Preschool Lessons in Fairness

This week’s article summary is Preschool Lessons in Fairness May Last a Long Time.

Last year one of my article summaries was Preschool: The Most Important Year, which explained how high-quality early education experiences support habit and skill development of self-regulation, the basics of interpersonal relationships, and further foster creativity and curiosity through play.

Add to this list learning how to be fair.

Early childhood education is so important because it’s when most of us begin to learn how to coexist and work and play with others: how to take turns, how to deal with not always getting our way, how to be nice, how to share.

One evening last month early childhood expert Dr. Dipesh Navsaria spoke at Trinity. He emphasized three keys to successful intra/interpersonal skills and habits as adults: our genes, our experiences, and our relationship with parents, caregivers, and teachers.

We are all social animals, yet we must learn and practice how to interact with others. Early childhood experiences are an essential building block of the strong foundation upon which subsequent success and happiness is built.

Joe

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"Play fair" may be one of the earliest lessons of preschool—perhaps even before the ABCs and 123s—and a new study suggests cementing that skill early can make for more just adults decades later. 

A new study in the journal Nature Communications looks at students who participated in the landmark Abecedarian project, a large longitudinal study of pre-K programs in North Carolina in the 1970s. Participating students in the original study were randomly assigned to either a control group that received basic food, health care, and family social support, or an intervention group that received five years of intensive academic and social skills instruction. The current follow-up study suggests that experience may prime them to take a more just approach to social situations.

In the new study, subjects played the "ultimatum game." It's a common test in economics and psychology in which one player is given $20 and decides how to split it with another player. The second player can accept or reject the deal; if it is rejected, neither player gets any money. In this study, the offers were randomly generated by a computer algorithm rather than by another player.

Over time, research has found that players often walk away from an unfair split like $16/$4 if it benefits the other person, but accept the split if it benefits them—and players in the control group followed this trend. But former Abecedarian students were significantly more likely than others to reject offers that were unfair to either side—even when that meant turning down a bigger share of the money.

In fact, the more money offered to former Abecedarian students in an unfair exchange, the more likely they were to reject it. "Since rejecting offers in the game is akin to punishing the proposer, this rejection pattern can be considered a strong social signal aimed at enforcing equality during exchanges," the researchers wrote. They suggested early childhood experiences may have led to a stronger belief in reciprocity, making the former Abecedarian students focus less on immediate benefits of an unfair split and more on the need to "pay back" a favorable split later.

The Abecedarian project is one of the most rigorous and longest-running studies of the immediate and long-term effects of high-quality preschools, and follow-up studies have found benefits for students in terms of their college-going and choosing to parent at later ages among other things. These new findings suggest that some of the earliest preschool lessons in sharing and social-emotional development may also have long-term benefits for students. 

Time Outs Are Dated and Ineffective

This week’s article is Time Outs Are a Dated and Ineffective Parenting Strategy, and it’s a follow-up to last week’s summary on attention and motivation.

While the article is written for parents, it relates to the classroom as well.

As we all know, the goal of parenting (or classroom management) is to be firm and fair: not permissive on one extreme or authoritarian on the other but what behavior experts refer to as authoritative.

The job of a parent/teacher (authority) is to establish parameters/rules/norms/expectations and the job of kids/students is to learn to navigate and make good decisions within those societal/family/classroom limits.

Most of us make the right decision most of the time and positively behave and interact with others within expected parameters, but most of us also on occasion exceed the limits and need help/guidance/reminding/understanding how our actions adversely affect others and even ourselves. Ideally we self-correct but as we all know learning to be self-reflective and regulatory requires much practice and experience. Character skill and habit development requires as much attention and reinforcement as cognitive development.

Unfortunately when the consequence of misbehavior is something punitive like a time out we are more likely to blame others rather than ourselves for our indiscretions and missteps.

At my previous school I team-taught an eighth grade Language Arts class. As we were a Responsive Classroom school, the recommendation for a student who stepped out of line in the classroom was a ‘re-group.’ When a teacher saw a student acting inappropriately, he/she in a calm but foreceful voice told the child to ‘re-group’. The student didn’t move to a time out location or leave the room or go to see the Division Head; rather, a re-group served as a warning that the child needed to correct this misbehavior and had the opportunity to self-correct.

You can imagine a group of cynical eighth grade teachers first hearing about this type of classroom management strategy from an outside consultant: raised eyebrows, scowls, and harrumphs.

Yet as we discussed (proactively and reactively), practiced, and modeled re-grouping among ourselves and with our students and then began to use it in earnest, classroom behavior improved tremendously, removed any power struggle from the teacher-student relationship, and most kids learned quickly to modify their behavior without need for a further consequence, like leaving the classroom or seeing an administrator. In this way the student had a choice of how to he/she would behave next and that empowerment made a huge difference.

As I mentioned last week, it can be tough in the heat of the moment to remain calm, but we always need to remember that improving children’s behavior needs to include personal autonomy and choice.

Joe

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The timeout technique, used by parents for decades, exploded into the public domain in the early 2000s thanks to TV’s “Supernanny” who rebranded it as the “naughty step” technique. Many parents still rely on timeouts when their kids misbehave. A growing number of experts, though, advise against it.

Timeout involves placing your child in a designated quiet, isolated, safe place in the home immediately after they’ve ignored a warning to stop misbehaving. After a brief explanation for why they’re in timeout, the child sits there long enough to calm down and think about what they’ve done wrong.  The recommendation for children 2-6 is keeping them there for one minute per year of age, and ignoring them while they are there. If they leave the spot before time is up, you must take them back, as often as necessary — while refusing to engage in any conversation. When the timer goes off, you reiterate why they were there, tell them to apologize for their behavior and give them hugs and kisses so they know you still love them.

Parenting experts have criticized the timeout technique in recent years, saying that it might neglect a child’s emotional needs. Most experts agree that punishment is harmful to a child’s emotional development and that isolation — the defining quality of the timeout technique — is a form of punishment.

“Children experience feelings of isolation and abandonment when placed in time out,” says one child/adolescent therapist. “There is loss of contact, which can also be interpreted as loss of a parent’s love, especially for younger children. Kids who are sent to their room often believe their isolation is a result of being bad enough that parents do not want to be around them.”

This can be particularly risky for kids who have a predisposition to anxiety. The isolation may increase their fears, and the more anxious they become, the more likely they may be to exhibit behavioral outbursts, such as destroying their toys or room during a timeout.

“Healthy humans are social creatures,” one psychiatrist says. “We rely on others for physical survival and emotional support, which means when we are involuntarily cut off from other human beings, psychologically painful feelings of loneliness and anxiety arise. In children, this is amplified by their belief that they are helpless in the world without their parents to help them. The threat of separation from those who protect them can cause severe anxiety and psychological discomfort in a child.”

This means regular reliance on the timeout technique can have long-lasting negative effects. A child who experiences frequent threats of (or actual) abandonment by their parent will build a model of the world in which they have no firm anchor of support. They have learned they must conform to the views of others in order to survive, and are thus more likely to grow up feeling insecure and powerless.

There’s also the argument that timeout simply doesn’t work. “Kids don’t have the advanced cognitive skills to think abstractly,” says a pediatrician. “Emotional modulation and regulation occurs with development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which doesn’t fully develop until adolescence.” This means putting a child by themselves in a timeout situation and telling them to think about what they’ve done is generally a waste of time. “If you ask the child why they are in timeout, they usually say ‘I don’t know.”

So what’s the alternative?

Many parenting experts advocate “time-in” as a healthier behavior strategy. It involves sitting with your children when they misbehave, talking them through their emotions and helping them to learn to harness those big feelings they don’t yet understand.

To help a child grasp why their behavior is not appropriate, try to go to the child’s eye level, speak in a calm, soft voice, explain what the child is doing and why they shouldn’t do it, and suggest an acceptable alternative.

There may still a place for a variation on the timeout technique in parenting, though. Some kids can be overstimulated or overwhelmed by the emotions of those around them, which may lead them to respond in ways that can be misconstrued as defiance or misbehavior. However, if timeouts are used as a way to give the child a calmer environment, the parent should remain with the child at all times, and maintain a calm, loving demeanor to help them calm down.

Attention and Motivation

This week’s article summary is A Lost Secret: How To Get Kids to Pay Attention, and it’s a follow up to a previous summary on kids today having better attention than fifty years ago.

Like any other skill and habit, attention requires motivation and incentive. If we really don’t care about something, we typically don’t put it the same effort, focus, and concentration.

What I found interesting about this research is that better attention does not result from more stringent rules but from greater personal autonomy and choice. As most of us know, research shows that extrinsic rules, rewards, and punishments do not work in the long run, meaning helping a person become self-motivated and self-disciplined.

Still it can be challenging as a parent and teacher in the heat of the moment (when a child is misbehaving) to always give a child voice and choice. It can seem counterintuitive in the moment, yet we all need to remind ourselves that these intrinsic habits we all want in our kids do not result from extrinsic strictness. Parameters are vital yet we all need the autonomy to make choices within them.

The philosophy behind Positive Discipline is that compliance of classroom rules and norms is enhanced through individual and collective voice and decision making.

In both my personal and professional life, I often reflect on the misbehavior of people (be they kids, adults, or me) through the lens of Positive Discipline’s Mistaken Goals Chart. Before I react to someone acting outside the normalcy of social mores, I try to think about why her/she is acting in that way. Positive Discipline has definitely refocused my perspective to believing everyone want to fit in and be part of a group; it’s just that this goal is easier and more natural for some than others and that interpersonal skill and habit development are a lifetime pursuit.

Joe

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Fifteen years ago, psychologists ran a simple experiment. They wanted to see how well kids pay attention — even if they don't have to. They would bring two kids, between the ages 5 to 11, into a room and have them sit at two tables. Then they had a research assistant teach one of the kids how to assemble a toy. The other kid was told to wait. They wanted to see what the waiting child did. Would she pay attention to the research assistant. Or did she goof off? They ran this experiment on about 80 kids, with two different backgrounds: white, middle-class children from California and Maya children from Guatemala, whom she had been studying for years.

The difference was like night and day.

Many of the American kids slouched in their chairs, stared at the floor or looked around the room at the posters. In contrast, the Maya children were more likely to pay attention. Some of them sat perfectly still in the chair, staring at the instructor. The Maya kids showed sustained attention about two-thirds of the time. The middle-class, American kids did so exactly half as often.

Why such different results? Maya kids are encouraged very early on to pay attention to what their family is doing so they can learn how to do chores and work collaboratively with their family. But Rogoff and other Maya researchers think there's more to the story. They think these indigenous children have something that many American kids have lost.

For years, psychologists have been developing a standard test to measure how well people can focus — or at least that's what they thought they were measuring. On one test a person is shown a series of images on the screen and instructed to press a button every time a city pops up. The more mistakes you make like this, the worse your ability is to pay attention, the researchers thought.

But then a few years ago, they decided to tweak the experiment. Right before it began, they told the college kids: "If you do better on the task, it would end sooner--and you can get out of the lab sooner."

In other words, the researchers gave the volunteers more motivation to pay attention. The results were shocking: The extra motivation increased the person's ability to sustain attention by more than 50 percent. The researchers could even see changes in how the brain worked when people were motivated. The circuitry that controls attention was more active throughout the entire experiment when participants were motivated to finish the test. Whereas, without the motivation, this circuitry tended to flash on and off.

For some people, the motivation can be just as important as their innate ability to pay attention.
So maybe the Maya children are more attentive in the origami/toy experiment — not because they have better attention spans — but because they are more motivated to pay attention. Their parents have somehow motivated them to pay attention even without being told. To see this Maya parenting firsthand, I traveled down to a tiny Maya village in Yucatan, Mexico.

Right away, I realized what these kids have that many American kids miss out on: an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to largely choose what they do, where they go, whom they do it with. That means, they also have the freedom to control what they pay attention to. Even 4-year-olds have the freedom to leave the house by themselves.

Now the kids aren't just playing around in the yard. They're still getting work done. They go to school. They do several after-school activities — and many, many chores. When I was with one family, the oldest girl did the dishes even though no one asked her to, and she helped take care of her little sisters. But the kids, to a great extent, set their schedules and agendas. Rather than having the mom set the goal — and then having to offer enticements and rewards to reach that goal — the child is setting the goal. Then the parents support that goal however they can.

The parents intentionally give their children this autonomy and freedom because they believe it's the best way to motivate kids.

With this strategy, Maya children also learn how to manage their own attention, instead of always depending on adults to tell them what to pay attention to. It may be the case that some American children give up control of their attention when it's always managed by an adult.

Although neuroscientists are just beginning to understand what's happening in the brain while we pay attention, psychologists already have a pretty good understanding of what's needed to motivate kids. One of the most important ingredients for motivating kids is autonomy--to do something with this full sense of willingness and choice.

Many studies have shown that when teachers foster autonomy, it stimulates kids' motivation to learn, tackle challenges and pay attention.

Yet in the last few decades, some parts of our culture have turned in the other direction. They've started taking autonomy away from kids — especially in some schools. One of the things we've been doing in the American school system is making it more and more controlling rather than supportive.
And this lack of autonomy in school inhibits kids' ability to pay attention.

Families and schools in the U.S. can't go full-on Maya to motivate kids. It's often not practical — or safe — to give kids that much autonomy in many places, for instance.

But we need to try.