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Most of us like Right Answers. Knowing the right answers got us where we are today – pretty successful grownups who feel competent most of the time. We are good at knowing things and we feel in some ways it’s our mission to make sure our children know things too. We like it when our kids give us the right answers. We don’t like it so much when our kids are wrong.

Is that a problem? If we correct children, and make them repeat the Right Answer, even tell them they’ve given us a Wrong Answer, is that itself the wrong thing to do?

Yes. The answer is yes. It’s wrong to say, “That’s wrong.” Here’s why.

Children have an awful lot to learn before they leave our care and go out into the big wide world, even if we’re only talking about heading off to kindergarten. Learning all that stuff takes quite a bit of effort and a large amount of courage. A person has to be persistent. A person has to feel she’s making progress. All of this is undermined if a grownup is hanging around criticizing.

When an adult tells a child, “That’s wrong,” the message received is, “You’re incompetent. You’re incapable. You’re dumb.” Certainly the grownup doesn’t mean all this. The grownup only means to point out that an answer or a thought was wrong. But the vulnerable child hears an indictment. She hears a message that tells her she’s not good enough.

The child also hears that it’s safer to not think. It’s safer to wait for someone to tell him the Right Answer so he can just memorize it. It’s safer to be passive, to be dumb about learning. This is the child who is always asking if the teacher likes his paper. This is the child who watches others to see what they’re doing before he dares to try something himself. This is the child who doesn’t bother to think but waits until the Right Answer is spoken by someone else.

When we tell children their ideas are wrong, we make learning a guessing game, not an exercise in thinking. Guess what the right answer is, we’re saying. If you’re lucky or if you’re smart, you’ll guess right. If you’re unlucky or if you’re stupid, you’ll guess wrong. It should be obvious that this isn’t fair. This doesn’t contribute to a love of learning. Telling children they’re wrong when they venture an idea stops their brains.

The problem, of course, is that we adults love the Right Answer. Wrong answers give us the willies. We hate how a wrong answer lingers in the air, infecting everyone. What if the child continues to think a wrong thought? What if his brother or sister agrees with a wrong idea?

We could calm down. Our anxiety is all about us and our feelings, not about the children and theirs. Eventually, the truth will become apparent and children will come round to what we think is “right.” Or, maybe, they will stumble on a new truth and we’ll be forced to agree with them. Either way is okay. The big issue isn’t landing on a question’s one right answer.

The big issue is thinking about questions at all.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

The transition from school to home is as tricky as your own transition from work to home can be. No matter if your child goes to preschool, or grade school or high school, making the adjustment from school or childcare to home can be tricky.

Here are some tips to make things go more smoothly.

Be present. By that I mean, be really there, available, undistracted. Don’t listen to the radio or check your email and stay off of Facebook. Turn off the TV if you’re the one watching it. Be ready if your child has something to tell you, really ready.
Be considerate. Your child has had a day – a good day or a bad day – and you can ruin it or make it even worse by being demanding and crabby. Let your child get in the door and get settled. If you have to remind her to leave her shoes on the mat or hang up her backpack, just say so. “Please do put your shoes on the mat… thanks.” Keep in mind that you can also make her day better, by looking her in the eye, giving her a little hug, and saying, “I’m glad you’re home.”
Be respectful. You’ve missed your child and maybe you were worried for him about something – a spelling test or a tummy ache. Even so, the first few minutes your child is in the car or in the house isn’t the time to polish your detective skills. When you can politely ask how the test went, ask. But if he says, “Okay,” and doesn’t say anything more, that’s not an opening to quiz him on how many, exactly, he missed.
Be creative. Ask interesting questions if you want to get a conversation going, not the same old tired ones. Instead of asking, “How was your day,” ask something else, like “How was recess?” or “Who did you play with today?” Ask questions that have a good chance to trigger recall the good parts of the day, not the anxious or unhappy parts.

It usually only takes a few minutes for your child adjust to home-mode from school-mode. Let him have 10 minutes to decompress. Then you can ask about homework. You’re more likely to get an answer.

You probably are making the very same transition that your child is making, from your role in the wider world to your role as a parent and spouse. You also have a transition to make. You also need some time to decompress and adjust to being around the people you love. Give yourself that time by being calm and undemanding of your kids.

How you manage your child’s transition from school to home has a lot of influence on how the evening will go. At the very least, get things off to a good start. There’s no point in being careless about your child’s homecoming and making her feel unwelcome and unhappy.

If your child is happy, you will be too.

Babies are so sweet and helpless. It takes a very long time before they can do anything, figure things out, or think thoughts. Right? Not quite.

Babies come ready to do a lot of things we don’t give them credit for. Here is a short list.

Three-year-olds remember people they met just once when they were only a year old. And the meeting doesn’t have to have been scary or otherwise especially memorable. Keep in mind that they will probably forget this person entirely before they are seven, since early memories mostly disappear. But those one-year-olds are paying attention!
By a year old, babies can tell a cartoon of a real human being from a cartoon of a monkey and from a cartoon of a person with non-human eyes. In fact, even three-month-old infants look longer at human faces and human bodies than they do at faces and bodies of other primates. Even tiny babies who don’t recognize themselves in the mirror know what people are supposed to look like.
By nine months old, babies are sensitive to the emotional quality of music and can tell the difference between “happy” music and “sad” music. Researchers haven’t established if babies this young have learned to associate happiness and sadness to a tune’s key and tempo, but they can distinguish between the two.
By nine months old, babies can recognize the artistic style of different painters. They grow bored looking at a series of paintings by the same artist but perk up when a painting by an artist working in a different style is introduced.
One-year-old babies can predict what an adult is going to do. Research has demonstrated that, as a grown up puts toys into a bucket one at a time, year-old children’s eyes jumped ahead to the bucket before the toy arrived there, although babies just six-months-old stayed focused on the toy itself.
Babies younger than nine months can hear every speech sound in every language around the world and back in time. Older babies, children, and adults have lost this ability, since their brains have become customized to focus only on the language (or languages) they experience in everyday conversations.
Babies practice saying words long before they can speak them. Brain scans reveal that the motor cortex – the part of the brain necessary to say words but not needed to just hear them or understand them – is active as early as seven months of age, even though children won’t speak for another six months or more.
Babies as young as five months old have expectations for how solids and liquids behave and use cues to decide if a particular substance is solid or liquid. They seem to have an inborn understanding of how the world works.
Five-month-old children understand number and can tell when the wrong number of objects is displayed. In one study, babies were shown a toy that was then placed behind a screen, then shown another object, which was also placed behind the screen. When the screen was removed, babies showed surprise if the number of toys revealed was different from the total number of toys they saw.

This is cool but what does it mean for you? Two things:

First, don’t underestimate the importance of the early weeks and months and years of your child’s life. Learning doesn’t begin in preschool. Babies come ready to learn and ready to engage the world.

Second, the way babies learn this stuff is through experience. They play with things, they watch other people do things, they have expectations of how things should happen because of daily experience with interesting ideas.

Make certain your baby has a rich and interesting day, every day. If your child goes to daycare, make certain that care is stimulating and warmly supportive. Don’t think a baby isn’t paying attention. He is!

College is extremely expensive. But it doesn’t have to be if you know how and where to find scholarships and “free money”. The Princeton Review shares what it takes to get scholarships, how to apply for financial aid and how to graduate from college debt-free.

When you choose a story to read to your child, do you care if it has a moral? Even when the story doesn’t have a moral, do you make one up anyway? Is it important to you that children “get the point” of the consequences of the main character’s actions?

A lot of traditional stories seem to be built with the moral in mind. Aesop’s fables are particularly explicit in this regard. Think of the fable the Hare and the Tortoise and the moral “slow and steady wins the race.” The story of Little Red Riding Hood seems an elaborate warning to stay on the path and not talk to strangers. In fact, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears bothers us just a bit because nothing really happens to Goldilocks who broke into the bears’ home and destroyed their possessions. It’s as if we’d rather Goldilocks got eaten by the bears instead of being allowed to escape out the window.

Many modern books for children revolve around a moral, especially the storybooks parents can find at the supermarket and other big box stores. The Curious George books have morals that are gently emphasized. Recent titles in The Berenstain Bears series are more heavy-handed. The question is, does all this moralizing pay off? Do children pick up on the moral of a story and use that to guide their own behavior.

The answer is, “It depends.”

A recent study with children aged three to seven found that some classic tales that emphasize a moral failed to have the intended effect. For example, stories that hinge on the bad outcomes resulting from telling a lie did not reduce children’s own impulse to lie. Here’s how the study worked.

Over 260 preschoolers were asked to play a game in which cheating would have made them a winner but no one would know if they actually cheated. A videotape of the process revealed who did cheat and, later, who lied about cheating when asked. Next, children were read a story that illustrated the consequences of lying, like Pinocchio or The Boy Who Cried Wolf. (If you’ve forgotten, Pinocchio’s nose grows longer when he lies and his lying leads to other bad consequences; in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a boy is not believed when he reports that a wolf is approaching the village because he lied about this in the past.) Then the children played the cheating game again. The result? Children were as likely to cheat and as likely to lie about cheating after hearing the stories as before.

A second experiment used the same cheating game but a different story, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. In this tale, the young future president is confronted with a ruined tree and, instead of covering up his deed, admits to it, saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” In this experiment, children were much less likely to lie about cheating and much more likely to admit that they cheated.

So here’s the take-away: morals that depict terrible consequences for lying (and perhaps for other misdeeds as well), do not reduce bad behavior but stories that depict a main character resisting the temptation to behave badly do reduce bad behavior. Morals work, but only if they present positive choices.

The implications of this reach beyond the realm of reading aloud to children. Here are some thoughts:

Rather than threatening punishment if your child makes a bad choice, promise a celebration for a good choice.
Be quicker to celebrate good decisions than to punish bad ones. We do get what we pay attention to, so pay attention to the good things.
When you choose books and movies for your children, avoid those with heavy moral messages, especially those that illustrate the negative consequences of bad behavior. These don’t improve behavior and are unpleasant for their audiences. Even children know when they’re being manipulated and don’t like it at all.
When you tell personal stories, of your own childhood or of what happened during your workday, tell stories not about how someone got away with something or how they were punished for what they did but tell stories about how someone make a good choice, even when it was difficult.

Children learn to make good, moral decisions through observation. They watch what happens and over time develop their notions of how the world works. Morals that hinge on positive decisions teach best.

If your kid seems less capable these days of managing social situations, her attachment to digital devices might be at fault. A recent study suggests that kids are better at reading social cues after they’ve taken a break from electronic media.

In the study, a small group (51) of sixth grade students spent five days at an outdoor education camp, with no access to television, computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices. A similar number of preteens (54) from the same school and grade served as the control group and attended school as usual during the five days the experimental group was at camp. Both sets of students reported about four-and-a-half hours as their usual daily media use.

Before and after the experimental period, all the students took tests of their ability to recognize the emotional content of facial expressions from still photographs and silenced videos. Before the media blackout, the students in the experimental group scored the same as the students in the control group in their ability to read others’ feelings. But after the camp experience with no media access, the students in the experimental group scored significantly higher than the kids who stayed at school in their ability to respond to others’ facial expressions and nonverbal cues.

This is intriguing. The fact that a significant effect was found after such a short-term media diet with such a small number of students suggests that restricting digital access while upping face-to-face interactions is indeed effective in helping preteens understand others. It is possible, of course, that just being outdoors might have reset kids’ thinking. It might be that just the novel situation of being away at camp and engaging in all the group activities that go on in such a situation, may have been the bigger factor. It’s unclear if it was the lack of media or the increase in other things that caused the difference. But there was a difference.

During the preteen and teen years, the ability to read emotions of others (and oneself) is an important skill for social and life success. Previous studies have demonstrated that older kids are just not very good at this skill. So anything that interferes with this or that can enhance it is important to us parents. What should we do?

Set limits on children’s media use. You’ve heard this before but here’s another reason to actually do something. If all that media is causing your child’s social skills to be stifled, it’s time to turn things off.
Increase your children’s face-to-face interactions. Talk with your children and listen to them when they talk. Eat meals together. Help your kids have more time for friends. Kids can’t get better at reading social cues without practice in social situations.
Change things up. The outdoor camp experience in the study was a different-from-normal way to spend five school days. How different-from-normal are your own days at home? Hiking trips, visits to the city, travel to other places, even taking in a movie together shakes things up, gives you and your kid something to talk about, and gets you all in a different, more social frame of mind.
Go slow with educational technology. Schools are becoming more reliant on media, permitting students to engage with handhelds during class and even supplying students with handhelds to use. This might be a socially costly mistake.

We know that babies need human interaction to develop attachment to others and to feel good about themselves. We know that for babies and toddlers screen time is no substitute for real human interaction. It appears that older children are very much the same. The need for human interaction doesn’t go away.

A blogger for Resources for Infant Educarers, the organization founded by the famed Magda Gerber, said recently, “We don’t think twice about interrupting infants and toddlers, mostly because we don’t value what they are doing.” This is a startling idea, one that suggests that preschoolers’ short attention spans begin when they are constantly interrupted as babies. It also makes me wonder, “What are babies doing and what do babies think about?”

What babies are doing is figuring out how their equipment works. They are practicing using their eyes and ears to bring information. They are practicing control and coordination of their muscles, gaining physical strength, and expanding sensory information through touch and taste. All of this supports brain development by creating neural pathways and increasing the speed of neural response. This is essential stuff. It clearly takes some powers of concentration.

What babies think about, to the extent that babies think at all, develops their sense of intention and their appreciation of cause and effect. Babies who see a mobile might intend to touch it and move their arms or legs to do so, then notice the effect of their efforts. This also is important stuff that creates brain connections and takes uninterrupted time to accomplish.

To us, though, it may look as if babies are just lying there, doing nothing. If we were trapped on our backs or tummies on the floor, we’d be bored out of our minds, so we might assume our babies are also. Even when a baby is content, we often intervene. We attract their attention to something. We interrupt whatever they were working on. This, if it happened to us, would make us unhappy. And we might learn eventually to rely on others for distraction.

When toddlers seem at loose ends and preschoolers expect us to entertain us, it’s possible to imagine that we might be at fault. We may have trained our babies that thinking deep thoughts on one’s own isn’t enough.

So here are some quick tips:

Let content babies be. Just like letting sleeping dogs lie and not fixing something that’s not broken, we should check our impulse to insert ourselves into our little children’s lives. If they are happy, they don’t need us.
Keep babies away from electronic media. The easiest way to do that is to keep televisions, radios and computerized entertainment turned off. These things distract you too, you know. If the silence presses on you, turn on music, any music you like. But never, ever park a baby in front of a screen and keep your handhelds out of the hands of your toddlers.
Choose un-noisy toys without a lot of blinking. Watch what children play with. They play with what researchers have called “loose parts” – the boxes things come in, paper tubes, cloth, and odd bits. They also play longest with toys that do nothing on their own. Just because Grandma gifted baby with a loud, obnoxious toy isn’t a reason to let it get in the way of your child’s thinking.
Make certain your baby has interesting things to look at and do on his own. To gaze out the window, a baby has to be near a window. To feel the breeze on his face, a baby has to be outdoors. Mobile infants and toddlers need places to play that are safe for them, without a lot of restrictions or reprimands.

Keep in mind that there’s a line here. While you want to let your young child to explore and consider and think without interruption from you, you don’t want your baby to feel abandoned. No one is suggesting that you plop a baby on a mat and walk away without another thought. But responsive parenting isn’t intrusive parenting. It’s about the child, not about you.

Secure attachment arises, not from being the center of the parental Universe but from being respected as a worthy human being. Respect means having one’s distress calls answered quickly and lovingly. But respect also means being allowed the space and freedom to think and to do.

Notice and value what your baby is doing. Be careful not to interrupt.

The good news is that children ages 2 to 18 are eating more fruits and drinking less fruit juice than they were seven years ago. The bad news is that vegetables are still missing from children’s diets and the place they are missing from most might be exactly the place to slip them in.

Parents have figured out that fruit juice, though high in vitamins, is also high in calories and can lead to obesity, stomach upsets and tooth decay. But researchers in Kansas found that 41% of children and adults eat less than one serving of whole fruit per day, so there is room for improvement. An apple a day may keep the doctor away and contribute to better health.

Even worse, though, is the consumption of vegetables. Those Kansas researchers found that almost a quarter of children and adults eat no vegetables at all on any given day, not even if French fries are allowed to count as a vegetable. So the goal of eating five servings of fruits and vegetables every day as part of a healthy diet is not even close to being accomplished. Which begs the question, where are fruits and vegetables most missing?

Take a look at your own daily eating habits. Fruit seems a likely addition to an American-style breakfast but how often is it there? Skip past the traditional glass of juice and go for a whole orange or a handful of grapes or several apple slices. How can you insert fruit into your everyday breakfast and add it to what your kids eat in the morning?

Then take a look a lunch. Another piece of whole fruit might make an appearance at lunch but this is a good time also to get in a vegetable. The trick here is to serve veggies children will eat, not ignore. Try baby carrots, celery stuffed with cream cheese or nut butter, cherry tomatoes or snap peas but also try kale chips, dried seaweed, dry-roasted garbanzos and green peas, and other snack-like vegetables. Slip these into the lunch box in place of potato chips – those don’t really count as vegetables anyway, do they?

Add lettuce to your child’s turkey sandwich. Instead of jelly with peanut butter, insert slices of apple, raisins, or, of course, banana. Instead of a white-flour cupcake serve a pumpkin muffin. What can you do to up the veggie quotient at lunch every day?

Five servings of fruit and vegetables. Try not to see that as an impossibility for your kids but a challenge for you as your family’s nutritionist. Up the nutrition at breakfast and lunch and feel guilt free at dessert time at night.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

How will things go after the baby comes? Will your child’s other parent do things the way you think they should be done? Or will your new parenting roles divide your family, as you and your partner argue over the right way to raise your child?

A new study set out to get an advance look at how parents will work together – or not – following the birth of a baby. Researchers got that look by videotaping parents as they interacted with a doll a few weeks ahead of their real baby’s birth.

You read that right: a doll.

Researchers visited 182 couples at home during the third trimester of pregnancy with a first child. They brought with them a doll made from a newborn-sized footed sleeper stuffed with 7 to 8 pounds of uncooked rice and topped by a head made of green fabric. As you can imagine, this doll was as heavy and as floppy as a real newborn but looked nothing at all like the expectant parents themselves!

Researchers then videotaped the parents-to-be as they interacted with this pretend baby, first individually, then together, and then as the parents discussed the interaction experience. Nine months later, after the real babies were born, the researchers again visited the families and videotaped parents as they interacted with their children.

Parents differed in their levels of support of each other during the pretend-baby interactions, including how well parents cooperated with each other, how playful parents were, the levels of warmth each parent expressed, and how much each parent seemed to use intuitive parenting behaviors. But the key finding was that the ways parents behaved with the pretend baby pretty much predicted how they would behave nine months later, after their real baby was born. Things don’t change after the baby is born. Parents continue to be the people they were before and to interact with their partners in the same ways.

Lead author Lauren Altenburger said, “Some of the couples were very positive, saying nice things to each other about their parenting. With the doll they might say ‘You’re going to be such a great dad.’ After the birth of the baby, their talk would be very similar: ‘You’re such a natural.'” But others, with both the doll and the baby, were not so kind to their partner. They said things like “You’re not going to hold the real baby like that, are you?” They were critical of each other, she said.

So this is pretty interesting. I, for one, can’t wait to stuff a sleeper with rice and see how much it seems like an infant. But – without getting out the baby dolls – what does this study mean for you?

Your partner is who he or she is and will continue to be the same person even after your children are born. While becoming a parent is certainly a life-changing experience, parents’ personalities don’t change and you shouldn’t expect that to happen, for you or for your partner.
If you tend to be critical of others or overly perfectionistic – if you like everything to be done exactly your way – then now is the time to work on lightening up. Now, before the baby arrives. A new baby brings out the protective streak in most adults but you don’t want to alienate your child’s other parent by insisting that your way is always the best.
Notice the excellent qualities in your baby’s other parent and celebrate those. What is your partner bringing to the parenting experience and how do you complement each other? Parenting isn’t a competition and goodness knows every parent needs someone else to collaborate with. Creating a happy family really requires partnership.

It’s a commonplace thought that we parent our children the same way our parents raised us. This might be true, and if it is, it supports the idea that how we might pretend to be parents carries over into our real life actions as moms and dads. It means our parenting instincts run deeper than the latest parenting advice books. But what really matters – what has always mattered – is that parents get along and respect and support each other.

Now, before your baby arrives or now even after your children are around, is the time to do just that.

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