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How Hard Could Coaching Ten Year-Olds Be?

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Suzita

Sam, the youngest and smallest player on our basketball team had been desperate to “bring the ball up” in a game all season. My husband Todd, Sam’s coach, was hesitant because he could see what Sam couldn’t. If Sam dribbled the ball up, he wasn’t likely to make it past half court before it was stolen. This was 10 year-old Sam’s first time playing basketball and truth be told, he hadn’t even mastered dribbling yet.

But toward the end of the season, in the final minutes of a game, Todd let Sam bring the ball up. At half court Sam was quickly swarmed by players twice his size and lost the ball. When he looked over at Todd tears were welling in his eyes.

A moment later our team got the ball back and a kind soul passed it to Sam, who was then fouled as he attempted a shot. Next Sam was whisked to the free throw line with all eyes on him and the score tied. He nervously prepared for his shot. (They only get one free throw in this league.) Sam eyed the basket and hurled the ball with all his might. We’re still not sure how, but the ball went in. I could almost see the synapses in Sam’s young brain laying down a long-term memory of that moment, which became the high point of Todd’s and my season as well.

Coaching our kids and their buddies was something Todd and I always assumed we would do. Todd’s a teacher. I’m a child psychologist. Between us we’ve done quite a few sports, and have had a wide-range of coaches. I naively thought this combo would make a pretty good coaching partnership.

Here’s how it went. Todd was the head coach and I was an assistant coach of sorts, which often looked more like a good cop and a bad cop. I was usually the one who put kids who misbehaved into short time-outs on the sidelines. And I soon acquired the nugget of wisdom that the quickest way to stop an elementary-aged boy from talking when he should be listening was to have someone else’s Mom (me) sit right next to him.

The honest truth is coaching kids turned out to be much more challenging for Todd and me than either of us expected, for reasons which changed with each new group of kids. In coaching basketball for 4 years at the YMCA, for instance, Todd became the one who always said yes to adding boys who’d never played basketball to his roster. I mean isn’t this what the YMCA is all about, introducing kids to new sports? But because of this we often had “Bad News Bears” teams who rarely won. We noticed that as the boys got older, this was more challenging for them to accept, no matter how much we praised the effort they put in.

We did at least follow the advice of sports psychologists Ronald Smith and Frank Smoll of the University of Washington, in concentrating on player effort. These researchers advise focusing on effort and commitment because those are within the players’ control, unlike the skill-level of the other team. Smith and Smoll also emphasize the importance of a positive relationship between coach and players. I’m reminded of the kids on Todd’s teams who’ve pulled him aside before or after practice to share some non-sports accomplishment with him.

My energetic and upbeat friend Lila has coached her daughters’ first through fourth grade soccer teams for the last 4 years. She also understands the value of getting to know each girl on her team. At the beginning of their work together, Lila talks to each player about her personal hopes and goals for that season.

Although Lila has been successful in many areas as a girls’ soccer coach, she has struggled with her younger daughter’s response to having her mother as coach. Last year Ava, age 7, didn’t appreciate the attention her mother gave to the other players. “You act like you like them more than me!” Eventually Lila talked with Ava about this at home, and they came up with a hand-signal code Ava could use with her mom to let her know when she was upset at practice. Then they agreed on some small overtures Lila could make to Ava at those difficult times.

Lila and Todd are both blessed with deep wells of patience which they draw on regularly as coaches. (I notice this in others because my well tends to be slightly more shallow.) But a coach needs more than simply patience to teach young players a new sport. Smith and Smoll have created DVDs for parents and coaches which describe their coaching strategies supported by many years of research. One of these strategies is that the progression for teaching a skill is:

1. Demonstrate. 2. Explain (briefly). 3. Practice.

These sports psychologists tell coaches that player mistakes should be used as teachable moments. However, when a coach is using a mistake for teaching purposes, s/he should use the “positive sandwich” method. First, note something the player is doing well. Next follow this comment with specific technical instruction. And finally end with a note of encouragement. Praising players when they are giving their maximum effort goes a long way toward increasing effort and commitment during the season.

In one study Smith and Smoll found that girls who played basketball for coaches who’d been trained in these methods had decreased anxiety overall, while girls who played for untrained coaches had increased anxiety as the season progressed.

For many of the above reasons, and because Todd and I have each had coaches who have left negative marks on us, we put a lot of thought into choosing coaches for our kids.

What to Look for in a Coach for Your Child:

The coach shows good sportsmanship at games and spends consistent time teaching players about sportsmanship.
The players like and respect the coach and are motivated to work hard when they are around him or her.
The coach praises kids when they work hard, and doesn’t give empty, undeserved praise.
The coach is able to understand each child’s current abilities and pushes each appropriately for their level.
S/he wants the kids to enjoy playing the sport and isn’t focused only on winning.
In a recreational setting, the coach gives all kids relatively equal playing time at games.

What to Consider If You’ve Decided to Coach Youth Sports:

Try to find another team parent to be an assistant coach, but make sure his or her coaching style is similar to yours.
Get to know your players’ parents. Ask them their goals for their child regarding this athletic experience.
Spend time developing relationships with each player, and ask them their personal goals for the season.
If your own child is playing on the team, talk to her ahead of time about her concerns about you as coach, and check-in with her regularly throughout the season.
Read some books on how to coach kids’ sports.
Come to each practice with many options, so that you can drop a drill that isn’t working. Expect this situation to occur somewhat consistently.

I think I expected the experience of coaching youth sports to be more mild and calm, probably influenced by watching too many After School Special, Hallmark-sponsored TV shows as a child. My vision of the coaching experience was similar to one of those hazy photographs where the bright colors have been tempered.

But what Todd and I found is that when you’re actually working with a team, it’s quite intense. The highs are high and the lows are low (much more like adolescence than middle childhood). The beginning of a new season can feel like strapping yourself into a rollercoaster you’ve never ridden before.

I guess I’ll just chalk coaching up to one of the numerous parenting experiences that did not play out as we expected, but I’m glad we took on just the same.

Please forward this to anyone you know who coaches kids’ sports!

And feel free to leave a comment below on your experience with coaches–

Posted in Active Kids & Families | Tagged coaching kids soccer, coaching my child, coaching youth basketball, Frank Smoll, how to find a good coach for my child, kids recreational sports, positive sandwich method of feedback, Ronald Smith, sports psychologists for kids sports, sportsmanship for kids | 1 Comment

Teaching Kids to Advocate for Themselves – And 5 Ways to Help Little Kids Learn This Skill

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Suzita

Recently my husband Todd, and Daniel, our fifth grader, walked in the door on a particularly gray and blustery afternoon, their grim faces matching the outdoor weather. “What’s wrong?” I wanted to know. “Daniel’s teacher put him next to Jonah for another month, maybe we should talk to her this time,” Todd said with that exhausted, one-more-thing-on-the-to-do-list look. Todd is usually pretty good at not getting drawn into our kids’ problems, so either it had been a particularly tiring week at work, or Daniel was quite upset about this one (or both).

Jonah is a bright, interesting kid in Daniel’s class, but he can also be impulsive, loud, and off-topic, especially toward the end of the day. Jonah’s apparently got a few mental health diagnoses which he gladly offered Daniel a while back as the reasons for his troublesome behavior. Their teacher changes the class table arrangements every month, and Daniel was frustrated because after just one month off, he was sitting next to Jonah yet again.

“It’s so unfair and annoying, Mama! Jonah talks all the time. We’ll be working on writing or math and he’ll just blurt something out or ask me a question about the Broncos’ game this weekend. And he always ends up getting me in trouble!” Daniel didn’t come right out and ask me to call his teacher, but I could tell this was what he was thinking.

However, what my frustrated child didn’t realize was that I’d been reading, Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World, by Stuart Diamond. I’ve decided to read this rather thick tome at least once a year because there is so much to be gained within its pages. (Here’s the post I wrote after last year’s read.) Getting More is a summary of the semester-long negotiation class Diamond teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Business School. My sister, who took the class, says it’s a favorite among students. And Daniel also didn’t know that I’d just been reading the section on teaching your children to negotiate.

We all know, or at least have read somewhere, that we’re supposed to have our kids solve their own problems. But so much of the parenting literature just stops there, or perhaps gives the vague advice that we can “help” them to solve their own problems. How do we do this exactly? Turns out Diamond’s book on negotiation has some very practical advice, because after all isn’t advocating simply negotiating for oneself?

I think the message our kids often get is that advocating for themselves involves going to the person they are having a problem with and telling them what they want as clearly as possible. We kind of feel like we’ve done our parenting job if our kids manage to pull this off. But my guess is that usually our kids forget to consider what Diamond emphasizes is the most important consideration in a negotiation–the person you are talking to. Diamond’s second negotiation strategy (right after clarifying your own goals) is: It’s about Them.

“You can’t persuade people of anything unless you know the pictures in their heads: their perceptions, sensibilities, needs, how they make commitments, whether they are trustworthy….Think of yourself as the least important person in the negotiation. You must do role reversal, putting yourself in their shoes and trying to put them in yours.”

Diamond also suggests thinking about whether a third person (perhaps a boss or teacher) could be playing a role in the situation without our realizing it.

It occurred to me that we parents could help our kids get into the head of the person with whom they’re negotiating. We have more life experience and can often better generate ideas of what else might be happening in the situation.

So my relieved husband walked off to grade some papers, and left me to try my hand at teaching negotiation skills to Daniel. “Okay, even though your problem is with Jonah, you are talking to your teacher about this situation, so it’s her we want to think about first,” I said. I pointed out that Daniel is one of the older kids in the class, while Jonah is one of the younger ones and asked, “Is it possible your teacher purposely puts you next to Jonah because she knows you’re older and you may be able to help Jonah stay focused on his work?”

Daniel thought carefully about my question. “Yes. I think this is why she keeps putting Jonah next to me, because she also asks me to stand next to Jonah when we line up to go somewhere. But I don’t think she realizes how much it bugs me when he talks to me when I’m writing!”

I then asked Daniel whether he knew of parents who’d complained about Jonah to his teacher. Daniel said at least one had, and that Jonah regularly met with the principal too. As Daniel and I discussed the situation as fully as we could, we wondered whether his teacher and the principal were feeling pretty frustrated with Jonah. If this was the case, I told Daniel that it wasn’t likely his teacher would simply move him away from Jonah, because she may need Daniel to be her helper on this one.

Daniel decided to email his teacher. He figured emailing would be easier than talking with her in person where he might get nervous not follow through. He didn’t ask his teacher to move him to a new table. Instead he told her how distracted he got when Jonah talked at him while he tried to concentrate on writing and math.

The next day Daniel’s teacher had a proposition for him, after reading his email. She suggested Daniel use certain words with Jonah each time he was distracting. If these words didn’t help after three times, Daniel could ask her for help. She also told him he would not get in trouble for speaking out in class without being called on in this particular situation. Daniel felt immediate relief and agreed to try the new plan.

I was glad Daniel was successful with advocating for himself, because then next time he faced a similar problem, I could remind him how this one had worked out. And honestly this had been enough work for me, and I was ready to take a little break from thinking about negotiation.

Of course I was I forgetting one crucial thing. When you have three kids, you don’t always get to decide when to stop thinking about negotiation. That evening as I drove Annie home from gymnastics class I could tell she was in a bad mood. She angrily informed me that her teacher had not let her try a flip into the foam pit at gymnastics. “It’s so unfair! I’m as good as the other girls. She let this one girl who’s only seven try one, but not me and I’m eight!”

I don’t think Annie was factoring in that I’d stayed to watch her gymnastics class this time. Though I’d spent some of the time reading my Getting More negotiation book, I did catch the part of the class where the girls were doing front flips, with the teacher’s help, into a pit of soft foam blocks. I’d seen that Annie needed quite a bit of help from her teacher. I’d also watched the other girl Annie spoke of demonstrate she was clearly ready to try a flip on her own. This same girl, who Annie claimed was seven, was also at least a foot taller than Annie and wearing a bra. I’m thinking she was more likely twelve than seven!

I listened to Annie vent all the way home about the injustice of it all, but in my head I thought highly of her gymnastics teacher for setting limits with a child who wasn’t ready to try a new skill on her own yet. I quickly decided this was a negotiation I wasn’t going to enter into. My eight year-old was more likely hungry, tired, and thus cranky after her gymnastics class. No doubt there would be more appropriate situations in the future within which Annie could practice advocating for herself, but I was secretly relieved this wasn’t one of them.

5 Ways to Begin Building Self-Advocacy Skills with Young Children

Have kids order for themselves at restaurants.
Have kids make eye contact when talking to adults they know outside the family.
If a problem arises that can be solved via email, have a young child dictate an email to you. Type it in their words.
Help the child think through a problem by asking open-ended questions such as: What do you want to happen? What do you think you’ll do first? What do you think he’ll say?
Role play the negotiation with your child before they make their official attempt.

I’d love to hear other examples of children advocating for themselves. Please leave a comment below!

Posted in Life Skills | Tagged advocacy in little kids, child has problem with another student, child needs to talk to teacher, how can my son talk with his teacher, my daughter is shy at school, my kid needs to speak up in class, self advocacy, Stuart Diamond, student emails teacher, teaching kids to negotiate, teaching young kids to problem-solve | 4 Comments

6 Inexpensive Ways to Weave Exercise Into Your Kid’s Life – And New Reasons You (and Her Teacher) Will Be Glad You Did!

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Suzita

Here’s my little secret: When my kids were young (maybe ages 2-7) I spent far too much time worrying about how tireless/active/hyper they were. In my own non-scientific playground research, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that my kids were on the extreme end of the spectrum for physical activity. This finding exhausted my already-tired self. And honestly it felt unfair. I had three kids — at least one of them should have come out as one of those calm children who spend hours drawing! I was also tired because no matter how many hours those sleep books said my kids should be sleeping, they seemed to need a good 1-2 hours less than recommended, and each rose at 6 a.m. like clockwork.

On one particularly moody day, I shared these insights with my Mom, assuming she’d feel some sympathy for me. She’d had two girls, and I was sure we were vastly easier to manage than my brood. “That’s exactly what I used to think about you,” she responded emphatically. “It was true too! You were more active than the other girls you played with and don’t even get me started on how little you slept!” My first thought was, I think I’ll keep this from my husband. All these years I’ve been secretly blaming him for our over-active non-sleepers.

Still, my Mom helped me settle down and accept my plight. In the large scheme of things my burden was obviously quite light. I simply had to embrace exercise! My kids were telling me with their bodies that exercise needed to be a large part of our days. I started giving myself regular pep-talks, “These kids are going to keep you in shape! And you can get a lot done when you rise at dawn. Target is practically empty at 8 a.m.” This was the phase of my life when I never wore shoes I couldn’t run in. Come to think of it, I still don’t. Maybe some day I’ll wear flip-flops again.

The more I planned our days around getting enough exercise, the more I came across articles reminding me of its benefits. This knowledge helped on those sleepy mornings when we were the sole people at our neighborhood park at 7:30 a.m. We live in a small, cottage-like house which simply didn’t have the space for the rambunctious activity my kids craved.

Sometimes I look back on that phase of my life, now thankfully a blurry memory, and wonder did I really do that? Then last month I was at a neighborhood party talking with a woman who lives across the street from our local playground. She said, “I remember you! You don’t know me, but I used to watch you playing with your kids at the park on early mornings. I watched you through my kitchen window while I made my breakfast.” So, it must have been me, or Todd, although he complained about it a lot less. (He’s always been an early riser. My kids get that gene from him!)

Okay, the benefits of regular physical activity. It can:

Boost Cognitive Ability
Increase Motivation
Improve Concentration
Increase Creativity
Lift Depression (and may be as effective as antidepressants for treating depression)
Reduce Anxiety

It was motivating to be reminded of these benefits. Most things we do frequently we eventually improve at. Over time Todd and I got better at meeting our kids’ voracious needs for physical activity, mostly by appropriating the resourceful techniques of other desperate parents.

6 Inexpensive Ways to Keep Your Kids Moving Daily

1. The simple frisbee for modified golf. Make sure each child has one of their own. Go to an open space with sporadic trees, fences, or playground equipment and challenge your kids to “hit that faraway tree with the frisbee.” They can count how many tries it takes if this doesn’t start competitive arguments. (In my family it often does.) When they hit the tree, have them try for the next object. Encourage running from throw to throw. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that we stole this idea from a man exercising his dogs.

2. Time your kids while they move fast. Use the secondhand on your watch, or even better, a basic stopwatch to time your kids doing almost anything aerobic. You’ll be surprised at how many activities kids come up with for you to watch and time. We’ve found it more motivating to measure them against themselves than comparing their time to an older sibling’s.

3. Find other ways to measure your kids’ athletic prowess. I once had 6 kids running back and forth for 45 minutes straight by setting up a long jump course at the playground and measuring their jumps.

4. Fly a kite. As an adult who is not an avid kite flier, I had no memory of how much running went into kite flying. Not only does the person trying to launch the kite run back and forth, but the three kids “chasing the kite” also run like crazy. You just need to make sure the goal isn’t to get the kite flying high (that’s when all the standing around takes place), but for the kids to run around pulling it behind them.

5. Create an indoor obstacle course on rainy days. Crawl under a chair, jump up the stairs, hop in and out of a hula hoop. To keep them going longer, pull out the stopwatch again.

6. Bike with your kids to do errands. Once kids are old enough to bicycle safely on their own, it’s amazing how much calmer they are in the grocery store when they’ve used up their extra energy biking there. Walking at a good pace is also an option for errand-running, and more conducive to conversation.

Of course all this activity wasn’t about training my young kids for future Olympic bids. It was merely satisfying the strong drive their little bodies had to move.

Use Exercise to Support Emotion Regulation in Kids

Early Morning Exercise. When one of my kids has a stressful event taking place at school, I take an early morning walk with him or her that day. Sometimes we talk about the upcoming event or situation, and sometimes we talk about everything but the stressor. But brisk walking before school calms my kids on anxious days.

Exercise as an Antidote to a “Day After Christmas Mood.” This idea was spawned this month out of desperation. Daniel, our 11 year-old, recently played a main role in a musical. He loved everything about it: the practices, his fellow actors, the camaraderie, the performances. And then it was over. I see now that after such a wonderful experience, Daniel had nowhere to go but down. He’d been in a cranky, irritable, fight-provoking mood for two days by the time we finally talked through things. One of the strategies we came up with to help Daniel through this emotional rollercoaster period after his next play, was to have him exercise even more than usual during the post-excitement transition.

3 Ways Well-Timed Physical Activity Can Make a Parent’s Life Easier

1. If kids can run around hard after school, they can put the school day behind them, and sit down to their homework in a calmer state of mind (and body). In addition to this, brain science shows that exercise increases brain volume (both gray and white matter), vascularization, blood flow, and additional functional measures. I’m not even sure what all of these things are, but they sound like they’ll help my kids get their homework done more efficiently and accurately. To me this says less homework help (by parents) and less homework complaining (by children). This works for me!

2. My friend Tina’s daughter has always been a light, finicky eater who hates to stay at the dinner table for long. One year it happened that her daughter’s soccer practice (during which the kids ran all out for much of the time) ended about an hour before dinnertime. During that soccer season, Tina noticed her daughter began eating much more at dinner and was less fidgety at the table. From then on, Tina made it a priority to get her daughter some type of exercise during the pre-dinner time period.

3. I’ve heard similar stories of families with poor sleepers who upped the level of physical activity in their children’s lives and found that the children fell asleep more easily and stayed asleep better. One caveat to this strategy is that the exercise must end at least two hours before bedtime so that the children have enough time to fully wind down from it.

We used to laugh at this sign when we were kids. “Where are all the Slow Children?!”

Now that my kids are older, their bodies seem more and more under their own control. Again, sometimes I wonder if they really were as active as my memory suggests. However, the other day my children found videos we’d made of them as preschoolers. In one I was attempting to interview my 5 year-old son about all his favorites (friend, color, toy, playground activity, etc.). The camera is focused on his chubby-cheeked face as he stands in front of me. But in the corner of the frame you can see the top of another head popping in and out of view. It’s my 3 year-old son Daniel jumping up and down (for no real reason at all) the entire time I’m speaking with his brother.

I guess not quite enough time has passed yet because the image of that day, as cute as it was, gave me a mini post-traumatic reaction to those times of exhaustion. Maybe I need to go get a little exercise now so I’ll feel better!

Other creative ways to keep kids moving? Leave a comment!

Posted in Active Kids & Families | Tagged bad sleepers, benefits of exercise, exercise and emotion regulation, exercise research results, fun physical activity for young kids, getting my kid to move, hyper kids, kid off the computer, kid off the couch, my kid needs more exercise, my kid never runs around, my kids won't go outside, physical kids, picky eaters | 12 Comments

Tears at the Airport: How Kids Can Learn Emotional Intelligence

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Suzita

I was in a Barnes and Noble bookstore not long ago and wandered into the children’s section. In one corner was a toy train table with wooden tracks and colorful train cars attached to one another magnetically. Engrossed in play were a mom and her 4 or 5 year-old son. I stopped to watch, remembering my kids’ love of trains at that age.

The boy was creating a long line of train cars to pull around the track when his mother picked up another car and had it ask, “Can I join your train?” “No, we’re full,” the boy answered for the long train. “I think there’s still room,” the lone train car returned. “I said no,” the boy stated emphatically. “Well, I feel left out and that makes me mad!” The mother was still using her train’s pretend voice. The boy stopped playing briefly and looked into his mother’s eyes after this strong sentiment. She gazed at him evenly to reaffirm that she didn’t say it, her train did. “Well, maybe you can join us in five minutes,” the boy offered as his train pulled out of the station.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was taking place here, but it seemed likely that the effect of this train play was to coach the boy on words to use when he felt angry or left out. This interchange reminded me of what psychologist John Gottman calls emotion coaching. In The Heart of Parenting: Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. he describes 5 steps to emotion coaching, which isn’t necessarily done while playing trains, but more often during one-on-one exchanges:

1. Become aware of the child’s emotion.

2. Recognize the emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching.

3. Listen empathetically, validating the child’s feelings.

4. Help the child find words to label the emotion he is having.

5. Explore strategies to solve the problem at hand.

Gottman’s research shows that children whose parents use emotion coaching with them, are more resilient and better able to regulate their emotions. It’s likely that because these kids aren’t using as much energy to manage their daily emotional ups and downs, they have more energy available to focus on school and social relationships. In Gottman’s research emotion-coached kids did better in school and friendships than un-coached children.

Preliminary findings by additional researchers suggest that people with low emotional intelligence have higher rates of substance abuse later in life.

Often simply helping a tearful child identify whether he’s more sad or more frustrated can have a calming effect. Kids know you are hearing them and trying to understand their experience. After they settle down some, they are more ready to problem-solve, but Gottman encourages us not to jump in with suggestions. He wants us to coach our kids to come up with their own problem-solving strategies using questions such as, “What do you think you’ll do next?”

This is the part that I have the hardest time with — letting my kids generate their own solutions. It is so challenging for me to sit there and be patient with an upset child and gently coach her to think of what, let’s be honest, are often barely workable solutions! Meanwhile I, older and a bit wiser, have maybe 4 or 5 ideas on the tip of my tongue which could quickly solve the problem.

Once the child decides which of her options she wants to try first, then we still have to keep our mouths shut and be supportive. Again, being a grown-up, I know the initial not-so-great idea likely won’t work out. And it can all take such a long time! It’s a little excruciating, especially because I usually have to be somewhere soon. It’s probably good I didn’t go into teaching.

However, I do want to get better at this aspect of parenting. I believe Gottman’s advice is valid. And in Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson emphasize that learning emotional literacy is especially important for boys. Unlike girls who tend to use emotional language in their play and notice the feelings of those around them, young boys in Western culture are generally taught to suppress their emotions (except anger). Boys are regularly steered away from focusing on their inner world or the emotional cues of others. Kindlon and Thompson suggest that teaching boys an emotional vocabulary allows them to express themselves in ways other than anger and aggression.

I have found that with young children, using Feelings Charts or posters (with numerous cartoon or real faces showing various emotions) can be surprisingly helpful.

Homemade Feelings Chart

When I did play therapy as a psychologist I used to bring small laminated Feelings Charts into our play time. I’d often have a toy we were using land on the Feeling Chart face in order to help the child learn that emotion. When my own kids were upset as toddlers and preschoolers, I’d have them point to how they were feeling on the Feelings Chart and 9 out of 10 times that simple action helped them begin to calm themselves.

But I do admit it can be hard to “let our kids express their feelings” in public. Especially those intense emotional spells that happen between ages 2 and 5! My son Stephen was very attached to his grandparents when he was young, although they all lived far away and could only visit for short periods. When it was time to say goodbye, Stephen would accompany us to the shuttle that took his grandparents to the airport. He’d begin to cry as we spotted the shuttle driving up, and then stand there bawling and waving to his grandparents as they boarded the shuttle bus.

Todd worried that letting him do this would mean Stephen would be an emotional wreck for the rest of the day. “Couldn’t we keep him home and avoid a scene,” Todd asked. I felt fairly awkward as strangers stared out the shuttle window at my sad little boy who kept crying harder as we waited. But Stephen always wanted to stay until the shuttle left and it seemed fair to grant him this small request.

Stephen’s grandma told us that after one of these times, as she retrieved something from her overhead bag, she saw that half the passengers who’d witnessed Stephen’s goodbye had tears in their own eyes and were smiling understandingly.

And here’s the unexpected part: We’d bundle our crying child back into our car and talk about how sad he was, but also remind him that he would slowly feel better. Then we’d discuss our plans for the day. By the time we arrived home a mere 20 minutes later, Stephen was mostly himself again. Each time he got through the intense emotion, not stuck in it, as we’d worried. This was one of our first lessons in emotion coaching, and in the end it wasn’t as hard as we’d dreaded.

Other ways to teach kids emotional intelligence? Leave a comment!

Posted in Teaching Social/Emotional Skills | Tagged Dan Kindlon, emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional literacy in kids, feelings chart, John Gottman, Michael Thompson, parents emotion coaching, teaching boys to express emotions, teaching kids emotional awareness, teaching kids feelings | 1 Comment

“You’re smart.” Versus “You worked hard.”

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Suzita

Eliza lives down the street. She’s seventeen now but we’ve known her since we moved to the neighborhood eight years ago. She’s a tall girl with a tangle of blonde curls. She’s often wearing splashes of colorful apparel, chosen more because the fabrics appealed than the items matched. When Eliza was fourteen she babysat for our kids a few times but babysitting was never really her thing.

Art was her thing. Her mom, Marta, told me Eliza has loved making art since she was a little girl. “She loved making art, but she wasn’t exactly artistic.” When she was younger Eliza would beg her mom for various art classes: How to Draw Cartoons; Making Works of Art from Nature; Pastel Painting; Beginning Sculpture; Black and White Sketching Basics; and even Sewing. Eliza greatly enjoyed these courses, but more often than not, the instructor found a way to let Marta know her daughter wasn’t “a natural” in artistic endeavors.

Eliza achieved similarly average results and grades in her art classes at school. Her sixth grade art teacher informed her mother that Eliza worked diligently in class, but her outcomes weren’t commensurate with the energy she applied. Marta made sure not to pass along these comments to her daughter. She herself was continually surprised, though, when Eliza’s attraction to all forms of art grew year by year.

When Eliza was fourteen, a local art studio offered a class in stained glass. It was more expensive than some, but Eliza requested it be her sole birthday gift and her parents relented. Six weeks into the class she brought home her first stained glass production, which was but two rows of glass squares in a range of blue hues welded together. It was the spark in her daughter’s eyes, though, that Marta noticed. “Mom, I’ve found my medium! I’m going to stick with stained glass for good.”

Three years later Eliza has been true to her word. She babysat to earn money for stained glass classes, equipment, and supplies, then organized a small studio in one corner of their garage. Sure enough, step by step Eliza learned this art form. It likely took her longer than some, but this didn’t dissuade her. When she recently showed me some of her gorgeous, newly-made pieces, she acknowledged that not all her works turn out well. She said this is frustrating because they take a while to make and the supplies cost money, but she always tries to understand what went wrong with those pieces, so she won’t make those mistakes again.

Two months ago Eliza showed her stained glass artwork in public for the first time. She was shocked by the overwhelmingly positive response to her work. She told Marta she’d expected people to react as her art teachers had, giving her B-/C+ types of responses. Thinking about the path she’d taken to become an artist, Eliza figured she’d developed a thick skin over time. And more significantly she’d become used to creating the art that she envisioned, not that others wanted.

As I’ve watched Eliza grow up over the last eight years, I’ve seen her utilize what researcher Carol Dweck would call a growth mindset. Eliza has focused on following her aspirations and learning new techniques in art, not on grades or even final products. She relished the challenge of gaining new skills and expected these learning processes to take time.

In Mindset: A New Psychology of Success, Dweck describes the findings of her numerous studies on elementary-aged children. In one notable study, after successfully completing some fairly easy puzzles, some kids were told, “You must be smart at this.” But later these “smart” children were less likely to take on increasingly challenging puzzles. It seems they didn’t want to risk failing, and therefore losing their “smart” label. Meanwhile children who were told they must have worked really hard to do the puzzles successfully, were energized by the feedback and wanted to attempt harder puzzles next.

One little sentence highlighting children’s intelligence or diligence ended up having an enormous impact on their mindset.

Turns out some children (and adults as well) see intelligence as fixed, meaning they are born with a certain level of IQ which they have little control over increasing. Because people with a fixed intelligence mindset believe being smart means achieving effortless success, expending effort makes them feel incompetent. This is how we find certain exceedingly bright students who “avoid challenges, dislike effort, and wilt in the face of difficulty,” Dweck explains.

Children with a growth mindset believe that no matter who you are, you can always become a great deal smarter. If they do poorly on a test, they are more likely to think about what went wrong and what they can learn from their mistakes, much like Eliza does with her stained glass artwork.

Eliza exemplifies Dweck’s finding that there is no relationship between one’s history of success in a certain area, and one’s current efforts to seek out or cope with challenges. The ability to master a difficult task is not about our actual skills, but about the mindset we bring to the challenge. Each time I catch sight of the soaring bird fashioned from a riot of colorful glass which I bought at Eliza’s art opening, I’ll remember this sentiment.

Thoughts or comments?

Posted in Teaching Social/Emotional Skills | Tagged Carol Dweck, focus on children's effort, growth versus fixed mindset, help kids master hard task, my kid is scared of hard work, my kid quits too easily, optimism, optimism in children, teaching kids optimism | 8 Comments

Teaching Kids Optimism

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Suzita

My daughter Annie started first grade raring to go. After all those years of watching her big brothers attend full-day school, her time had finally come. She was a real school kid. There was just one problem. In Annie’s mind, real school kids could read and Annie couldn’t do this yet.

All three of my kids were late bloomers when it came to academic skills such as reading and writing. If you gave them a ball, bike, or a pair of sneakers, on the other hand, they knew just what to do. But physical prowess wasn’t what everyone was discussing in first grade, at least not in Annie’s circle.

Like her brothers, the structures and synapses Annie’s brain needed in order to take off in reading were not fully developed in first grade. Unlike her brothers who didn’t notice much going on around them during those early elementary years, Annie was aware of her situation. A month into school Annie came home and sadly informed me that she wasn’t in the good reading group. Then she proceeded to list the kids who were.

“I just can’t read as well as Kate and Amy and Lisa, Mama. I’m never going to be in their reading group,” Annie said dejectedly.

She was right. Her reading was progressing slowly, even though she was putting in quite a bit of practice. But as I’d seen particularly with her brother Daniel at this age, Annie’s reading ability had hit a plateau. It was as if her current level of brain development could only carry her so far. Therefore, I couldn’t advise her to simply practice more, as I could with other skills she was truly capable of but simply hadn’t learned yet. It was a rough time.

Since Annie was getting better at following the plots of chapter books when I read them aloud, we did this frequently during that period. I also worked with her on math games, such as Perplexors. Annie adored these puzzles and they came more easily to her than reading.

It’s so challenging to watch kids struggle. During this phase in Annie’s life I re-read prominent psychologist, Martin Seligman’s The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience in which he summarizes the results of a decade of research on optimism in children. I was looking for ways to help Annie maintain optimism during her bumpy process of learning to read. Seligman writes that school-age children begin to develop theories about why they succeed and why they fail. We parents can have some influence over these theories by carefully choosing how we talk to our kids about their struggles. Our kids’ theories about success and failure will be the foundations of their later optimism or pessimism about the world.

Optimism v. Pessimism

Seligman emphasizes that optimism is much more than being upbeat and facing each day with a smile. It involves accurately perceiving how much control we have over our lives while also taking responsibility when we’ve caused a problem. Seligman then notes that cynicism and pessimism go deeper than merely being urbane postures donned at parties, paired with the wearing of muted clothing.

Pessimism is a “theory of reality” that our children can learn from us, their teachers, or other significant adults in their lives. Research finds that pessimistic people get depressed more often, achieve less in school and work, and have worse physical health than optimistic people.

Optimistic and pessimistic personality styles involve habits of thinking called explanatory style, according to Seligman. This is how we explain things to ourselves. I learned that I should listen to how Annie explained to herself the struggles she was having learning to read, because certain explanations are more optimistic than others.

What to Look for

There are three characteristics of explanatory style to look for when helping our kids lay the foundation for an optimistic worldview. The first is how permanent they consider a problem to be. Pessimistic people believe the cause of something unfortunate is permanent and unchangeable. Meanwhile children who bounce back from setbacks tend to consider the reasons for bad events to be temporary. Seligman writes that permanent thoughts make us feel down and ready to give up before even trying. In contrast, if we believe the situation is changeable, we feel energized and strive to find ways to alter it. On the other side of this coin, when something good happens to an optimistic person, she tends to view her situation as permanent rather than temporary.

The second quality of our explanatory style is pervasiveness. When something negative happens to a pessimistic person, she tends to see it as having a global effect on her life, rather than it being tied to a specific issue. If a pessimistic child doesn’t win a writing contest, he reasons that it’s because he’s not smart. He probably shouldn’t enter any more contests. School just isn’t his thing. An optimistic child, however, might attribute his lack of a ribbon as due to poor editing of that particular paper. Additionally, an optimistic child would see a success as representing a global attribute. “I did well on that project because I’m creative and hardworking.”

The final aspect of explanatory style is personalization, deciding who is at fault when something bad happens. Seligman stresses the importance of viewing a situation with accuracy. If something was the child’s fault, does she begin to think about how to make amends or does she spiral down into self-blame and become stuck? It’s also important for children to think about other factors outside themselves which might have played a role in a negative result.

Optimistic people perceive their responsibility for problems accurately. “I would have been on time for the play rehearsal if I’d started getting ready earlier. But I’m also not the only one having a rough time getting around with all this unexpected ice and snow on the roads.” Optimists move fairly quickly into considering what they can do to fix the problem. “I’ll apologize to our director for being late and ask her if I can stay after rehearsal to hear what I missed.”

Extreme pessimists often wrongly believe they are the cause of negative events that they had little control over, a characteristic also seen in people with depression.

Back to Annie

When Annie was striving to learn to read, she seemed to be on the fence as to whether her situation was temporary or permanent. She wasn’t used to skills taking her this long to master. I, on the other hand, had more data at my disposal. I remembered how long it took her to learn to talk (again, hello late bloomer!) and I’d seen her brothers learn to read later than many. Remember the young kids’ book Leo the Late Bloomer about the sweet tiger who learned every life skill later than everyone else? Todd and I used to read this book to help ourselves feel better at these times in our kids’ lives.

I told Annie that her experience learning to read was very similar to that of her brothers, who have become strong readers over time. This information helped Annie realize that her situation was indeed temporary.

During her reading struggles, I never heard Annie say this was hard because she wasn’t smart. I think she was able to look at her situation as a problem with reading rather than a problem with her abilities throughout school, but I worried her view might shift into a global one over time. Therefore, I frequently pointed out other skills that were coming rather easily to her, such as math. Some days this helped. Other days Annie challenged my comments.

When it came to who was responsible for Annie’s problem, there was less I felt I could do. She, or rather her young brain, was likely the cause. I never mentioned anything about brain development to Annie, even though this was how I saw her reading situation. I didn’t think she would have understood this concept. Since I was fairly certain her trajectory would be similar to her brothers’, I merely tried to help both of us remain patient.

If I had heard Annie say that she couldn’t read because she wasn’t smart, I would have used the technique Seligman calls “disputing”. Disputing would have involved presenting alternative evidence which challenged Annie’s belief she wasn’t smart. “What about that good grade you got on your science project? Or the recent time when your teacher held up your writing assignment as an example for the other kids? Do these things suggest you aren’t a smart kid?” (To be honest, I would have probably moved Annie away from the word smart. In my mind “smart” is a vague concept which means different things to different people.)

Practicing Optimism

Seligman encourages us to teach our older kids to dispute their negative thoughts on their own. He frames it as teaching our child to be a detective, first noticing that a thought has popped into his head, next understanding that the thoughts we “hurl at ourselves” aren’t necessarily true, then using his detective stance to challenge the thought by generating alternative possibilities. Because as the saying goes, we shouldn’t believe everything we think.

One way we can teach our children to dispute pessimistic thoughts is by revealing our own thinking process to them. When the furnace repairman is late we can vocalize our thinking with our kids. It might start with, “Why does this always happen to us? It’s as if there’s a huge sign on our house saying ‘Feel free to push us to the end of the list!’” Then we can take a breath, slow down, and begin to dispute these initial thoughts aloud. “Well, it is Friday afternoon and there’s a lot of traffic out there. Maybe he’s stuck in it. And I guess we are lucky that he offered to come today rather than let us freeze until tomorrow. It’s not completely true that repairmen are always late to our house. The plumber who fixed our outdoor spigots came early last month.” Once we get started, we could even have our kids help us continue disputing our pessimistic stance.

Showing our children our thinking processes and the way we handle them not only teaches them how to become optimists, but gives us more practice thinking this way. Just because I’m writing about this doesn’t mean I’m out there doing it daily. Like most of us, I need to commit to practicing optimistic thinking more often. As I tell my kids, “It’s simple. We become best at what we practice most.”

Annie’s reading did progress over time. Her improvement trajectory was not a smooth upward slope, but rather jagged leaps and bounds throughout the year. In the end the thing that helped most was reminding her that her “problem” was temporary. Annie’s still not in the reading group that she wishes she were in, but she’s much less frustrated about reading now. We regularly find her reading chapter books aloud to her stuffed animals or hamsters with the pride of having accomplished a long-awaited skill.

How have you handled the late bloomer in your life? Leave a comment!

Posted in Teaching Social/Emotional Skills | Tagged child having trouble learning to read, cynical children, emotional intelligence, explanatory style and optimism research, grumpy child, kids who are cynical, late readers, Martin Seligman, my kid is so negative, negative child, optimism in children, pessimism in children, teaching optimism with disputing | 5 Comments

What Role Does Quitting Play in Our Children’s Lives?

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Suzita

My husband Todd grew early. By 7^th grade he was 5’ 7.” For boys this can be an advantage, a luck-of-the-draw event that goes your way. Todd had always enjoyed basketball and his early growth spurt, along with hours and hours of shooting on his driveway hoop, yielded a position on his middle school basketball team. I’m guessing this is a pretty big deal for a middle school boy. Todd remembers being proud to be on that team.

During his first two years of high school Todd played on the freshman and junior varsity basketball teams. On the junior varsity team he worked with his favorite coach. Coach Scott told Todd and his teammates that family and school came before basketball, and emphasized having fun on the court. Todd and I have consistently searched for this (at times hard to find) attitude in coaches for our kids.

When Todd was a junior, he moved up to the varsity basketball team. Things changed almost immediately. This team held two practices a day during the school week, the first began at 6:45 a.m. Games weren’t played in the high school gym, but in the city’s coliseum, and reported on in the sports pages. Everything about the experience was more serious and intense, including the varsity coach. Todd said the game quickly stopped being enjoyable and two months into the season, he quit.

Todd still has former high school classmates, and even parents of classmates, who disagree with his decision to quit. Basketball was big in his town and landing a spot on the varsity team was an honor. When Todd reunites with old friends, the subject of his quitting basketball invariably comes up. But to this day Todd knows he made the right decision for him.

What role does quitting play in the lives of our kids? Should it be on the table as an option, or only a last resort? We’ve all heard that quitters never win and winners never quit. I guess that’s one answer to my question. Recently I looked for quotes on quitting and only found ones with similar sentiments. Seems many of us are not fond of quitters.

I usually write about more unanimously agreed upon parenting topics such as teaching kids persistence, or gratitude, or financial skills. Yet one of my most popular posts was about teaching kids how to learn from failure. Failing and quitting have the same end result but differing paths to this destination. My stepfather (the one who rewarded me for failing) defined a good failure as when we try mightily for something we really want, but fail to attain it. Failing usually involves another person deciding you didn’t make the cut. Failing, therefore, has a large ouch factor.

We have more control over quitting. We can mull it over as long as we want before making the decision to walk away from something. Others may not agree with it, but quitting is mostly our decision. My stepfather, Dan, also supported quitting. During the last week of my hard-working and active high school career he said, “Remember, it’s still not too late to drop out and pursue a different path.” He’s no longer with us to give his opinion on the importance of quitting, but I would guess it had to do with reminding ourselves we always have choices. Quitting is an expression of our personal freedom, he’d probably say.

For those of us who are less comfortable with quitting, how do we decide it’s time to call it a day?

Five Things to Discuss with Your Child When S/he is Considering Quitting:

1. Has your child followed the full arc of the experience? Has she, for example, played the viola long enough that she’s had good days and rough days, satisfying weeks and disheartening ones? If not, it’s possible she is quitting on the early side.

2. Is your child at a point where he consistently has more bad days than positive ones with this activity? If he’s done it for a while already, this may be a sign it’s time to quit.

3. Has a requirement of the activity recently changed? This year practices are much longer, or your child has to travel far away for meets, or a new teacher has a much different approach?

4. Is there something else that your child is really wanting to start (and has for a while), but can’t begin due to the time commitment of her current activity?

5. Might your child be experiencing a period of burnout that could be addressed in other ways rather than full-out quitting? It seems strange to think about burnout in younger children. On the other hand, we all know kids who began swim team, soccer, or piano at age five and continued on to more competitive levels each year. In these situations burnout is indeed a possibility.

Jesse Lynn Hanley, co-author of Tired of Being Tired, describes one phase of burnout as “dragging.” Your child can’t seem to find the energy she once did for her activity. We parents probably pick up on this state quickly, noticing a steep increase in our nagging. Hanley recommends that people experiencing this type of burnout get more sleep, eat small, healthy snacks often, and have more fun. We can help our kids get back in touch with things they find low-stress and pleasurable. Not being adults, this will likely take our kids all of twenty minutes. Additionally, taking a week-long break from lessons or practices is sometimes what’s needed to re-energize a child.

After thinking through these points, it’s time to help your child generate a list of pros and cons regarding quitting. Recently my friend, Bella, did this with her 9 year-old son, Sam. The prior year Sam had begged to play soccer. Although he wasn’t the most coordinated kid on the field, he’d loved it all that year. A few weeks into this season, however, Sam began saying he wanted to quit. It turned out his new coach had added some endurance drills in the form of pre- and post-practice laps. Sam was frustrated because many of the kids were faster than he was. When he and Bella sat down and listed the pros and cons of soccer, the cons section was lengthy. Bella was quite sure Sam would opt to quit. To her surprise though, venting all those cons on paper made Sam feel much better and he skipped away saying he still wanted to play soccer.

More commonly, however, making the list of pros and cons can provide the final clarification that it’s quitting time.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt co-authors of Freakonomics are strong proponents and practitioners of quitting. In their Freakonomics radio show on quitting, Levitt advocates that when it’s time to quit, do it fast. Walk away and don’t look back. As long as the decision to quit has been a thorough one, I agree. Otherwise we wallow in what-ifs rather than use our freed-up energy and resources for new projects and passions. Dubner also suggests that understanding why we are quitting and taking personal responsibility for the decision helps us to move on.

Being an economist, Dubner describes an economic phenomenon that gets in the way of quitting, sunk costs. Sunk cost is a concept which focuses on the past. “I can’t quit now, think of all the time and effort I’ve put into water polo.” This thinking illustrates the sunk costs fallacy and it, in addition to the opinions of others, is why many of us struggle to quit anything.

Then Dubner discusses opportunity cost, a future-focused notion. “Yes, but all those hours and dollars I’m putting into water polo, which I don’t even really like anymore, I could be putting toward something I think I’d love, pottery.”

Professor Carsten Rausch of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada has studied quitting and agrees that adults regularly fall for the sunk costs fallacy. It fits right in with our ethic of not being wasteful.

But here’s the unexpected part, he says children are unfazed by the sunk costs fallacy! Picture your kids and think about this. It makes intuitive sense, doesn’t it? When my son Stephen told us yesterday that he might try playing another instrument for a while, he wasn’t at all considering the fact that after 2 1/2 years, we’ve nearly paid off his clarinet. And the number of hours he’s put in practicing clarinet didn’t seem to factor into his comment in the least.

When we help our kids list their pros and cons of an activity, we must remember that adults are more affected by sunk costs than children are. This can allow our kids to view their current situation with more clarity than we do.

In his research on quitting, Rausch found that quitting can be good for one’s health. People who are better able to let go have fewer depressive symptoms, lower levels of systemic inflammation, lower cortisone levels, and develop fewer health problems over time.

That even gives quitting a rosy glow! Although I’m sure Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, would heartily disagree. She sees parents in the dominant Caucasian culture as letting their kids quit things much too easily. When I, along with so many other parents, read her essay this year it struck many chords. My first inclination was to completely ignore her rather extreme thesis.

But after I put the article down for a bit, I remembered that it’s often those outside one’s culture who can see our problems most accurately. When I thought more about what Chua had to say, I decided to take with me the idea that if kids don’t make it past the initial challenges of any new skill, they will never experience the joy and deep satisfaction that come with mastery. This point resonated with me.

Deep satisfaction from mastery VERSUS increased mental and physical health from quitting.

Both good choices.

According to Professor Rausch, each of us encounters a potentially unattainable goal approximately once a year. So, we all get quitting practice annually. Judging from my kids’ lives, quitting opportunities during childhood are even more frequent.

The advice to quit without looking back is useful during the actual quitting event and days soon after. But it’s also helpful to remember that, after moving on, it’s not as if our kids will never again take up a once-loved instrument, sport, or hobby. Todd spent much of college and graduate school playing intramural and pick-up basketball. For him it was an ideal way to exercise, meet people, and blow off steam. Basketball will always have a comfortable familiarity for him.

These past few years Todd has coached our son Daniel’s basketball team. In this way he’s rekindled his fond memories of Coach Scott by borrowing some of the coaching methods and messages he found helpful long ago.

Leave a comment below about how a child you know handled quitting. Thanks!

Posted in Teaching Social/Emotional Skills | Tagged Amy Chua, Carsten Rausch, Jesse L. Hanley, kids and sunk costs fallacy, my kid is a quitter, my kid never sticks with anything, my son always wants to quit, pros and cons of quitting, quitting, quitting in childhood, quitting soccer, should kids quit, Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt | 4 Comments

Toward Media Savvy Kids

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Suzita

A while back Todd took our daughter Annie (8) to the nearby hardware store. This locally-owned place is stocked with just about every basic item you could want. Todd needed drywall anchors and screws. Annie asked to stay by the Japanese eraser display while her dad went to find the fasteners section.

I can’t recall when the first Japanese eraser toy made its way into our home. I think it was probably given to Annie as a party favor. I’d never seen one. Basically they’re small toys made of soft rubbery material, so your kids can add the phrase “and they’re erasers!” to their purchasing pleas. They come in numerous forms, from farm animals to random food products such as Japanese cans of soda pop, unappetizing, British cookies labeled biscuits, or strawberries colored yellow, pink, and red. If you’re a sports fan, there are colorful balls, bats, and mitts. Each tiny eraser is actually several puzzle pieces fit together, able to be dis- and reassembled.

On the day of the store run, Annie owned maybe five of these toys. As she stood admiring the prolific display of erasers, a salesperson handed her “The Japanese Eraser Official Guidebook”. Annie returned home ecstatic. “Look what this lady gave me for free!” You guessed it – Annie’s prized possession was basically a catalog of Japanese erasers. The thing was eight pages long and must have included 500 different erasers. As Annie excitedly showed me the next ten erasers she hoped to buy, I noticed the catalog also offered two handgun erasers. Note to Japanese Eraser Company: Hello Kitty wasn’t armed and she sold just fine.

Annie poured over her catalog and later brought it to our local playground where we met our neighbor Dana and her daughter, Sophie. Sophie was only five, but seemed already to know how cool and life-altering these Japanese erasers were. Now she and Annie were both scanning the pages with focused intensity. Soon Sophie too carried a list of the ten erasers she wanted most. I’m so sorry Dana!

The salesperson had given Annie the Japanese eraser catalog and hooked her in. Then Annie reeled in Sophie. Ah, modern marketing. As I’ve read more about how corporations are marketing to children these days, I’ve discovered one of the methods they use most is having kids convince other kids to buy their products, just as I’d watched Annie do with Sophie. As children get older, more stealthy tactics are used. Certain kids are offered a free trial of a new product, “before your friends have seen it!” Those lucky few strut around school with the new item, and as is the way of the schoolyard, soon everyone wants one.

I guess I pretty much knew that big business marketing campaigns were behind Americans’ increasing consumerism. I buy therefore I am. And I was also aware that the secret weapon of advertising is the message that we lack something and won’t feel complete until we buy what we’re missing. Now that I have kids, though, I hate that mass media tells them they are lacking in some way. Won’t they get that message daily in middle school? It’s awful that advertising takes advantage of kids’ more fragile self-images, telling them there’s something wrong with them when five minutes before they were sitting on the sofa feeling fine.

As I’ve learned more about the tools marketers use today, I’ve been most saddened by this background message suggesting we are incomplete. I want my kids to embody the attitude of “I am enough” and “I have enough”. Instead the sneaky ads tap them on the shoulder and whisper, “Remember, you are what you wear.” “Everyone notices what kind of school supplies you have.” “You’re only as good as what you own.”

While reading Tips for Parenting in a Commercial Culture from Center for a New American Dream, I came across a concept about which I was previously unaware. The booklet (which you can download free) pointed out that another major marketing message is: Life should always be easy, and there’s something wrong if it isn’t. The ads then suggest you buy their product or pill when you struggle with something, and magically everything will improve. I know this view is prevalent in Western culture these days, but I guess I thought it evolved on its own, not in some secret marketing meeting.

The “life should be easy” mindset is one I regularly challenge in my kids. “Why would you think everything would be easy? You should be proud of yourself for working hard to master something. People become best at what they practice most.” In this blog I’ve written about teaching my kids how to fail (well), and encouraging persistence in my kids. So, when I realized corporate media campaigns are working at cross-purposes with my parenting focus, I was initially shocked, then angry.

Looking for ways to combat the ever-present media messages in my kids’ lives, I read Living Simply with Children, by Marie Sherlock. I learned what I’d known intuitively, that advertisers purposely separate children from their parents then aim their messages at the kids one-on-one. The same businesses who declare family-friendliness are finding ways to influence our kids outside our earshot. At our house, this direct-to-kid advertising has been happening over the computer. However, it’s harder than you’d think to fight it.

As the experts advise, we’ve placed our computer in a central location. You practically trip over it when passing by. Our son Daniel (11) is allowed to play online educational games with our permission. Of course, he always asks at chaotic times. Do they do this consciously? It’s truly a skill. So, I’ll quickly assess the game he’s about to play (usually one a school friend has shown him). The games tend to look fairly harmless, even a little boring. I give Daniel my consent and return to the four other things I’m juggling. I now realize that these online educational games have numerous ads intertwined within them, often only popping up toward the end of play. We don’t have cable television so Daniel doesn’t see many commercials, but it turns out he’s been receiving his dose of ads online under the guise of learning games.

Five Actions to Help Immunize Our Kids Against Advertising:

1. Reduce TV time.

According to numerous sources, the most significant action we can take to reduce our kids’ exposure to advertising is setting limits on television watching.

2. Read books about how marketing works with your kids.

A book titled Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know, by Shari Graydon explains various secrets of advertising to older kids and teens. It touches on numerous marketing techniques from airbrushing magazine photos to product placement on film and TV, to Internet advertising.

3. Play games to deconstruct commercials.

My friend Margaret has her five and eight year-old kids mute the TV during commercials and try to guess the product being sold. She says her kids really enjoy this game. Margaret notes that muting the commercial allows one to pay closer attention to certain details such as the body language and emotions actors use to sell a product. Made You Look additionally suggests leaving the TV’s audio on and but turning away from the screen as a means of understanding a commercial’s use of language, music, pace, and sound.

4. Listen to the message underneath your child’s nagging and pleading.

In Living Simply with Children, Marie Sherlock reminds parents to listen to the messages beneath kids’ nagging for material things. If you can keep your child talking, they may eventually express their underlying emotions. Perhaps they feel left out of an opportunity. Or maybe asking for certain things is a way of saying they think they don’t fit in at school. Although we parents still might not spring for the wanted item, our kids will feel heard by us. With your help your child can devise additional ways to face his or her challenges.

5. Share your own struggles with “wanting” with your child.

We parents are just as susceptible to keeping up with the Joneses as our children are to wanting what the Joneses’ kids have. We might tell our kids how we handle our wants, on good as well as bad days. We can also admit to things we’ve bought and later regretted, or share childhood stories of how badly we wanted that Barbie camping van, or the shoes all the cool kids wore.

It’s been three months since Annie got the Japanese eraser catalog, and although she hasn’t bought any new erasers for a while, I still can’t extract this treasured item from her room without fierce opposition. However, she will play the guessing game about commercials my friend Margaret uses.

I’ll close with an upbeat statistic:

The Center for a New American Dream did a study which found that of 9-14 year-olds, 57% would rather do something fun with their parents than go shopping.

More ideas for teaching kids about advertising? Leave a comment below!

Posted in Life Skills | Tagged ads on computer games, Center for a New American Dream, help kids reduce consumerism, internet advertising and kids, Japanese erasers, Marie Sherlock, media literacy for kids, my kid believes ads on tv, my kids doesn't understand that ads are ads, Shari Graydon, teach kids about advertising, teach kids marketing tricks, teach kids media literacy | 2 Comments

What is Enough? Teaching Your Children the Concept of Enough

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Suzita

I’ve been thinking about the idea of “enough.” Whether it’s a material item (shoes) or a non-material one (free time), how do you know when you have enough of something? Enough seems to reside at the sweet spot between needing more and wanting more. It’s a calm, settled, balanced place. Enough is a place where one easily feels gratitude and appreciation. At this sweet spot, we have access to the bigger picture and can gain perspective. When we stop at enough, the excess energy we would have used to secure more, becomes available for bringing creativity and ingenuity into our lives.

From what I can tell, unlike curiosity or the drive to play, awareness of “enough” is not a natural state throughout childhood. I remember very early on being assured my babies would drink as much breast milk as they needed, and indeed they did. After this point, however, it seemed risky to let the child set all the guidelines. Eating specialist Ellyn Satter’s advice of shared responsibility worked well at our family’s dinner table. She says it is the parent’s job to put out a meal of healthy food, but the child’s responsibility to choose which and how much of the food to eat.

Eating is the activity where it’s easiest for me to practice the concept of enough. The Japanese use the term “hara hachi bu” which means eat until you are eight parts (80%) full. I like this idea (unless I’m really hungry). The concept of enough is intertwined within hara hachi bu. If you know there is enough to go around, that there is enough for you, you’ll experience that calm, settled, balanced feeling while eating. Hara hachi bu requires an internal focus on the messages of one’s body, rather than an external focus on factors such as the amount of food left on your plate or a waiter’s suggestions.

I assume the Japanese incorporate the idea of hara hachi bu into other areas of their lives as well. This is more challenging for me and I’ve noticed, my kids. How do we know when we are 80% full of pants, kitchen gadgets, iPad apps, or video games? And realistically, we should probably start with knowing when we are 100% full before pulling back to the trickier notion of 80%. Help please!

When my son, Daniel, was eight his favorite toys were Bionicles, those scary-faced Lego brand plastic figures. Daniel loved his first Bionicle the way some kids love a cherished stuffed animal. He brought it everywhere. He smiled warmly upon it and hugged it when he woke up in the morning. I, myself, cringed every time I saw its angry scowl, oversized weaponry, and lobster claw hands. I warned Daniel that not all his friends, especially those outside the male persuasion, would adore Bionicles like he did.

Soon, Daniel was rather rapidly accumulating Bionicles. His favorite way to add to his collection was having us help him browse eBay for low-priced, previously-owned Bionicles. He was able to afford these on his own after saving his allowance for maybe three weeks. I guess you could say that during this time, Daniel was figuring out how many Bionicles were “enough.” Not an easy task. In the end, he peaked at twelve. I’m assuming that, because he peaked there, twelve was actually past his place of enough. After another few years, the glow faded and Daniel began to sell his Bionicles on eBay, probably to other children learning the lesson of how many are enough.

Our son Stephen has loved books for many years. He rarely meets a book that isn’t worth picking up and leafing through. And books are easy to acquire. We live biking distance from a well-stocked used bookstore. Stephen’s room, though, is small. Nevertheless, for a while he collected and assembled large piles of books “to read next.” During that time Todd and I would weave our way around stacks of upcoming reads to tuck Stephen into bed.

Eventually I think Stephen realized the numerous book piles were beginning to oppress him. He found himself in a place quite a bit past enough. These days Stephen keeps on hand two or three books to read next. He also saves certain beloved book series in his room to read again and again. And, being a geography guy, Stephen always has a plethora of atlases within reach. It’s not as if his bedroom is empty, but Stephen has found his enough sweet spot, at least when it comes to books. International soccer jerseys are another issue!

Our daughter, Annie, is a very social human. I know humans are by definition social beings, but this does not accurately describe Annie. If she had to choose between a new toy and a play date, the play date would win 95% of the time. Her capacity for social contact is simply greater than most. Extreme extraversion. Many personality theories posit, by the way, that over time we all tend to move toward the opposite side of our personality extremes. This suggests Annie will meet her inner introvert for the first time around college.

Still, for the past few years Annie has been learning that not every person has such a grand capacity for social time. She is gradually comprehending that her friends will need play time to end before she does. Annie has also been practicing and learning to enjoy being alone. Yes, for some kids this is a skill to be learned. Annie will probably continue to struggle with the lesson of how much social contact is enough for a while. She has improved her understanding of enough as she’s watched her friends. She sees when they surpass their sweet spot of enough during a playdate and melt down upon reaching the too-much point. And Annie is learning that to be a friend is not to push someone past their personal level of enough.

The book Your Money of Your Life introduces the concept of enough from a variety of perspectives. In one section the authors discuss the Fulfillment Curve which graphs the relationship between the amount of money we spend and our experience of fulfillment.

Stephen’s drawing of the Fulfillment Curve

Authors Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin summarize:

There is an interesting place on this graph – its peak. Part of the secret of life, it would seem, comes from identifying for yourself the point of maximum fulfillment. There is a name for this peak of the Fulfillment Curve, and it provides the basis for transforming your relationship with money. It’s a word we use every day, yet we are practically incapable of recognizing it when it’s staring us in the face. The word is “enough.” At the peak of the Fulfillment Curve we have enough. Enough for our survival. Enough comforts. And even enough little “luxuries.”

The wisdom of this lesson runs wide and deep. The first image that came to mind when I read about the fulfillment curve was chocolate covered almonds–pretty much my favorite treat on the planet. I’ve known for a while that the first (and honestly second) chocolate covered almonds always taste the best, so much better than the 20^th. The first two are my peak on the fulfillment curve, my place of enough.

Or at least that’s what I’m working toward…

For now chocolate covered almonds can’t enter my home in quantities greater than two. With this food there is no such thing as hara hachi bu for me, as of yet. I’ll be better off starting my practice of hara hachi bu with root vegetables.

How do you know when you’ve reached the place of enough? How do you teach your kids this lesson? Leave a comment below!

Update: I’m writing a bit less frequently on Play. Fight. Repeat. because I am beginning work on a larger project, a parenting book covering many themes from this blog. You’ll continue to hear from me throughout this new undertaking, though. Your comments on Play. Fight. Repeat. are now more valuable than ever in helping me to clarify what subjects readers are thinking about, struggling with, and want more on.

Posted in Teaching Social/Emotional Skills | Tagged Ellyn Satter, enough, fulfillment curve, hara hachi bu, help kids find balance, Joe Dominguez, my kid wants it all, my kids want more and more, point of enough, teaching kids to balance needs and wants, Vicki Robin | 9 Comments

Teaching Kids to Save Money

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Suzita

Saving versus spending: Each of my three kids falls into a separate section of this continuum, depending on how recently they received birthday money. On the one hand it’s enlightening to see what my kids choose to buy with their own money. It’s a window into their young minds. Recent purchases at our home have been: magic trick supplies, Japanese erasers (shaped like various food items), and international soccer jerseys. And yet in today’s world, teaching kids the value of saving money seems as vital as regularly putting money into their college funds.

Not too long ago I read about encouraging teens to start saving for their own retirements! Then I found a chart that helped me grasp the importance that we all start saving early for retirement. It was in David Bach’s book, Smart Couples Finish Rich. It clearly presents the investments of three young people over time.

Billy started saving at age 14. He put a mere $2000 per year into an account for only five years then stopped altogether.

Susan began saving at age 19. She put $2000 per year into an account for a period of eight years then stopped at age 26.

Kim started investing at the ripe old age of 27. She put $2000 per year in the bank until she was 65. That’s 38 years!

In Bach’s compounding interest chart he assumes a 10% annual return on Billy, Susan, and Kim’s money. I don’t know about you, but what I’ve been reading lately suggests we should cut that percentage in half. As seems to be the case in all areas these days, this change means we’ll have to work that much harder on our long-term savings plans.

But if they could manage a 10% return, at age 65 this is the amount of money each person would have amassed.

Billy: $1,184,6000

Susan: $1,035,148

Kim: $883,185

This past summer I showed this compounding interest chart to my sons, Stephen and Daniel. Annie was off playing with her Japanese erasers. At 8, I think she’s still a little young for this lesson.

Here’s a video that nicely teaches kids about the power of compounding interest.

Stephen (13) and Daniel (11) were initially very impressed by the power of compound interest. Next I explained to them that when they get their first summer job, perhaps at age 15 or 16, they are allowed to invest as much as they make (up to $5000) in a Roth IRA (which I also explained). Remembering back to my summer work, I never made anything close to $5000. I’m thinking that it will be more like $2000 or $3000.

My sons looked at me with a mixture of excitement and disappointment. They didn’t want to put all the money gained from their first “real job” into some bank account that they couldn’t touch until they were grandparents!

This is a tough one. I’ve by no means figured it out, but here’s what we have so far. As I mentioned in a prior post, my kids have a small business which earns them quite a bit of money for kids their ages. Annie is even getting in on it these days. (She specializes in cat care.) We require our kids to put 25% of all money they receive into savings accounts at our local credit union. These savings accounts are growing yearly and we’ve told the kids that this money will be put into their Roth IRAs to match the amount they earn from their first “real” summer job (meaning Uncle Sam knows they’ve been working and taxes have been taken out of their earnings).

Even with the savings they are generating over time, our kids likely won’t save an amount equal to what they will make in a summer job. However, they will apply what’s in these savings accounts to the Roth IRA, and Todd and I will put up the rest of the money in order that the Roth IRAs can be funded with the full dollar amount of summer work earnings.

The boys thought this could work and began looking slightly more upbeat. We’ll see if they feel the same way when the time comes to open their Roth IRAs. By the way, when my kids are saving for something short-term, they collect money over time in an envelope here at home with a picture of their intended purchase taped to it for motivation.

In my quest to find more solutions to the challenge of teaching kids to save money, I read The First National Bank of Dad, by David Owen. He came up with the innovative idea of establishing his own bank in which his kids opened savings accounts. The reason he elected to start his own bank (using Quicken) was that interest rates at real banks were pretty abysmal, and this was even in 2003! These interest rates were not likely to hook his kids into the fun and satisfaction of saving money.

So he made it worth his kids’ efforts to save. The Bank of Dad gave an interest rate of 5% per MONTH. Owen explained that this came out to an annual interest rate of more than 70%.

Can I sign up too?

He deposited his kids’ allowances and any other money they received into the bank and pretty quickly his children were enjoying watching their money grow rather than spending it. Although, being kids, they still spent some of course, and Owen discussed the latest gadgets his kids bought during this time.

Owen’s book was a convincing read. I appreciated his ability to hook his kids into saving money. The part that was harder for me to swallow was how much money his kids were raking in by simply leaving a good portion of their cash in their accounts. In not too long each kid had generated approximately $400 while still buying most of what they wanted as well.

As I read The First National Bank of Dad, something was missing from the lessons he was teaching his kids (and readers) about saving and spending money. Owen didn’t discuss the pros and cons of regularly buying the latest products. Instead his arguments rested on the premise that there’s nothing wrong with our current consumer-based economy, as long as one has enough money to work within it sufficiently. He never asked his kids to evaluate their recent purchases. Did they still use these items regularly? Did these new things bring them the satisfaction they’d hoped for? Did the new purchases perform and last as expected? Did more expensive things last longer, or was price not predictive of long-term performance?

Guess I need to do a little more reading…

Suggestions for good books in this area? Leave a comment below!

Posted in Education, Life Skills | Tagged compound interest, compounding interest, David Bach, David Owen, kids save for retirement, kids saving money, my kid never saves his money, teaching compound interest to kids, teaching kids to save money, thinks money grows on trees | 3 Comments

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By Suzita Cochran ~ Boulder, Colorado

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