Articles Archive - Page 77 of 91

You probably already know what sleep is for. You know that your brain is actually just as active during sleep as it is when you’re awake, organizing what was learned during the day and laying down memories. The purpose of sleep is to minimize the need for activity so the important brain work can be accomplished. It’s sort of like what happens after-hours at your local grocery store. The shelves get rearranged, stock is replenished, improvements are made – things that couldn’t happen as well when the place is full of customers.

So it’s important that your children – and you! – get enough sleep at night. But now a new study indicates that for children, at least, daytime naps serve the same function. Preschoolers who nap know more than preschoolers who don’t.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst taught children to play a game like “Memory” in which they needed to remember the location of different pictures. They played the game in the morning, Then, during their regular naptime, some children were encouraged to sleep while others were kept awake. Nappers typically slept for 77 minutes. In the afternoon, they played the game again and again the next day. Children who napped remembered significantly more of the Memory game picture placements than children who didn’t, both immediately and on the following day.

According to lead researcher, Rebecca Spencer, “Our study shows that naps help the kids better remember what they are learning in preschool…When they miss a nap, the child cannot recover this benefit of sleep with their overnight sleep. It seems that there is an additional benefit of having the sleep occur in close proximity to the learning.”

A follow-up study using brain scans confirmed that during naps, “sleep spindles” increase. These indicators of brain activity are associated with formation of new learning.

What does this mean for us?

Make certain your preschool child gets sufficient sleep at night and also during naps. Don’t hurry to eliminate naps.
Don’t push your child’s preschool to replace naptime with more academic time. Insist that your child who takes naps at home be allowed to nap at school.
Counter administrative efforts to eliminate naps, increase homework, and shorten recess. Downtime is needed for learning to happen.

Spencer says, “Children should not only be given the opportunity, they should be encouraged to sleep by creating an environment which supports sleep.” Do that for your child.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

You’re just going to the grocery store or around the block. A short trip. Slow speeds. Not much traffic. So it’s a huge temptation to not buckle-in your child. It’s such a hassle to fiddle with all the straps and with your child’s resistance. The risk, you figure, is really small.

You’re not alone. A recent study by Safe Kids Worldwide found that 1 in 4 parents admits to driving without buckling their 10-and-under children into a car seat or booster seat. This survey of over 1000 parents found that more affluent parents and younger parents were most likely to omit this crucial safety step.

It’s true that the number of children dying in car crashes has dropped by 58% since 1987 – a wonderful accomplishment. It’s far less likely than it used to be that you know of or have heard of a child crash fatality. But this drop is not because driving is so much safer than before. It’s because more parents than before take the time to secure their children safely. Parents whose children are unsecured inside a car expose their kids to the same, elevated risk of severe injury and death as existed in generations past.

Car accidents are still a leading cause of death in children. In 2011 679 children aged 12 and under died in crashes. Of these, one-third were unrestrained inside the car. Older kids involved in fatal car crashes were more likely to be unrestrained or improperly restrained than younger children.

Yes, it’s fun to “ride shotgun” in the front passenger seat. Yes, sitting in a booster seat makes an older child feel he’s being treated like a baby. But children who are still not adult-sized can be injured or killed by airbag impacts. Everyone else in the car might walk away but the under-12 child sitting in the wrong place or at the wrong height may suffer great harm.

Naturally, one exception leads to many more. Every parent knows that permitting a child to ride improperly secured even once makes it more likely she’ll ask for the same “privilege” again. It’s more likely a younger sibling will think riding unrestrained is admirable. It makes the task of buckling everyone in that much harder. Here’s what to do:

Make certain you and other adults buckle seat belts for every trip, even short ones. No exceptions.
Do not put the car in gear until everyone in the car is properly secured. Pull over and stop driving if someone disengages his restraint system while the car is in motion.
Always position children in the back seat. Use car seats or boosters appropriate to the age and size of the child.
Make certain your child’s car seat or booster is properly secured inside the car.
Insist that everyone with whom your child rides – friends, car pools, family members – always buckle children in.
If driving during the night, resist the temptation to let children sleep on the floor of the car or in fully-reclined seats without proper buckling-in.

Never make an exception to the all-buckled-in rule. No ride is so short that there is no risk of an accident. According to Partners for Child Passenger Safety, 80% of crashes involving children occur within 20 minutes of home and at speeds less than 45 mph. Riding in the country is no guarantee of safety. In fact, over half of fatal accidents happen in rural areas, according to the National Highway Safety Council.

There are so many dangers over which parents have no control. It makes sense to exercise the little control we have. Making certain children are fully secured inside a car is a detail that should never be overlooked.

How distractible are you?

If you’re like a lot of people, your attention is constantly being pulled this way and that. You may find yourself jumping from the activity you’re engaged in to something else that you’re afraid you’ll forget to do, then trying to recapture what you were thinking before you got detoured.

This is a “normal” part of our busy, complicated lives. Mostly, we’re okay with this. But our kids may not be. During the older elementary school years and middle school grades, children increasingly need to stay focused on the task at hand. The most successful kids have learned how to control their attention.

Now there’s a way to help kids do just that. A study in “mindfulness” with 10- and 11-year-old students has demonstrated that practice in staying “in the moment” helps kids be more focused and less distracted. Mindfulness involves paying attention on purpose, in a calm, relaxed state. It has been shown to reduce stress levels and increase feelings of well-being.

The study was conducted in England with 30 preteens. Kids’ ability to pay attention and stay on-task was measured, then played a computer game designed to improve their level of focus. Measurements were made at three-month intervals to gauge changes over time in students’ ability to stay mentally on-task.

The exercise was a success. Students increased in ability to pay attention and ignore distractions. As the lead researcher said, “The ability to pay attention in class is crucial for success at school. Mindfulness appears to have an effect after only a short training course, which the children thoroughly enjoyed!”

The training helped children actually watch their minds at work and monitor their own levels of attention. The researchers believe a program like the one used in this study could help students who have attention difficulties like ADHD.

Notice that what was used in this study wasn’t just any video game, but one specifically designed to require mindfulness. But parents without this sort of tool can still help their children pay attention to their attention:

Use what’s known as “think aloud” to model paying attention to thinking. When you get distracted, say, “Oh, my mind drifted away. I’ve got it back now. Tell me that again…”
Encourage your child to monitor her own thinking, maybe when she’s doing homework. Help her to notice when her mind wanders off.
Practice doing one thing at a time. Give whatever you’re doing your undivided attention and invite your child to do this too.

The ability to control attention has been shown in numerous studies to be important in children’s learning. Now that you’re mindful of mindfulness, you can guide your child better in developing this essential skill.

The key focus these days in education circles is on “executive processing” skills of persistence, attention, and self-control. The truth is that learning the alphabet and numbers, even learning to read, are fairly simple for a teacher to orchestrate.

More difficult and more important are development of children’s attitudes towards learning. The problem has been that no one knew if some children are just born more disposed to learn or if teachers could do things to help executive processing skills along.

Now we have an idea. A study just published in School Psychology Quarterly found that teachers who support a “positive emotional tone” in their classrooms have students with better ability to pay attention, to stay on task, and to control themselves and who wind up learning more.

Researchers measured the achievement and executive processing ability of 800 preschool children enrolled in 60 schools in five school districts across the Southeastern United States. They also measured interactions between teachers and these children. Children whose teachers were more positive and less negative in their interactions developed children’s executive processing skills and their academic abilities. Lead researcher Dale Farran said, “Oddly, a positive tone in the classroom does not just affect children’s social development. The more positively welcoming classrooms are, the more children are going to learn in them.”

“Positive interactions” include being aware of children’s likely reactions to learning assignments and being proactive in guiding them to effective behavior before disruptive behavior occurs. What the researchers call “behavior disapproval” – signaling to a child that she is doing something wrong – has a negative effect on learning. Farran said, “The teacher must anticipate what’s coming up and not redirect after the fact. It’s a more subtle kind of planning that takes a lot of skill on the part of teachers.”

It’s a straight line between how teachers interact with children and the development of children’s ability to learn and their actual level of learning. Positive, proactive teachers get better results.

What does this mean for us? We usually have little control over how our child’s teacher does her job. What can we do?

If you do have a choice, choose a preschool experience or a teacher who is socially skillful and child-centered. Look for teachers who are calm and who seem able to think one step ahead of the kids.
If your child’s preschool or kindergarten teacher seems harsh and demanding, strongly consider other options. Executive processing skills and attitudes towards learning form early and last a lifetime. Early learning should be positive. If your child’s situation isn’t, then see if you can find another classroom for him.
Practice positive interactions at home. You know your child even better than her teacher does, so you have an advantage. You understand what she will find difficult, where she is likely to get confused, and when she is likely to give up on a task. Be one step ahead of her. Guide her development of persistence, attention, and self-control by being positive and proactive, not negative and reactive.

Keep in mind how important executive processing skills are, for getting along at school and also for academic success.

Pay attention. Be persistent in your guidance of your child. And exert self-control so your guidance is positive, not negative.

It’s a commonplace notion that what one thinks about tends to come true. Now this pop culture notion has been applied to an analysis of teens’ text messages. The outcome? Teen texts about delinquent actions predict their actual involvement in bad behavior.

Over 6 million text messages sent and received by 172 ninth-grade students in 47 high schools across the country formed the basis of a recent study. Four days of text messages selected at random from each student yielded 76,000 messages for analysis. These messages were then read to measure discussions of buying or using illegal substances, rule-breaking, aggressive behavior, and shoplifting or creating property damage.

Students’ level of anti-social texts was then compared to parents’ and the students’ own rating of their behavior during and after the ninth-grade year.

The researchers found that texting about delinquent actions predicted actual delinquent behavior. Texting often was used to plan and coordinate these activities. In addition, the data suggest that texting about anti-social activities increases the level of a teen’s involvement in these sorts of activities. Texting about delinquent behavior seems to make delinquent behavior more likely and more “normal” to teen texters.

What’s a parent to do? You can’t very well follow your child around, monitoring his texts.

If your child doesn’t have a cell phone, don’t hurry to buy her one. The longer you can delay a child’s cell-phone use, the more time you give her to grow into an understanding of consequences and into stronger emotional control.
Talk with your child about the link between his discussion of bad behavior with his friends and actual commitment of bad behavior. It makes sense to adults that casual talk makes something seem normal or can escalate an offhand comment into aggressive action. Kids are unlikely to see this connection unless it’s pointed out to them.
Do not participate in angry texting yourself. If your child texts you angrily, simply do not respond, or respond by texting, “I can’t talk with you when you’re so angry.” Never send an angry text or make even joking suggestions of the violent response your teen might make in reaction to some injustice.
If your child lands in trouble, consider limiting her cell phone use as part of her plan to make adjustments to her life. Getting back on the straight-and-narrow has to be planned with the child’s collaboration, and kids may think giving up their phones is impossible. But helping a child in trouble realize that her phone may make getting into trouble easier, may give her the strength to self-regulate her cell phone use.

With devices comes responsibility to use devices responsibly. Teens are still learning how to be responsible. It’s important that parents be aware of how teens use texting and understand that irresponsible texting can lead to trouble.

You know how this goes. You warn your kid about dangerous stuff or even just things to avoid, only to find they completely ignore you. They even act surprised after-the-fact that you ever warned them at all. Your warnings seem to fall on deaf ears.

There’s a reason why. Negative consequences are processed differently in the brain than positive consequences. The reasons why a risky behavior might be fun are more available to a child’s mind than the reasons why it might be dangerous. This fact can help us help our kids.

Researchers at University College London asked 59 people aged 9 to 26 to estimate the likelihood that any of 40 bad things would happen to them. The bad things ranged from stuff like getting head lice to breaking an arm or being seriously injured in a car accident and included stuff like, appendicitis, bicycle theft, home burglary, knee surgery, losing a wallet, sports injury, bullied by a stranger, and being stung by a wasp.

After they guessed, they were told the real odds of each event.

Then the participants were asked to guess the odds once again. Everyone was good at reporting odds if the risk was actually less than what they’d originally thought. But they were less good at remembering the odds of bad events that were more likely than they’d thought before. And the younger the child, the worse they were at remembering worse odds.

The problem wasn’t a matter of poor memory, since better-than-expected outcomes were remembered just fine. The problem was a matter of brain development. Positive information is registered in many different parts of the brain. Negative information is registered primarily in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for weighing consequences and making judgments. However, the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until late adolescence, even as late as the mid-20s.

So now what? How can you warn your child about risks and have those warnings be remembered? Researcher Tali Sharot says simply, “We learn better from good news than from bad news.” So instead of telling children about bad outcomes, emphasize good ones.

Instead of warning about the dangers of smoking, point out that non-smokers have better lung capacity and do better at sports.
Instead of carping about the need for fruits and vegetables, point out that the anti-oxidants in fruits and vegetables promote smooth skin.
Instead of fussing over your child’s driving, remind her that good drivers pay less for car insurance.

Admittedly, we still will worry and warn. We’d feel that we weren’t being good parents if we didn’t. But we shouldn’t be surprised that children don’t seem to process our warnings or apply them at the critical moment. This we should expect.

We have to be prepared to make our warnings over and over, and in as positive a way as we can. Nothing we can do will hurry brain development. Keeping our kids safe and healthy until their brains catch up is still a parent’s job.

New parents often share a sunny fantasy: they will manage their child perfectly, they will apply the latest theories and advice faultlessly, and their baby will develop into the perfect child.

This fantasy lasts just as long as it takes for Baby to assert his own ideas. Parents quickly discover that child-rearing isn’t something they do alone; their child is a full partner in the process.

A new study of over 14,000 pairs of infant twins confirms this fact. Babies’ inborn predispositions and inclinations shape their behavior and influence how their parents treat them. Babies are not passive recipients of their parents’ efforts. Babies shape their own family’s dynamics.

Researchers compared family interactions in homes of identical twins to those in homes of fraternal (not-identical) twins. They speculated that if babies’ genetic predispositions influence parents’ behavior that moms and dads would treat identical twins similarly to each other but would treat fraternal twins less-similarly.

This is exactly what they found. Babies who share 100% of their genetic inheritance were treated very similarly by their parents. Babies who share only 50% of their genes (as all children in a family who are not identical twins do), were treated differently from each other. This indicates that parents respond to babies’ preset traits and inclinations. Babies influence their parents.

This might seem obvious, but notice that most parents act as if it’s not. As lead researcher, Reut Avinun says, “There is a lot of pressure on parents these days to produce children that excel in everything, socially and academically. Since children are not born [as a blank slate], I felt it was important to explore their side of the story, to show how they can affect their environment, and specifically parental behavior.”

Not only do new parents tend to believe they have total control over their children’s academic and athletic futures, they also believe everything they read in parenting guides. But these guides can never take into account the child’s side of the story. Avinun says, “There isn’t one style of ideal parenting. Each child requires a different environment to excel.”

Parent-child interactions, then, are a dialogue, not part of a plan formulated by adults. The child’s inborn personality influences how parents respond to them. These responses influence the child’s actions in return. This interplay of personality and inclinations is what makes every child’s experience different, even children in the same family. According to Avinun, “parents should not invest a lot of effort in trying to treat their children similarly, but instead, be aware of the variation in their children’s attributes and nurture them accordingly.”

What does this mean for us, in practical terms?

We should abandon our own intentions to shape our children in a particular image and instead let the children’s intentions emerge. We have influence but we don’t have control.
We should not worry about treating different children in the family differently if each child seems to need something unique. Children are not all the same and trying to make them all the same is frustrating for everyone. (This includes identical twins, by the way, who may be identical genetically but will be shaped by different life experiences.)
We should not obsess over parenting perfection. Good parenting is not based in some advice guide but is based in our relationships with our children. It’s a dance we engage with our children, gradually moving into harmony.

Finally, we should remember that children are people too. Funny, special, quirky, surprising people. They have the power to show us things we never could have imagined.

Letting children be themselves develops the best in both of us.

One of our counselors referred to his last year working in admissions at a highly?selective college as the “year of the blood drive essay”. That year, an unusually high number of applicants told the same tale of how one on?campus blood drive changed their lives and made them appreciate the importance of serving humanity. Writing such grandiose statements into your essays won’t help you stand out. The statements sound cliché. So here are the five most overused clichés we—and every admissions officer we’ve spoken with—see most often, and which you should avoid.

1. The aforementioned “blood drive essay” or “How community service taught me the importance of helping others” Colleges appreciate students who are concerned about their communities. But one blood drive does not a humanitarian make. A claim to have learned how important it is to help people, needs to be substantiated with evidence of a sincere, long?term commitment to actually helping people. Otherwise, your message loses some oomph. If you had an experience during your community service that really meant a lot to you, say so. And be honest. Otherwise, consider doing a good deed for admissions officers and avoid the community service cliché.

2. “Hard work always pays off,” and other life lessons learned while playing sports The problem with many sports essays is they explain what life is like for every athlete. You go to practice. You work hard. You compete. Then the student makes it worse by saying sports taught him the importance of hard work and commitment, which is almost certainly not something he would say to his friends. Be original. Tell your sports story that nobody else can tell. If you can’t find a story you own, just write about something else.

3. “How my trip to another country broadened my horizons” This essay essentially says, “France is very difference from the United States—the food, the language, the customs. But I learned to appreciate the differences and to adapt to the ways of the French.” Visiting a country and noticing that it is different is not a story that you own. The admissions office doesn’t want to read your travel journals. Instead, make yourself, not the country, the focus of the essay. One of my students who had never previously ventured onto any sort of dance floor wrote that his trip to Spain was the first time he’d ever danced in front of other people. That wasn’t an essay about how Spain was different—it was an essay about how he was different in Spain.

4. “How I overcame a life challenge [that wasn’t really all that challenging]” Essays can help admissions officers understand more about a student who has overcome legitimate hardship. But far too many other students misguidedly manufacture hardship in a college essay to try to gain sympathy or make excuses (e.g., for low grades). This approach won’t work. If you’ve endured a hardship and you want to talk about it, you should. Otherwise, it’s probably better to choose a different topic. Note: The pet eulogy falls into this category. Lovely if you want to write one. Just don’t include it as part of your college essay.

5. Anything that doesn’t really sound like you Your essays are supposed to give the readers a sense of your personality. So give your essays a sincerity test. Do they sound like you, or do they sound like you’re trying to impress someone? Don’t use words you looked up in the thesaurus. There really is no place for “plethora” in a college essay. Don’t quote Shakespeare or Plato or the Dali Lama unless that is really you. If your best friend reads your college essay and says it sounds just like you, that’s probably a good sign.

Does the tooth fairy leave money for lost baby teeth at your house? If she does, how much cash does she pay out per tooth?

According to VISA, some tooth fairies leave $3 per tooth. Others leave $5. Some very well-heeled tooth fairies are reported even to leave $50. Fifty dollars!

Each year, VISA conducts a survey of parents about tooth fairy payouts. The 2013 survey of 3,000 parents, just completed at the end of July and not yet published (though widely reported), found that tooth fairy visits this year result in 23% more money than they did just a year ago and 40% more than in 2011.

VISA reports that the national average tooth fairy-value of a baby tooth these days is $3.70. Six percent of parents report leaving $20 per tooth. And a you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me 2% actually report leaving, yes, $50 per tooth.

In my day, the going rate for a baby tooth was 10 cents, tucked into a Sunday school offering envelope and slid beneath the pillow under my sleeping six-year-old head. That translates into just 86 cents in today’s dollars. So, clearly, more than just inflation is going on.

VISA’s spokesman Jason Alderman speculates that parents are trying to make up for lack of attention in other areas of their relationship with the child. Another VISA spokesman posits that parents view tooth fairy duties as a competition engaged with other parents, and more cash under-the-pillow demonstrates both more love and more financial capacity, should any other families find out. Regardless of the motivation, the message sent to children is problematic.

The whole tooth fairy notion is thought to be a way of easing a child’s anxiety over having part of his body fall out, by offering a monetary exchange, and also a way of softening a parent’s distress that her baby is growing up, by inventing a childish fantasy around the experience. So both parent and child are invested in the tooth fairy idea and enjoy it. But something in this fun custom is lost when the payout elevates a lost tooth to the level of a birthday. Even children realize that something is out of whack.

And this out-of-whack realization is corrupting. Over-payment sends the message that no amount of money is too much to ask for and that value is not tied to anything in the real world but is based only on what the market will bear. This is the sort of thinking that spun Wall Street out of control recently. Learning this sort of lesson early in life is not the sort of education children need.

There is no reason to go along with the tooth fairy game at all. If your child hasn’t lost a first tooth yet, you might want to consider if you want to let the tooth fairy into your lives at all and, if you do, what role you want her to play. Will she leave money? Or will she leave something else, maybe even just glitter standing in for fairy dust?

If you do have a tooth fairy and you do permit her to leave money, keep the amount within reason. Losing a tooth isn’t the same as losing another body part. A tooth does get replaced automatically, after all. Even though the national average might be nearly $4, keep in mind that this average is thrown off by those $50 payouts. A more reasonable amount – something in line with my own childhood, adjusted for inflation – is just a dollar. Even less – a shiny quarter, perhaps – would be fine.

The fun of the tooth fairy lies in the surprise (and, for the parent, in the challenge of slipping something past a sleeping child). It doesn’t really matter if the surprise has monetary value at all.

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