Parenting Strategy 10:
Teach Your Child to Think Clearly and Solve Problems
BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT
"In a business class at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, we had to interview a variety of local people and write a report. I thought the assignment was a waste of time until I spoke with a 78-year-old farmer. 'How much education do you have?' I asked.
"Six years of schoolin',' he replied. 'And 72 years of learnin'."
—Contributed by S.G.H. to Reader's Digest
This article isn't about how to make your child smarter. It isn't about helping him get better grades. It's about helping your child love to learn. If he loves to learn, he'll make maximum use of his intelligence and will probably be successful in whatever he tries to do.
The question then is how to instill in your child a love of learning. Here is what I know that might help you in this strategy for raising resourceful, resilient and compassionate children.
What Can Parents Do to Improve Their Child's Test Scores?
I have just completed a fascinating book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen L. Dubner titled Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. This open-minded book draws all kinds of surprising conclusions out of numerous statistics, all of which are presented in a very understandable way.
For example, one of the most fascinating studies is that of a huge education-evaluation project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which was done in the late 1990s. The ECLS attempted to measure the academic progress of more than 20,000 children from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The information came from across the country and represented an accurate cross section of American schoolchildren. Using regression analysis, that is, controlling variables to eliminate any number of disadvantages that one student might have against the average student, the data offers compelling correlations between a child's personal circumstances and his school performance.
The results may surprise you. They certainly caused me to reconsider, as least from what the data of this large study indicate, some of what the authors refer to as "conventional wisdom," but which turns out to be wrong. See what you think.
In looking at a monumental amount of information, there were sixteen factors that showed a strong correlation—either positive or negative—with test scores. Let's begin with eight factors that are strongly correlated with high test scores:
 The child has highly educated parents.
The child's parents have high socioeconomic status.
The child's mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child's birth.
The child has low birthweight.
The child's parents speak English in the home.
The child is adopted.
The child's parents are involved in the PTA.
The child has many books in his home.
Now here are the eight factors that are not correlated with high test scores:
The child's family is intact.
The child's parents recently moved into a better neighborhood.
The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten.
The child attended Head Start.
The child's parents regularly take him to museums.
The child is regularly spanked.
The child frequently watches television.
The child's parents read to him nearly every day.
I recommend you read the book to explore questions Levitt asks in attempting to decide why reading to a child doesn't correlate with high test scores, but having many books in the home does. Do the children learn by osmosis?
You are likely to read, as I have, that there is correlation between reading to your child and success in school. Perhaps how the other studies define "success" is different than test scores. In any case, you certainly can't conclude from this analysis that you should stop reading to your child. Nor, as the authors point out, should you get divorced because an intact family isn't correlated with high test scores. You might, though, feel less guilty if you are divorced, or have not decided to be a stay-at-home mom between your child's birth and kindergarten.
What can you, as a parent, make of all this? As the author points out:
"To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are, the second list describes things that parents do. Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn't seem to matter whether a child is trotted off to museums, or spanked, or sent to Head Start, or frequently read to, or plopped in front of the television.
"For parents—and parenting experts—who are obsessed with child-rearing techniques, this may be sobering news. The reality is that technique looks to be highly overrated.
"But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are."
What the Data From Test Scores Mean to You as a Parent
It may be quite true that if you are smart, hardworking, well educated, etc., that you are one of those whose children are "more likely to succeed." Please note, however, that "more likely" to succeed is not the same as "will" succeed. And remember that this is a sociological study looking at the relationships between what 20,000 parents have achieved in life, together with some of their parenting techniques, and how well their children have done in taking tests. But your child is a statistic of one.
Consequently, if you want your child to do as well as possible in school and in life, you can't assume that you will be successful simply because you have an advanced degree or high socioeconomic status, or if you waited until you are thirty to have your first child. While these factors seem to make a difference when applied across a wide spectrum of families, they may not translate into success in your particular case.
On the other hand, if you don't have an advanced degree and if you had your first child when you were a teenager, there is no reason to believe your children will not turn out just fine. How well your child does in school and in life will depend on how different factors combine in your particular circumstances.
One of the most important of those factors, from my own experience and in observing my clients, is whether you, yourself, love learning. Children "inherit" an enthusiasm of learning from parents. Some parents may express that enthusiasm by buying books and joining the PTA. Other parents may go to museums and read books to their children.
Do you approach each day as an opportunity to grow and explore, to know more than you did the day before? If you have an enthusiasm for learning, it will rub off. If you try to force-feed your love of learning, your efforts may backfire. But simply sharing how wonderful learning is, you are bound to do many things that encourage your children to learn. If you have a love of learning, it will be obvious in the way you live your life. If you include your children in your life, they are bound to learn that learning is fun and feeds the soul.
I am always pleased when I have an opportunity to tour a factory. It doesn't matter what the factory makes. There is always something to learn. My children have joined me in some of these tours, but they have also had to listen when I've shared some minor thing I've discovered about a new invention I've read about or seen on television, perhaps on Nova, which is one of my favorite programs. As a consequence, I believe, they know a lot and seem to enjoy going places where they can learn new things.
Let's imagine, however, that you don't see yourself as a lover of learning. You just do the best you can from day to day and are glad to survive the struggles of putting food on the table. Nevertheless, you are engaged in The Parenting Game and to help your children get good grades because you think that will lead to their success later in life. Don't despair. If you use some of the techniques suggested in this article, your child will benefit—and you just may learn a thing or two despite yourself.
Sharing a Love of Learning With Your Child
Clearly the earlier you interact with your child and the earlier you provide enriching experiences for him, the better, but it is never too late to show your child that you place learning high on your list of values.
Here are some suggestions for what you can do to encourage your child to become a lifelong learner.
Touch and Talk
As with other parents, I found my newborns irresistible. I loved holding them, rocking them, singing to them, and the special interaction that comes from breast feeding. Although at the time I didn't know it, I was giving their brains the nurturing nature needs to build neural connections. (You can read more about the ways that parents of young child affect brain development in How You Can Shape Your Child's Brain and Change the World.)
Although I was from an earlier generation that hadn't been inundated with the need to improve my children's intelligence by giving them electronic toys, videos and CDs (besides, these technical marvels weren't available then). However, by instinctively responding to them with gentle touch and by meeting their need for food, warmth and comfort, I gave them the care they needed, according to the Zero to Three Program.
"In spite of all the recent hype about 'making your baby smarter,' scientists have not discovered any special tricks for enhancing the natural wiring phase in children's brain development. Normal, loving, responsive caregiving seems to provide babies with the ideal environment for encouraging their own exploration, which is always the best route to learning."
There was another way my instinctive parenting helped my children develop their brains. You see, I come from a family where my father was a preacher and my mother was a teacher. I learned to express myself by talking. A lot of it. In fact, my nickname was "Breezy" because of all the questions I asked and all the talking I did. When I became a parent, in addition to reading to my children, I talked to them, explaining what I was doing, and encouraged their questions. It turns out this interaction with them was particularly important. Again, according to the Zero to Three Program:
"The one form of stimulation that has been proven to make a difference is language: infants and children who are conversed with, read to, and otherwise engaged in lots of verbal interaction show somewhat more advanced linguistic skills than children who are not as verbally engaged by their caregivers. Because language is fundamental to most of the rest of cognitive development, this simple action—talking and listening to your child—is one of the best ways to make the most of his or her critical brain-building years."
If you love to learn, but don't have a high socioeconomic status, or any of the other factors that the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study indicated were correlated with high test scores, you can still make a difference in your child's life by making a commitment to having dinner regularly with your children. Use the opportunity to share your day and your child is likely to do well on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), as I note in Listen, Talk, and Guide With Love: Communication That Works.
Support Your Child's Natural Curiosity With Questions, Both Yours and Theirs
It's such fun to watch young children. When you hold an infant whose eyes are open and who seems to be looking in your direction, you smile at her and wonder what she's thinking. Can she see your face? Does she realize it is a face? Then the baby smiles back and you know she's made a connection with you, but exactly what she thinks about all she sees is less important for the moment. What is important is that she has connected with the world outside her own body.
This is only the beginning. When she is a bit older, she will reach for a rattle, or a cup, or a stack of blocks. Each exploration is an adventure in discovering what this world is all about. You don't need to give her elaborate stimulation in order for her reach out. She will do that naturally. You may want to give her different textures and colors, of course, but these items need not be expensive. More than one genius has gone to Harvard, or Yale or wherever really smart kids are supposed to end up, with few amenities in the home, let alone complex electronic toys designed to raise IQ. (See Will Baby Einstein Videos Turn Your Child Into a Genius?)
The greatest fun in encouraging a love of learning, I think, comes when a child starts talking. This is when you can most encourage him to be observer of life without spending a lot of money or taking an inordinate amount of time. For example, remember when you were a little kid and watched a trail of ants making its way across the kitchen floor? You didn't think, "Ugg. We have to get rid of those things. They shouldn't be in the house." Instead, you probably wondered, how did they get in here? Where are they going? What do they want?
Imagine how you can switch on the curiosity button by asking one or two of those questions in a tone of genuine interest, rather than disgust, as you simultaneously search for the ant poison or go for the vacuum to suck them up. When you are curious about the things you find in the world, your child discovers that curiosity is a valuable commodity in your home.
Teachers spend most of their time asking questions with specific answers in mind. When I think about questions in regard to instilling a love of learning, I'm thinking about topics for which there may be several answers, as well as those that have only one. The most interesting, thought-provoking questions are those that stimulate the mind's creativity, rather than ones designed to elicit a rote response. (See Teach Your Child to Think Clearly and Solve Problems.)
Don't Focus on Grades Alone
Tests have value. They can tell you how well your child is doing in regard to a particular test. They can indicate if your child is able to accomplish certain tasks the school believes are important to know at that stage of education. But in this age of No Child Left Behind standardized tests that can make or break a school, teachers can focus so narrowly on teaching to the test that they miss the wider picture.
Think for a moment about what you want for your child. Did you read the first parenting strategy, Have a Plan and Know Yourself? If you did, you will realize that focusing only on tests and grade averages may not have much to do with how well your child will do in life. How will your child's test scores translate into being an honest and responsible employee, into success in relationships, into solving community and world problems, and into enjoying life? What relationship is there between good grades and treating the environment responsibly, respecting other people, being compassionate toward those less fortunate than oneself, maintaining a healthy body, having courage, or expressing any other quality you hope your child will have as an adult?
Furthermore, it is important to remember that there are many kinds of intelligence. The psychologist Howard Gardner speaks of "multiple intelligences" that each person possesses and that must be developed in different ways to live life fully. These seven intelligences include: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Others speak of naturalistic intelligence, spiritual intelligence, existential intelligence, and moral intelligence. While some teachers are able to adjust their classrooms to offer students opportunities to develop their various intelligences with a variety of teaching methods, most often students are exposed to techniques that only improve their linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences.
If you are someone who had trouble in school but knew you were smart, and if you had difficulty taking tests even though you knew the material, you can see that it only makes common sense to expand our concept of intelligence. It makes sense to help children take knowledge they have gained with one approach and use it in another. However, let's face it. Schools are eliminating many of the enrichment programs that allow children to build a bridge of understanding from reading, writing and arithmetic to using their basic intelligences in other ways. So their true skills may not be represented in a report card.
This is one of the many reasons more and more parents are deciding to home-school. But not everyone can afford to home-school their children. Not everyone is good at it. It's not good for everyone. But it is possible to use many home-school techniques even though their child attends public school. At the very least, you enrich the school experience when you demonstrate to your child your love of learning.
Share Your Observations About the World
Recently I was in a restaurant seated on a bench a short distance from a couple in their late twenties. She wore an engagement ring, apparently engaged to him, and was telling a story about her day. It was the best example of "valley speak" I had heard for a long time. She must have used the words "like" and "you know" every two sentences, which was amusing, because I would have expected her to have discontinued that manner of speaking once she got into her twenties.
What most tickled me, however, was the observation that she ended her sentences on a higher pitch, which is what we do when we ask a question. For example, if I ask the question, "Did you visit the museum?," I will most likely raise the pitch of my voice at the end. However, when I say, "I recently saw the movie March of the Penguins," my voice stays on the same level or may even go down a little. The woman sitting next to me ended almost every sentence with a raised note. If I didn't understand English, I would have thought she spent the whole dinner asking questions.
Since then, I've notice the tendency of many people to use the inflection of a question when making a statement. I've even noticed it with radio announcers and, I must admit, with one of my own children! I wonder why we have made this way of speaking more common.
Here is why I've told you this story. Having read my observation, you may start to notice the inflection of people's voices when they speak to one another. If you do, and I suspect you will, this is a perfect example of how one person's observation becomes the jumping-off point for others to make similar observations.
When you share what you have noticed about the world—and when you listen to what your child says about her observations—you further her ability to learn from what is happening in the world around her, both in school and out.
Read to and With Your Children, Even When They Can Read by Themselves
A study done in 1988 by the U.S. Department of Education explored how eighth grade students spent their time outside of school. Turns out they watched an average of 21.2 hours of television a week, but spent only 1.9 hours a week reading, which included homework. When fifth graders were studied about the same time, educators learned that 90 percent of them devoted less than 1 percent of their time to reading. However, they spent 33 percent of their time watching television.
This was before Harry Potter, of course, so perhaps things have changed a bit, but I suspect not. Though J. K. Rawling's writings and other fantasy books have encouraged reading by young people, video games and electronic entertainment continue to capture children's attention.
There are dozens of reasons why reading is good for children, and for parents as well. But it is important to remember that reading should be approached as a joy of discovery, another way to express one's love of learning. If, as you read to your child, you think you have to do this because you want Johnny to get good grades, you miss the joy that reading brings. Lydia Bellino in Raising Lifelong Learners discusses the utilitarian attitude toward reading when she says:
"Reading matters, but children's mastery of reading is part and parcel of their growth as writers, listeners, creators, and learners. If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona, we do more harm than good. If we help our children break apart words, but don't give them special shelves for beloved books, bedside lamps, and a ritual for pouring over books before they go to sleep, we do more harm than good. If we drill our children to ensure that they instantly recognize vocabulary words, but don't notice and celebrate when they have the confidence to try reading the print they find on grocery store shelves and roadside signs, we do our children more harm than good."
Want your child to live fully? Then share your love of learning. Become engaged with the world. Ask questions. Look up the answers. Ask more questions. Explore still more possible answers. Learning comes from the internal process of connecting what is known with new experiences and engaging oneself in a continual process of expanding knowledge. As Loris Malaguzzi, creator of the Reggio school in Italy writes:
"Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known."
Venture beyond the known. Share your enthusiasm of learning with your child.
© Copyright 2005, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT |
What story do you tell when you look at the cartoon?
