Teach Kids to Make Happy Choices
July 25, 2008
Categories of choices trigger happier decisions. In the The Mere Categorization Effect: How the Presence of Categories Increases Choosers’ Perceptions of Assortment Variety and Outcome Satisfaction, which appears in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, Cassie Mogilner, a PhD candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and her colleagues report that people are happier with choices if the options come in categories. So if you are faced with picking, say, music downloads from a site that just lists thousands of songs versus one that categorizes the songs—as rock, rap, or whatever—you’ll end up happier making a choice out of the categories.
This information could help you make your kids happier with choices, even ones that might not be their favorites but that a parents wants them to make. Here’s an example: Imagine that you want your kid to eat vegetables but you just let them pick from everything in the house that they could eat. First, your kid is probably not very likely to pick carrots over candy. But what if you gave your kid categories to choose from for a meal? Maybe you could give three possible choices for the entree, three choices under vegetables, and three choices categorized as fruits. Then, tell your child that they get to pick one thing from each category.
Maybe that will make your kid happier, even when selecting celery over sweets. Give this a try and let others know what happens.
First Year Forecasts Future for Kids
June 30, 2008
The first year of a kid’s life tells a lot about the future. In a recent article in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Benjamin Lahey and his colleagues report that a kid’s behavior during the first year predicts that kid’s temperament even during the teen years. For example, a fussier baby is more likely to behave poorly as a teen. On the other hand, how a kid behaves as a teen also depends on how that kid was parented during the very first year. For instance, kids who got more mental stimulation from parents—say, singing to them lots—were less likely to cause trouble as teens.
As Lahey and his colleagues write:
… interventions focusing on parenting during the first year of life would be beneficial in preventing future child conduct problems.
So, if you think that you might need a little help in parenting, get that help before you have a baby. The first year is no time to be practicing your patience and just learning to parent as you go along. Be ready. Your child’s future depends on it.
Mom Impacts Parenting By Dad
June 19, 2008
How a mom behaves affects how a dad parents. I know, it sounds like just one more thing to “blame” on mom, but that’s not the intention. Instead, this is the result from research performed by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan and her colleagues. Schoppe-Sullivan and her co-researchers looked at 97 couples and found that the dad gets more involved with the kids if he receives encouragement from the mom.
As Schoppe-Sullivan says:
Mothers are in the driver’s seat. This is the first real evidence that mothers, through their behavior, act as gatekeepers by either fostering or curtailing how much fathers take part in caring for their baby.
So if a mom wants to increase the odds that dad will roll out of bed to feed the baby in the middle of the night, encourage him. Tell him how great it is if he does do it.
Maybe moms think that dads should just do this anyway. Maybe a mom would ask: Who is encouraging me? Those are completely reasonable things to think and ask. And maybe if the world worked perfectly, no mom would ever even need to think such things, but the world is far from perfect.
Maybe a mom should just ask: Do I want more help with the kids from their dad? If the answer is “yes,” and it probably is in nearly every case, then why worry about what should be? Instead, focus on what is. Encourage dad, and everyone might feel better in the end.
A Family Carnival
June 17, 2008
Take a moment today and visit the Carnival of Family Life.
The Carnival of Family Life: Father’s Day Edition includes articles about education, family finance, family humor and more, including my Happy Birthday Dad.
This carnival makes a great place to find new stories and writers. I hope that you enjoy your visit!
Happy Birthday Dad
June 6, 2008
Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 73, but he has been gone for some time. So instead of writing about a new scientific study, I’d like to tell you about an old one. This story is not scientific, and it’s not even a study of any sort. It’s just about playing catch.
