This week’s
article summary Empowering
Kids in an Anxious World is from an NPR broadcast I heard over the summer
and connects to last week’s article summary on the importance of recess and
unstructured time for kids.
According to the
broadcast story, one of the reasons for the increased anxiety and depression in
today’s teens is a lack of unstructured, unsupervised times—opportunities to
develop those executive function skills I referenced at our first preplanning
meeting: self-control, sustained attention, monitoring one’s own performance.
To me, the vital
goal we have as teachers is to develop both agency (sense of self) and
communion (sense of and care for others) in our students. This includes helping
them develop intrinsic motivation and honest evaluation and reflection on
themselves.
When you think
about it, much of our lives are influenced by extrinsic parameters….fear of
being caught, getting in trouble, being punished, etc.
We’ve all heard
the saying “True character is how you act when you know no one is watching.”
We all have an
internal moral compass, yet I wish we all relied on it more frequently to guide
our behavior.
As the article
explains, kids today too often no longer have opportunities to develop these
habits and skills at home due to being so over-scheduled and involved in
adult-directed activities. By default, schools have the responsibility to
develop these habits and skills in our students, and to do so we need to give
our students ample opportunities to be autonomous, to make decisions, and to
reflect and evaluate.
As we move into
the routine of school, think about how your classroom can achieve the last
sentence of the article: To build
self-control, we need to stop controlling children.
Joe
------------
Rates of anxiety
and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According
to one study, nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the
criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32
percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
And there's more
bad news, grown-ups: The authors of two new parenting books believe you're part
of the problem.
"Kids are
play-deprived nowadays," says Katherine Reynolds Lewis, a journalist,
parent, parent-educator and the author of one of those two new books, The
Good News About Bad Behavior. And by "play" she means play without
screens or adults keeping watch.
"Two or
three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in mixed-age groups,
playing pretty unsupervised," Lewis says. And this kind of parent-free
play helped them develop important skills they'd use for the rest of their
lives. "They were able to resolve disputes. They planned their time. They
managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds self-esteem
and mental health."
These days,
though, free play is on the decline, Lewis says, and so are the social and
emotional skills that come with it. Part of the problem, according to Lewis, is
parents who worry that unsupervised play is just too risky. But the risk is
part of the point — for kids "to have falls and scrapes and tumbles and
discover that they're okay. They can survive being hurt."
In many families,
Lewis says, play has also been crowded out by parents' increased focus on
schoolwork.
William Stixrud
is not one of those parents.
"When my
kids were in elementary school, I said, 'You know, I'm happy to look at your
report card, but I don't care that much. I care much more that you work hard to
develop yourself,'" says Stixrud, a neuropsychologist and co-author of the
other new parenting book, The Self-Driven Child.
He says academics
are important, but that, in most cases, kids should be in the driver's seat,
learning to manage their work, their time and, ideally, being able to pursue
their own interests. That freedom, Stixrud says, helps them develop internal
motivation in a way that rewards and grades just can't.
Stixrud's
daughter, Jora LaFontaine, who now has a Ph.D. in economics, says she still
remembers first grade, when she brought a paper home from school. Her parents
were supposed to sign it every day, proving she'd read for fifteen minutes. The
first day, though, Jora says her father looked at it, laughed, "signed
every single line on it and said that he did not want to turn reading into
homework or a chore."
When she was an A
student in high school, Jora attended a talk her dad gave about why parents
shouldn't focus on grades. William Stixrud remembers his daughter pushing back
that night in the car.
"Driving
home she said, 'You know, I liked the lecture, but I don't really believe that
you believe that stuff about the grades," Stixrud remembers.
"Most people
I tell this to laugh," Jora says, laughing herself. "So, I said to my
dad, 'If you don't get good grades, you're not gonna get into college. Or at
least you won't get into a good college... and if you don't get into a good
college, you won't get a good job ...
"So my dad
said, 'I will give you a hundred dollars if you're willing to get a C in one of
your classes,'" Jora says.
Stixrud says, his
daughter already took school seriously, and he wanted her to understand that
"one thing that seems like a disaster is just not that big a deal."
Jora didn't take
her father up on his offer, but she says it meant a lot, knowing that the only
person really pushing her to succeed ... was her. In that way, she embodies the
spirit of both books' message to parents.
As Lewis writes,
"to build self-control, we need to stop controlling children."
