Don't Pee on the Bee

Misner & Smith--Or as The Doobies say "Listen to the Music!"

2010-03-12T11:12:54-08:00

Here's a bonus post for the day! I was just listening to KVMR and heard my cousin and his girlfriend intereviewed. They also played quite a few songs since they are in the Grass Valley area for the weekend to perform their music. Take a listen! They are really good! They sang "Poor Player" during the interview. Check it out! It's so crazy to realize that we are all grown up and doing things besides just playing at our grandma's house! Way to go, Sam! And Megan!

Spring Cleaning

2010-03-12T08:17:00-08:00

There is a new book out by Annie Leonard with quite the title: The Story of Stuff: How Our Problem with Overconsumption Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health--and a Vision for Change. Whew! Although the title is long, the "Three Steps for Radical Spring Cleaning" that Spirituality & Health (Mar/Apr 2010) pulled out of it and put on their Best Practice page really hit me!

Ask yourself, "Who really wants this stuff?" Is it truly our own want, or is it the world at large that is giving us the idea that we need all this?
Align your time with your values. As we spend more and more time working and having "screen time," our face-to-face social activities (both personally and on a community level) are decreasing. And the formula is actually quite simple: the more time we spend doing things that make us happy, the happier we will be! (Remember all those studies on gratitude?)
Share. I'm going to quote this one directly. "Sharing means buying less, spending less, wasting less. Really, does every household need a lawn mower, Bundt pan, a scanner, a ladder? Sharing also requires conversations, so it builds community. More friends--less stuff! See www.sharingsolutions.com for tips on getting started."

Writing the "green article" that is coming out next month was incredibly inspiring to me! I really felt that we (my family) were doing OK with the whole green thing--and we are--but there are so many other ideas out there! It is so fascinating. So many things to try if you are up for it!

So for me . . . Stuff? I'm really over it--except for books and magazines, of course! But more stuff around my house? Not really needing it. And of course, isn't there always kid stuff lying around?

Aligning my time with my values. Yes. That is something that needs to be done. I've got a lot of my time right now going towards things that are not rocking my world. That will be changing soon.

And sharing? I remember reading another article about this where some guy on the East Coast had a tool "lending library," and his neighbors and friends would just borrow what they needed. I thought it was a great idea then, and I think it is an even better idea now! Of course, I love my kitchen stuff too, but it's great to borrow my friend's neighbor's lobster pot on New Years Eve instead of having to store one at my house! Hey, Alice! I guess we were eco-cool before we even realized it!

Come to your Senses!

2010-03-11T09:49:00-08:00

After that blast of Nurture Shock, it feels like time for a change!

Check out this link to the Sensory Garden in Davis, CA. The garden was written up in an article in the Mar/Apr 2010 Spirituality & Health magazine. The entire Central Park Gardens looks like a great place to spend an afternoon!

The Conclusion of Nurture Shock

2010-03-10T09:34:00-08:00

The Myth of the Supertrait

I loved the conclusion of this book, plain and simple. It really tied it all together and, I think, puts it into perspective for those who might have felt challenged by it all. I have debated on how to write this last post because it seemed that it was going to be a very long one in order to cover it all. Then I debated on just keeping it short and sweet. But what I realized is that I just wish everyone would read this book! Then we could have some very interesting conversations! I now understand why my friend, Tara, has actually read and reread this book very soon after buying it. There is so much there! And so many different ways to think about it! So, if you decide to read it at some later date, let me know. I think this will always be a worthy topic!

The eventual conclusion of the book states that we may need to give up a few of our preconceived perceptions about children in order to learn more about them. Bronson and Merryman sum it up as follows:

". . . the goal o f having a deeper understanding of children is not futile. In fact, it's by studying these apparent contradictions very closely that deeper understanding emerges. It's when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caregivers, can learn something new."

Several super interesting studies on gratitude were the main topic of this chapter. I've got to give you some info on each one to see how they build on each other and get us to the conclusion.

Dr. Robert Emmons at UC Davis had his college students keep a gratitude journal once a week for 10 weeks. At the end of the study, these students were 25% more happier, more optimistic about the future, got sick less often and got more exercise. He repeated it with undergrads who wrote daily for 2 weeks, and then he surveyed their friends and got similar results, results that even their friends noticed. His work demonstrated that by paying attention and being grateful, our perceptions can be changed.

This work inspired Dr. Jeffrey Froh, a psychology professor at Hofstra University on Long Island and also a psychologist for a local school district. He had been struck by the sense of entitlement and materialism with the students at his school and so began the first study of gratitude with school children. Eleven classrooms with 221 students (which included a cross-section of the entire school, including gifted and special ed children) participated. Four classes wrote daily in gratitude journals for 2 weeks. Three classes were control groups (meaning that nothing changed for them), and the last four classes were told to list 5 hassles from each day. All classes were given pre- and post-questionnaires that measured the students' life satisfaction, gratitude, and emotions. The results of the research? No change in the class that had written in their gratitude journals, and the control group actually experienced more gratitude. The group that had focused on their hassles was only slightly worse statistically than the rest. Froh then questioned why the results were so different with the school-age children than with his college students and reread the children's diary entries. What he found was that they wrote the same thing everyday. He realized he was going to need to address that in his next study. And he also realized that he needed to change on of his preconceived notions: that middle schoolers should respond the same way as college students to these gratitude journals.

As Froh did some further research, he learned that children will not experience gratitude unless they realize that this nice life isn't accidental, that it is intentional, costly and beneficial. The next question then was whether or not younger children get this. His next study involved 3rd-, 8th- and 12th-graders and a parochial school. Because of the religious background, Froh knew that these kids knew about sacrifice, prayer and gratitude, so he had them do something different. They were to write a letter to someone and let them know how special they were. They then were to read the letters to these people fact-to-face. Supposedly the letters were amazing, but again, the data did not show that the experiment had been successful. As he further studied the data, though, he realized that some children had benefited while others had not, and they were essentially canceling out each other. The children who benefited were the children who were typically low in positive affect, who rarely experienced positive feelings such as hope, excitement and inspiration. Another interesting twist was that the children who were generally more optimistic and grateful felt less happy and grateful. According to the authors, "Froh is considering that his intervention led those children to realize just how much of their lives depended on someone else's whim or sacrifice. They didn't feel happy that people were always there doing things for them. Instead, it made them feel powerless."

Bronson and Merryman included Froh's work in the Conclusion, not to demonstrate that teaching children about gratitude is futile, but "because we think that his entire process is also illustrative of a much larger point. When we looked back at all the enormity of research that this book was built on, an interesting pattern was apparent. Most of the noteworthy insights into child development were revealed when scholars dropped the same two assumptions as Froh had."

Bronson and Merryman coined the first assumption the Fallacy of Similar Effect. Children do not necessarily work the same way as adults. The cite examples from throughout the book:

Lack of sleep affects children exponentially more than adults
Measured intelligence in children goes up and down.
Children need explicit statements about race, not just a diverse environment.
Children need play for learning whereas adults look at play as a way to let off steam.
Praise is very effective on adults in the workplace but not so much on children.

The second assumption to drop, according to the authors, is the Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy. Positive traits, such as gratitude, do not necessarily stave off or "rescue" children from negative behavior. We, as parents, believe that "good" behavior and positive emotions, etc. will protect a child from "bad" things like stealing and peer pressure. Here are a few examples from studies in the book that demonstrated that is not the case:

A child's dishonesty was shown as a "sign of intelligence and social savvy."
Deception in a teenager is very necessary part in developing their adolescent identity.
Sibling relationships can be dramatically affected by a "blind devotion to fairness."
Children can use empathy to manipulate their friends.
Imprisoned felons were shown to have higher emotional intelligence than the population as a whole.

Bronson and Merryman say, "It isn't as if we've now abandoned our desire for children to acquire honesty and other virtues. (And we're still telling kids to "play nice" and say thank you.) But we no longer think of them [virtues] as Supertraits--moral Kevlar." (Love that metaphor!) They go on to say that we need to not look at "good" and "bad" as being opposite ends of a spectrum (which then makes it easier to be judgmental about them), but instead to realize that they are each on their own spectrum and therefore, mutually independent. And here we come back to their final words that were at the top of this
post . . .

It's when our children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.

Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn't (Nurture Shock)

2010-03-09T13:28:00-08:00

As I was beginning to read this chapter, I decided to glance through the rest of the book to see what was left. Imagine my surprise when I realized that right after this chapter came "Conclusion." What? There were still about one quarter of the pages to go! Then I just felt chagrin as I realized there were pages of notes that I had never even looked at! (Not feeling so intellectual at the moment.) And then, of course, the "Selected Sources and References" (which I had expected!) So it does indeed, appear, that we will be finishing Nurture Shock this week!

Despite scientists' admonitions, parents still spend billions every year on gimmicks and videos, hoping to jump-start infants' language skills. What's the right way to accomplish this goal?

Seems like it was relatively recently that all the hubbub about the Baby Einstein DVDs was occurring, yet it was over two years ago. But that is where this latest chapter of Nurture Shockstarts. The study that brought this all up was actually a follow-up to an earlier study that was determining why parents were having their babies watch TV. Contrary to the thought that it was babysitting, there were a significant number of parents who were doing this to give their babies a cognitive edge. Because of this, a second study was conducted to quantify the actual impact of this specific media exposure. You will likely recall that the findings showed that the more the children watched, the worse their vocabulary was. This was not to say that watching these types of DVDs was hurting the children, but it definitely wasn't doing what the parents thought it was doing. The study also showed that babies benefited more from a live human speaker than a voiceover on an audio track. Lip-reading is an important piece for babies learning to speak. Seeing a face, moving lips, and being able to hear and see when a word begins and ends are all critical. In fact, even in adults, this is important: seeing someone's lips as they are speaking is equivalent to a 20 decibel increase in volume!

When polled, most parents knew that a word-rich environment was helpful to a baby's developing language skills. (Believe it or not, there is actually something called a "verbal pedometer" that can be placed near or on your baby to count the number of words that your child hears each day! Yikes!) Research has shown that the more words that babies hear, the greater their language acquisition will be. However, new research has shown that the information flow that truly matters is not what parents put in to their child, but what is coming out of their baby. Dr. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda found that when parents immediately responded to a baby's vocalizations, these children were six months ahead of their peers in their language skills. Further studies by Dr. Michael Goldstein showed an increase in the type of vocalizations when parents were actually coaxed to respond (sometimes with touch, sometimes with words) to their baby. According to Po Bronson, one of the authors who actually witnessed and heard a mother and baby do this, "To my ear, it was stunning--the children literally sounded five months older, during the second ten-minute period, than they had in the first." Goldstein warns parents about overdoing this, however, and reminds them about the importance of play time as a means of learning as well.

To many parents, verbal skills and reading skills seem to be innate, but GOldstein says, "When parents see development in their kids, they are only seeing the output--not the mechanisms underneath. We just see significant changes, so parents tend to say 'It must be built in.' I don't think people are aware of what they are bringing to babies." One study comparing identical and fraternal twins showed that genetic factors are only about 25% of language acquisition. One researcher, when talking about the differences in being an early- or late-developer says, "The only thing typical about typical language development was variability." Tamis-LeMonda agrees and says that "sometimes a kid who seems to catch up wasn't actually behind in the first place; their receptive vocabulary was proceeding apace, but they weren't talking much because they were shy or didn't have the motor control yet." Her words conclude the chapter: "It's important to characterize early language precocity for what it is: a head start, but far from a guarantee. It's not lie the infancy period is the only critical period. New skills are emerging in every period, and vocabulary development has to continually expand."

Plays Well with Others (Nurture Shock)

2010-03-08T12:01:00-08:00

Before I get into this chapter, I am thinking about declaring this week Nurture Shock Week. Seems like it has been forever since I first started writing about this, and I never intended for it to take this long. So let's see if I can do it! And now on to the next chapter . . .

Why modern involved parenting has failed to produce a generation of angels

So let me start this post by saying that when I first read this chapter (several months ago now), I remember thinking, "How am I going to blog about this?" There is an awful lot to cover, and this chapter really jumped around with different approaches, studies and theories. It seemed pretty controversial to me then, so let's see how I feel at the end of this post!

The first part of this chapter discussed children's aggression and the effects of media exposure. I won't go into the studies' details here because I would just end up re-writing the chapter, but the initial thought that the more violent TV kids watch, the more violent they will be just didn't work out here. In fact, the more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were. (Relational aggression for preschool-age children was defined by ignoring a child who wanted to play or withdrawing friendship, i.e., "I won't be your friend anymore!") After replicating the study several times with diverse children, the results were the same. The researchers then studied the actual TV shows themselves and found that 66.7% of the prosocial shows studied contained insults. Dr. Jamie Ostrov, one of the main researchers on this subject, theorizes that "many educational shows spend most of the half-hour establishing a conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving the conflict. Preschoolers have a difficult time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier."

The next section of the book discussed parental fighting in front of children and the effects that that can have. Interestingly enough, these studies showed that children are definitely in tune with parents fighting, whether they actually witness it or not. But one thing that made it less detrimental to the children was seeing the parents resolve the conflict. The level of tension in the children decreased when they saw the resolution. In one study by Dr. E. Mark Cummings, he found that "children's emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between parent and child."

There was a very interesting discussion about studies done by Dr. Kenneth Dodge, a professor at Duke University, on culture and corporal punishment too. While I'm not going to into detail about that either, the fascinating findings were that if corporal punishment was seen as "the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn't," these children were actually less aggressive than those who were spanked as a last resort.

The authors then went on to discuss "The Nurture Paradox" wherein parents want to protect their children. According to Dr. Joseph Allen, a professor and clinician at the University of Virginia, "To protect kids is a natural instinct. But we end up not teaching them to deal with life's ups and downs. It's a healthy instinct, and fifty years ago parents had the same instinct, just that they had no time and energy to intervene. Today, for various reasons, those constraints aren't stopping us, and we go wild." Because of this, the "zero tolerance" policies have been adapted at schools. No one is saying that bullying is OK, but a task force of the American Psychological Association reminds us that many incidents involve poor judgment which is developmentally normal.

Other studies have shown that it is not just the "bad" kids who are bullying their peers, but "good" kids doing it too, just sometimes in a more subtle way. University of Kansas professor Patricia Hawley studies children from preschool through high school. She calls children who are able to use both prosocial and antisocial tactics to get their ways "bistrategic controllers." Another researcher says of these kids, "They're just socially busy."

And now my two cents worth . . . I have to admit that I felt incredibly challenged by the info about the types of TV that kids watch and their ensuing levels of aggression. I just kept thinking, "How could Sesame Street possibly be involved with this?" And maybe it wasn't. There was no list of the shows they researched. I suppose I could look up the studies and see if they are listed. But I will also say that both of my kids can be pretty bossy! Of course, their dad attributes that to the fact that both of their parents are bosses. So who knows? But this TV thing definitely threw me!

As for the parents fighting? Everything I read there felt pretty right on to me--as a parent and a psych grad. I know my kids are totally in tune to our emotions! And zero tolerance? I agree that there need to be limits to behaviors, but I do think that our kids are not really given opportunities to work some of their "issues" out. Of course, if either of my kids were being bullied, I would probably feel totally different. And I completely agree that "good" kids can be "bullies" as well. I found it ironic that Dr. Hawley can't get a grant to follow "bistrategics" long-term because they are so successful in school and life in general.

So now--what do you think?

Daily Resolution

2010-03-07T11:25:39-08:00

"I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's."
~Henry Moore

"Woo hoo!" as my friend Alex would say! Isn't this the time of year when those resolutions from January now lay by the wayside? How much better it could be for us--me! some of you, perhaps!--if we took it one day at a time? A little less heat on our already "simmering" and "boiling" expectations!

From www.henrymoore.com

Henry Moore (1898 - 1986) is perhaps the most influential public sculptor of this century. Drawing on his studies of Classical, pre-Columbian and African art, Moore created original and truly modern sculptural forms. Abstractions of organic shapes were his primary motif. His seated, standing, and reclining figures comprise an enduring vocabulary reflecting the universality of the human condition.

"The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration." ~ Henry Moore

"In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture." ~ Henry Moore as quoted in Five British Sculptors (Work and Talk) by Warren Forma, 1964.