Can You Really Succeed if You’re Young for Your Year? Outliers of Various Kinds….

Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers is a great book, and its author has a quirky sort of genius. A number of Gladwell’s points have peculiar relevance for parents and parenting—peculiar because Gladwell doesn’t talk about parents and kids much at all directly. I’ll start with the most obvious: Gladwell’s piece on the fact that the vast majority of players on Canadian National Hockey Team have birthdays in the first quarter of the year. This is, in essence, because hockey is a very important and competitive sport in Canada; it requires (unlike basketball) the use of a space that’s not easy to come by (skating rink); and the cut off age is January 1. The basic argument is that what starts out as a minor developmental advantage due to age ends up getting magnified every year: the slightly better kids get a lot more attention, thus making them better players, which makes them more likely to be selected the next year…and so on.


Some of these realities are hockey-specific, but not all of them. School districts with Talented and Gifted Programs select in a somewhat similar way (rarely do kids get second chances to play in, say, middle school). This often motivates people to hold a child back who’s on “the cusp” --or even just at the young end of his grade. This is especially the case with boys. A friend living in (very affluent) Westchester County, NY, told me that she’s facing pressure to hold back her son whose birthday is in the middle of the school year. The pressure is from other parents, since so many are keeping their kids at home for an extra year to give them an edge. I faced all this myself when dealing with my oldest daughter. She has a late birthday, as does her sister two years her junior. I didn’t like the idea of my girls being one year apart in school when they were two years apart in everything else. So for me, deciding for one was like deciding for both. In my search to figure out what was best for her I was amazed by the total lack of explanation. Every time I talked to someone about it, they told me to hold her back. But they could never give me a single good reason! As I often said to people, if we say it’s better for every child to stay back in these cases, the problem is the curriculum!


But Gladwell would probably be keeping his son back. And I see where he’s coming from: there are distinct advantages to being a big fish in a small pond. But I wonder if, in our pursuit of success that we can measure, we’re missing other factors. My sister in law has two brothers who were both young for their school year, both of whom went on to be real leaders in their time at the Naval Academy. The disadvantages of being young seemed to have worked to their favor in some way (something which Gladwell recognizes in fascinating detail elsewhere in Outliers.


There is a former student of mine who is a great counter example—I’ll call him “K.” K is the youngest of his family’s four sons. K is a bit on the young side, and his mother was undecided about what to do with him. She had a friend with a son whose birthday was close to K’s, and she decided that whatever her friend did her son, she’d do as well. The friend’s mom had her son start school; and so K did,too. K would seem like a prime candidate for bitterness over all this: he was a serious competitive swimmer in high school, and he (arguably, anyway) missed out on getting recruited as a result of his age. He probably could have gotten into a better college than the one where I teach (which is good, but not Ivy League material)—with all the advantages that represents—if he had been a grade behind.

But K isn’t bitter. Once he started college, he stopped swimming—and freed up a whole lot of time! An Electrical Engineering major, he’s about to graduate, and is poised to get a very good job in a time where jobs are scarce. And he doesn’t miss swimming at all.

How do YOU measure intelligence? (The “Tin-foil Standard” is my choice.)

So we all know there are kinds of intelligence. There is the traditional IQ test, but of course, everyone keeps talking about alternate measures of these things, since IQ alone doesn’t seem to be a big predictor of success and other relevant factors. I was reminded of this particularly recently as I was reading Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers (more on that to come!). Gladwell talks a lot about the discrepancy between IQ and success and has some very interesting things to say on the topic which I’ll come back to. But, in thinking about these things, it seems to me that there are a number of things to look for:

a) Interpersonal intelligence (“emotional” intelligence and so forth).

b) Creative intelligence (ability to use things for unexpected purposes).

c) Patience and work ethic (ability and willingness to take the time and care to do something right).

d) Intuition (a sensitivity to subtle things in the environment, whether that’s people or things) that allows for insights that others miss.

All these things are all important, and helping ourselves and our children develop our capacities in all these directions seems like a very worthy goal for parents. But sometimes, too, we want to have a sense of what kind of raw material we’re working with. When it comes to sheer, instinctive genius, I like to focus on the (seasonally appropriate) “tin foil standard.” It only works with very small children, but it clearly shows when there is greatness to come. The basic premises are these:

a) All children like candy

b) Many forms of candy come in tin foil

So….the smarter the child, the younger and more readily s/he recognizes that tin foil is something to be sought after and prized and, eventually consumed (though, hopefully, AFTER the removal of the foil itself). So what if tin foil is pretty and shiny and babies always try to eat things? If your baby tries to suck on a piece of tin foil at a very young age, s/he clearly has genius potential.

So: What’s the youngest age at which you’ve seen a kid go for a Twix bar? Or what’s your gold standard for intelligence? (Inquiring Mom wants to know…..)

Is this one precocious? Not sure yet.....



Finally, the Validation I've Been Waiting For!

One of the things that has always been clear—and funny-- to me is how we all tend to seek new items that reflect the opinions we already hold. So, I seem to remember the article that reports stronger immune systems in households that clean less frequently much better than the article noting how frequent, serious, handwashing helps prevent the majority of colds. But the sweetest moment of personal validation came recently, as I was searching the internet for pictures of haircuts. Now, before I get to the punch-line, I will note a couple of important things for the unfamiliar:

1) I have three daughters (my son’s the baby)

2) People seems to take a perverse pleasure in making irritating comments to mothers of daughters. Stuff like, “Just wait til she’s a teenager!” is frequently heard as someone peers over the side of a stroller or crib. There’s also the standard, “Uh-oh, that’s going to be expensive!” The most direct approach is taken by many, “Girls are so much harder to raise than boys.” And there is also the seemingly well-intentioned comment, which is particularly irritating to my husband (since it’s addressed to him), “She’ll have you wrapped around her finger.” (Just like her mom, haha).

So, now, I reveal my family’s recent moment of glory (forget about my doubts about “Science”).
Studies have shown it: ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY TO HAVE DAUGHTERS. I’ll say it again, in another way, in case it wasn't clear from the caps: Highly attractive people have a MORE than 50% chance of conceiving daughters. Scientists speculate yadda yadda. You get the drift. Validation.

Never mind the fine print—despite my new short haircut, I am feeling über attractive. Hope you are, too!

http://www.allure.com/beauty/blogs/reporter/2010/11/do-attractive-people-have-more.html

Crime, Punishment, and "Natural" Consequences

I’ve read a number of parenting articles, books, and so forth that recommend “natural” consequences for children’s misbehavior whenever possible. Advocates suggest that it’s best for children to understand that their failings have real consequences—not just punishments made up by their parents. Your job as a parent is, thus, to avoid “inventing” consequences, and allow your child to learn (reasonably) from what happens naturally when she makes a mistake or chooses unwisely. So…if your child insists that she doesn’t want t o wear a coat outside, go ahead and let her go out without it. She’ll learn when she gets cold, the idea goes. It makes a lot of sense to me in general. The more a child becomes aware that her actions change outcomes, the more likely she is to adjust her behavior when she discovers that it results in an unpleasant reality. If a behavior is truly dangerous (i.e. crossing a street without looking), then you should—ahem, naturally—intervene. But otherwise, try to allow natural consequences to take effect. Wherever possible, disciplinary measures should be natural. So if your child breaks a window, rather than sentencing him to his room for a week, he should try to earn money to pay for it; try to apologize to the people whose property he damaged, etc.

But…(See--it’s not only our children who raise objections!)


The difficulty I have is in fully understanding and applying this theory to complex, everyday reality. I will allow my kids not to wear a jacket if they don’t want to—though I will generally warn them that I think it’s a bad idea, since it may get chillier later in the day. Likewise, if they take excessive (but not insane) risks on the playground, I’ll let them. But often, letting nature take its course is a complex arena—and one that always entails rather significant intervention from yours truly.

Take the other day. My eldest child (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty), came home without her reading anthology. An anthology which, among other things, includes a glossary in the back. She had to write the definitions of a series of words. But, sans glossary, that was a bit tricky to do. Undaunted for once, I reminded said child that she had a dictionary she could use. She got it right out and started looking. Only, she doesn’t know how to use a dictionary, and I had forgotten how many steps there are to using one. Fortunately, there were only about 5 words, but they took what seemed like a lifetime, after reviewing alphabetical order, the use of guide words at the top of the page and so forth. While this may be encouraging her to understand the natural consequences of her actions, it seemed to place more of the burden on me than many other scenarios. This is fine if it’s actually helpful to her in the long run, but it reminds me of how complicated it is to understand what “natural” is—let alone what it means in practice (a theme which is frighteningly close to my dissertation topic….)

Fear and Trembling Part II: Facing My Own Fears, Provoked By a Hit and Run

The question of fear and how to face it is really a big one; I wish I could have a franker and more frequent conversations about such things with people. Earlier this year, I checked out a book from the library (Free Range Kids) written by a mother who had gotten herself called “the worst mother in the world”  for having allowed her (8 year old?) son to take  public transportation (including the subway) from midtown Manhattan back to his house alone.  She herself had found her action unspectacular (in either the good or bad sense); when local media got hold of it however, she was asked to appear on TV and won herself the title  (in some circles, anyway) of the “Worst Mother in the World” title. I am not personally committed to the specifics of what she allowed her son to do. While I doubt I would do the same with any of my kids, I believe that a good parent usually has a better sense of what a child’s ready for than an outside observer ever could. Which is why we need to watch our kids and respond to them as individuals…

One of the great difficulties of being a parent is, of course, OUR fear. We need to help our kids face fears, but first of all, we ourselves need to face a tremendous host of fears. Fears that our kids inspire in us. I was very discouraged after the birth of my first child by just how very afraid I felt most of the time. The possibility of harm was always lurking.  Back then, physical harm was foremost in my mind, but a friend—whose daughter recently turned 14—assures me that the fear he faces now with her is no less real, palpable, or serious.

I believe him. As I look towards the years when my children will face a host of challenging situations, I want to be ready to face my own fear and theirs. Earlier this year, I was deeply provoked by a hit-and-run accident that occurred outside a local high school. I thought, naturally, of the tragic deaths of a couple of young people who met their death unexpectedly. But I also thought of the terrified young girl who was behind the wheel when she accidentally hit two acquaintances. What kind of courage it requires to face that kind of reality! It got me thinking—what kind of education could you give your children to enable them to handle that kind of situation? First of all, you need to teach them not to run away from mistakes. Since then, I’ve been on a kind of mission to make sure my kids don’t walk away when they hurt someone; that they stay and help. It’s an amazingly hard thing to do: when my kids hurt someone, their guilt often makes them defensive, and they pull away from the person they’ve damaged (even if we’re talking a minor scrape that was *really* an accident!).  I’m hoping—and praying—that  some of this stays with them in the long run. 

Fear and Trembling….and Parenting Through It….

So lately my former student/blog commentator/texter extraordinaire Don Miller has been responding like crazy to one of my posts. But really, he’s not responding: he’s addressing a whole new topic, and one that deserves some attention: bullying, and our attempts to eliminate it. But in his posts and private emails to me, he’s getting at a much larger set of issues: the role that parents have in protecting their children from outside menaces. This takes many forms, but personal harassment is certainly one of them. Don’s questions—about whether we take things too far in trying to protect our children from harm—get at a central problem that we as parents face: what does it mean to protect our children? Can it be taken too far?

I have read a number of articles that suggest that we definitely do take our protection too far, and that it has a number of dire consequences for our kids. Back in 2004 I read—and passed on—an article by Hana Estroff Marano that was published in Psychology Today, “A Nation of Wimps.” Marano’s claim is that our over-protective parenting was producing a nation of spineless children. I have given this article to many of my students, who understand where she’s coming from: many of them are the victims of excessive parenting (at the hands of kind and very-well-intentioned mothers and fathers). So there is a problem, or a potential one. At the same time, every parent wants to protect children. What to do?

As strange as it may seems, I believe that what we parents and teachers need most is to protect and love our children more—not less. Come again? Yes; we need to understand that part of protecting our children is trying to equip them thoroughly with what they need to go through life, not just trying to keep them from getting hurt but helping them work through the hurt, trusting that there is something good at the other end of that pain. We will not keep them from the many faces of pain; the real question is how we can help them deal with suffering. What I want most for my children is to help them face their fears courageously and intelligently; and if I spend too much trying to keep them from fear or hurt, I limit their ability to grow in courage and intelligence. At the same time, I want them to know they’re not alone is confronting reality; I want them to know that I am there for them in the ways that I can help. If I try to avoid all pain, I limit my ability to teach them some of the life lessons they need most. When my almost-five year old daughter Veronica decided to go off the diving board recently, I told her I would be watching her and would be ready to meet her when she got off. But she had to face her own fear as she jumped off (and the terror on her face right before she hit the water was priceless); she did and I was proud—and I made her do it again and again so that she could get comfortable with that fear….It’s just the beginning of my own journey, trying to figure out how to face my own fears better and help them more (suggestions welcome!).

Ultimately, as a person of faith, I trust that reality is a good thing—and I don’t want to spare my kids their impact with it.

You’re Building a Life’s Legacy of Love: Think of that at 3 in the morning.

I recently received a card for the birth of our son. On the front it reads, “Children are a gift from God.” When you open it, it continues, “Remember that at 3 in the morning!” Waking up to feed, care for, and console small children is not most parents’ idea of a good time. And yet, we do it. Not all of us, perhaps, but many of us, much of the time. It seems like one of those things we just “do”; often grumbling about it before or afterwards, but rousing ourselves nevertheless. I was recently re-reading a chapter of The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik. I first discovered Gopnik’s work after the birth of my first child, and I am indebted to her for giving me a sense of the importance of seemingly minor infant and child behaviors. While babies are quite ridiculously cute, I am not someone naturally ecstatic about focusing my entire life on caring for them. Gopnik’s explanations of the things going on inside children; their reasoning process, even as infants, made a whole host of (previously uninteresting) behaviors suddenly compelling to me.

The chapter I was re-reading is called “Learning to Love” and in it, Gopnik shows how infants develop expectations about love based on what they experience with their caregivers. In particular, she looks at studies that show a) how infants and caregivers (especially parents) connect, especially looking at types of parental reactions to children; b) how these infants learn to make predictions about the ways caregivers interact with them and other children, and c) how children and grownups come to expect other people to behave like their parents.

To explain some key concepts in Gopnik’s words, “The internal working models of attachment, like other theories, are based on the evidence babies have about the people around them. Mothers who respond quickly to babies’ signals—who return to babies after they leave and comfort babies when they are unhappy—are more likely to have “secure” babies. Mothers who don’t react with comfort when babies are distressed are more likely to have avoidant babies. Mothers who express a great deal of distress themselves are more likely to have anxious babies.” So…when mothers respond quickly to their children, their babies tend to develop “secure” attachments; when they don’t, they tend towards “insecure” attachments.

Gopnik then tells of some clever experiments in which children are shown little (baby) balls accompanied by larger (mother) balls. At a certain point, the baby starts to cry, and the mother ball either moves towards or away from the baby ball in response to that cry. Babies look at things longer when they depart from their usual expectations, and so researchers have been able to tell what babies expect by noticing what they watch longer and with greater curiosity. Insecure babies look longer at the mom ball who moves towards the baby ball—they’re surprised by her. Secure babies, on the other hand, watch the big ball who moves away from the little one, since that’s not usual in their experience.

While a lot can happen from infancy to adulthood, there are further studies (too varied and complex to get into here) that show that the expectations formed in infancy tend to endure. While we are not determined by our childhoods, we naturally tend to imagine that we will be loved in the future if we’ve been loved in the past. And if we haven’t been loved in the past, we tend to think it’s unlikely in the future.

So when you wake up at 3 in the morning to respond to your baby’s cries, you’re building a legacy of secure attachment for her: making her know that she is loved now, and will be forever.