadmill. In the very first line of the summary, the authors write:
The benefits of endurance exercise on general health make it desirable to identify orally active agents that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases.
Yes, it would be great to find something like this to treat metabolic diseases. Drugs might even be formulated that provide “exercise” for people who can’t move because of a spinal injury, and such therapies might make their entire body work better. So the scientists aimed this research at useful goals.
But that’s not how this story got “sold” to the general public. Instead, people wrote about “exercise in a pill” or “coach potatoes turned into athletes with a pill” or some other free-lunch thinking. Is that how we want kids to think? If kids do think that way—that they can get exercise just by taking a pill—then they will think that way about other things too. They’ll want a pill that makes them learn algebra. They’ll think that life comes with easy solutions to everything.
Even if obesity takes over the world, even if someone wants to be the best athlete of all time, there should never be “exercise in a pill” for someone who is completely capable of exercising on their own. Instead, we should teach kids to value the effort applied to achieving something. We should teach them to envision what they want and then dig deep. We should teach them to dig in and fight for what they want. No one can get that from a pill.
But, we can only teach kids this lesson by showing them. As role models, adults must do their best to work for what they want. No lottery is likely to solve any financial problems, but a little financial work might. No waist line gets more trim with some gadget, but exercise will do the trick. No amount of just wishing will make a person learn something new, but digging in and doing the work will. Think of all of the good things that we could do—if we just stop looking for a free lunch.
Teach Kids to Explore
August 6, 2008
Kids might be more adventuresome in life if they explore in their youth. Well, I’m really only writing about this today because of rats. In “Social Competitiveness and Plasticity of Neuroendocrine Function in Old Age: Influence of Neonatal Novelty Exposure and Maternal Care Reliability,” which was published in PLoS ONE, Akaysha Tang and her colleagues report that rats that experienced new environments in their youth were better at social competition as adults. Also, the rats that experienced new environments as pups didn’t get as stressed as rats that just stayed home in their early days.
Does this apply to kids? I have no idea, but it certainly makes sense. It’s just the idea of practice: Start experiencing new things early on and it will be life as usual. Whatever you do, you get better at it. So if you put your kids in new situations early on, then they will do better in new situations as an adult. If it doesn’t work, at least you know just what to say: Rats!
Inside an Autistic Brain
August 5, 2008
An autistic person’s brain suffers from some communication problems that mimic the condition itself. An autistic person cannot always communicate with the surrounding world, and some parts of that person’s brain do not communicate with each other either. That’s what Marcel Just and his colleagues report in Social Neuroscience. The basic problem is that different areas of the brain—including ones related to social interactions—do not talk to each other very effectively.
Just believes that knowing this about an autistic brain could lead to better therapies. For example, if scientists know which brain connections do not work so well, activities could possibly be developed to strengthen those connections. Maybe like targeting areas of your body for improvement, the same could be done with the brain. If that could be done, then beefing up the connections in an autistic person’s brain might lead to better communication with the world.
Celebrate Breastfeeding Week
August 4, 2008
This is World Breastfeeding Week, from August 1 through 7. Put together by the World Health Organization and the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, this celebration encourages moms to breastfeed—and only breastfeed—for the first six months of a baby’s life. Today, though, only 4 babies in 10 get such a breastfeeding beginning.
A press release related to this celebration adds:
… governments must ensure that infant formula marketing never seeks to persuade mothers that products could possibly be equivalent to breast milk.
So moms, do your best to breastfeed. To learn more, visit Breastfeeding.
