Category: Health

Good people, bad people, and the rest of us

Posted on by Suki

The other day when we were talking to our kids about interacting with other people online, we came up against a problem that we face over and over as parents:

Concern #1: We don’t think it’s healthy for our kids to view the world as some horrible scary place they should be afraid of interacting with.

Concern #2: On the other hand, horrible scary things happen out there every day, and we want our children to have basic tools to deal with things that might come their way.

How you balance those concerns pretty much sums up your view of what your role as a parent is.

I tend to spend a lot of time standing in the middle of the seesaw, trying to keep it level. I did let my kids walk around the neighborhood alone when they were little. I didn’t prime them with horrible stories about mean people and what they will do to them. I did tell them that it’s OK to question the motives of adults they come into contact with.

Mean people R us, some of the time

A challenge for parents is to develop a consistent approach to how we deal with danger in the world, especially potentially dangerous people. What I came up with translates pretty well to the online world as well:

Premise #1: There is a small number of really terrible people in this world who want to hurt others.

Premise #2: There is a small number of really saintly people who will never hurt anyone or anything.

Premise #3: The rest of us just do our best with what life throws us.

I’ve never been terribly concerned about Premise #1, to tell you the truth. If you want your children not to be hurt by an adult, you’d do well to choose a partner who won’t hurt them because that’s who’s most likely to do it. If there are other people in your life who might hurt your children, do your best to change your life so that you don’t interact with those people.

Stranger-on-stranger violence is rare enough; stranger-adult-on-child violence is really quite rare. It’s also generally not possible to predict, so you can’t live your life assuming that everyone is out to get you.

Since you can’t reliably identify the saints amongst us, Premise #3 is where things get hairy. The fact is, sometimes we human beings don’t behave as well as we should. One of the situations in which we behave less well than normal is when we feel anonymous. Those who live in tourist towns, like me, can tell you without hesitation that people are less polite and leave more garbage lying around when they are at outside of their own community.

Our online lives have offered all of us a certain measure of anonymity and distance from the people we interact with. Even real humans that we see in the real world gain a certain amount of psychological distance online. People put things in email they’d never say to someone’s face. Facebook generates mini-scandals and lots of hurt feelings every day.

Do your best, keep trying to do better

So when we’re talking to our kids about taking care of themselves—in the “real” world or online—we’re more concerned about that huge number of people who are simply doing their best. We’re concerned whether our children are conscious of their own behavior and how it might affect others. And we’re concerned that another child that they met online may not have the same guidance from the adults in his or her real life.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible that the child they met online is actually a 34-year-old serial child kidnapper. It’s just that when I worry about which values to impart to my children, I put fear of someone running a red light and hitting them in a crosswalk way ahead of any of the more headline-worthy ways to get hurt in this world. It’s hard to resist the headlines (not to mention the Amber Alerts shining above the highways) and just plow forward with a hope that our kids will do OK for themselves in the world.

I think that open communication is the best way to do that. Each of us has to make a decision about where on the seesaw we want to stand, and then decide to be OK with that decision, no matter what happens.

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On manufactured non-controversies

Posted on by Suki

One of the Internet’s less noble qualities is its ability to help people get up-in-arms about things that are non-issues. If you use Facebook or other social media, you’re probably hit with it on a daily basis—forced hyperbole that translates to simple clickbait.

andertoons4419I heard about the so-called sunscreen controversy some years ago when my kids were small. According to people who got their PhDs from Google, the use of sunscreen has not slowed the rise of skin cancer—it has caused a rise in skin cancer. [Read this article to understand the argument and then this article to understand why the argument is based on faulty reasoning, shifty argumentation, and sleight of hand.]

This non-controversy rests on a treasure trove of examples how people misunderstand science, and how people with preformed agendas (e.g. “everything natural is good“) misread scientific data to serve their own purposes.

These non-controversies almost always rest on the same set of fallacies, including:

Playing on your fears

We live in a pretty scary world, I’ll admit. A few hundred years ago, most people lived in villages and only knew what was happening nearby. Now, when a non-custodial dad grabs his child in Sacramento, we read about it in lights over the highway across the state. In our villages, we ate what we grew, wore clothing we made, and lived in houses we built. Now we are all depending on strangers around the world to care for our health and well-being. We trust a factory worker in Vietnam not to put contaminated food into our frozen meals. We trust a medical technician in Israel to formulate our kids’ inhalers correctly. We trust a flooring company that sources materials from China not to allow hazardous chemicals that will poison us while we sleep.

This is all pretty scary, and non-controversies play on those fears.

Vilifying science and scientists

When did it happen that the scientist went from pathetic geek to evil genius baby killer? People in general have never trusted science that much, but it’s only been recently that our culture has been placing evil intent at the heart of science. We’re told that “scientists who speak out” feel threatened. We’re told that the reason you haven’t heard about this life-saving idea is that corporations and the scientists they employ are out to sell things that they know are killing us.

The fact is that scientists argue with each other all the time—it’s at the heart of what they do—so scientists disagreeing on any issue is hardly news. And yes, of course scientists have biases and sometimes the ideas that end up being proven to be correct are ignored for some time. However, the aim of scientists is certainly not to silence dissent and make us all sicker. Arguments that rest on that premise are false from the get-go.

Cherry-picking science

One of the most maddening things about science is that it’s hardly ever conclusive. When it comes to something as complex as the healthy functioning of the human body, science may never be able to be conclusive enough to convince a jury of uneducated citizens. So when an article trying to fan the flames of a non-controversy cites science, it does so with a careful process of ignoring the subtleties of scientific research.

No single study proves a hypothesis—scientists pretty much agree on this. But they also agree that science advances by following the advance of knowledge, not by ignoring what doesn’t fit your agenda. Looking at the history of scientific research, you can find studies that validate pretty much any idea—and then you can find the avalanche of studies that followed showing that the preceding study was flawed or inconclusive. Cherry-picking allows disingenuous Internet fakers to grab your attention without requiring them to face the subtler reality of conflicting scientific data.

Confusing correlation and causation

This is probably the most common confusion that non-controversy articles play on. For a good laugh, look at a few of the charts at Spurious Correlations. My favorite is how “murders by steam, hot vapors, and hot objects” correlates well with the age of the reigning Miss America.

So in the sunscreen non-controversy, a big deal is made of rising skin cancer rates that correlate with rising sunscreen use. It seems so tempting to come to the obvious conclusion that sunscreen use is causing cancer, but scientists who have attempted to prove that relationship simply haven’t been able to do it. This is not to say that no relationship exists, but rather that so far no one has been able to prove it. For some people, that lack of certainty is maddening. It leads them to prefer manufactured non-controversies because they are so simple and direct.

Blinding us with numbers, facts, and statistics

“She blinded me with science!” the scientist exclaims in Thomas Dolby’s song. And that’s what these non-controversies attempt to do. They cite fact after fact, number after number, name after name, and they seem so believable. But a preponderance of numbers doesn’t create fact; it simply creates confusion in the minds of people who aren’t trained to understand the numbers. And confusion leads to fear, which leads to… see above.

Why do people assign evil intent to scientists? I think it’s because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is—and what its limits are.

There are people who are trained to understand all the numbers, facts, and statistics, and they’re called scientists. And yes, scientists are human, all of them have biases, and some of them even have agendas. But who should we trust: someone who has dedicated his/her life to learning, investigation, and improving the human condition, or someone who has dedicated his/her life to fanning the flames of non-controversies in order to get more clicks?

I’ll trust the scientists.

What science “knows” will always be flawed and incomplete, and it will always be subject to bias and preconceived notions, but a skeptical trust in science is an improvement over living in a village that tries to solve its epidemic of bubonic plague by drowning all the cats.

Getting through this complex modern life we’ve been born into involves a lot of trust that we can’t avoid. The big question is how you’re going to make informed decisions about all the details that face us daily. Listening to the manufacturers of non-controversies might be appealing, but it’s not going to make you any healthier or safer.

“Inside Out,” a tour of modern parenting

Posted on by Suki

One of the benefits of parenting now rather than in previous times is how much more we know about human brains and how they work. Before the 21st century, advice to parents and teachers was pretty much based on inference—”we see that lots of people who have done xyz have had good results, so you should do it, too.”

These days, parents are benefiting from—and in some cases, freaking out because of—a huge influx of hard data about how brains work. So it’s not surprising that Pixar has come out with a movie that’s not only for kids, but for us adults who are worrying about how our parenting is affecting our children’s brains. [Read an interview with the director in which he talks about how his 11-year-old daughter inspired the film.]

The freak-out at the dinner table. We’ve been there!

A movie for kids and adults

“Inside Out” is a truly brilliant film in several respects. The aspect most important to me as an adult is that it’s a kids’ movie that adults can not only enjoy with the kids, but enjoy separately from the kids. As we sat in the theater, I noticed a striking pattern of laughter: The kids were laughing at the funny lines, the goofiness, and the nutty action sequences.

True, the adults were laughing at those, too. But we were also laughing at the adult level inside jokes (did they really sneak a joke about San Francisco “bears” into a mainstream movie?), the pained and loving relationship between the two parents (oh, ouch, I think we’ve had that actual discussion, dear), and the uncomfortable recognition of feelings from our own childhoods.

True to life

Not all films have to be “real” in the sense of sticking to objective realism. However, any good story is “real” within its own context. Whether the characters are fairies or girls attending a new school, their experiences and especially their reaction to those experiences need to seem “real” in context. We have to believe them.

The temptation with kids’ movies is to make things happen just because kids think they’re funny, or because it was time for some action in the plot, or because the animator always wanted to animate a wild mass of curly, red hair. “Inside Out” never feels like it’s veering off-center; this is a movie that knows what it’s about.

Modeling a healthy parenting style

Did the makers of this film really portray a loving, modern family that lets their 11-year-old daughter [gasp!] walk to school in a new city? Well, yes, they did. I wonder if Pete Docter has read Free-Range Kids. 

I appreciated that this film featured neither the sappy parent-as-role-model nor the damaging parent-as-natural-adversary tropes that are common in children’s films. These parents are real. They don’t make decisions only for their daughter—they have needs, too. They don’t try to control their daughter or even to completely understand her. They just love her and do their best, which isn’t always quite good enough.

A healthy theory of mind

Let’s face it: this is a cartoon, and the representation of the brains and how they work is cartoonish. But it’s also beautifully constructed both to reflect the state of modern brain research and also a healthy modern view of how to manage our ideas and emotions. In the movie, each person has a “control room” that is run by the emotions happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. But that’s where the brains’ similarities end. Each character in the film has a control room that works differently, depending on the character’s personality and life experiences.

Some of the funniest moments in the film are when we briefly step into the minds of the minor characters and see their control rooms as a metaphor for how they approach the world. Every character, we are reminded, is a person, and has the same emotions as the next. How those emotions behave and interact is what makes each of us unique.

Two thumbs up

I have to admit that I’m generally loathe to go to popular children’s movies. I am deeply grateful when another parent offers to take my child. And now that my youngest is old enough to go on her own, it takes a lot to get me to spend my dollars and my precious two hours on something that will, at best, bore me, and at worst, offend me.

But this is one film I can heartily recommend to parents like me who are done with stupid kid films. I left the theater feeling like I’d actually received more than I paid for, an unusual result of watching a hit summer movie.

Mom’s efficient control room—calm, cool, and collected!
Her daughter’s control room is rather more chaotic.
Dad’s emotions are remembering a great hockey game before they realize that their daughter is having a crisis.

Aside: Interesting how the filmmakers chose to portray Mom’s emotions as all women, Dad’s emotions as all men, but Daughter’s emotions as mixed male and female. Intentional? Hm…

Positive mindset, not mindlessly positive

Posted on by Suki

I visited a friend from the gifted education community recently. She hosted me and my son at her home, and she and I went for a long walk and got to chat non-stop. What a treat! Not a single interruption.

Here I am accepting prizes for a road race I won when I was a teen. I as very Dweckian—I really believed that I could become a top marathoner if I worked hard enough. Unfortunately, soon after this photo was taken my joints declared another plan for my life—they had reached their tolerance for abuse!
Here I am accepting prizes for a road race I won when I was a teen. I was very Dweckian—I really believed that I could become a top marathoner if I worked hard enough. Unfortunately, soon after this photo was taken my joints declared another plan for my life—they had reached their tolerance for abuse!

One of the things we talked about was Carol Dweck’s Mindset research. Dweck is a psychologist who ran experiments to find out whether people’s mindsets influence how well they learn. Probably not surprisingly, she found that people who believe that they can improve tend to learn better than people who believe that their abilities are fixed. She called this a “growth mindset” vs. a “fixed mindset.” (If you want more details, visit her website here.)

I say this isn’t surprising because it’s something parents have been saying for many years: If you go into a task expecting to fail, you probably won’t do as well as you could. But it’s great that Dweck was able to devise experiments that showed this effect in action.

However… the big “however” was what my friend and I discussed. People in general have a tendency to take limited studies and over-apply them. Reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food recently, I was reminded of the time in the 80’s when oat bran was said to be the cure for everything, to the point that a friend of mine would sprinkle it on her Chinese takeout.

Mindset as oat bran

The psychological equivalent of sprinkling oat bran on Chinese takeout is the idea, being adopted by many an educator and plenty of parents these days, that kids can learn anything if they just try hard enough. As soon as you hear someone say that, make sure to put on your Dweckian brakes and remember the limitations of research.

Dweck’s research did not prove that anyone can learn anything if they try hard enough. Her research did suggest that people learn more easily and quickly when they have a positive mindset.

Other research, however, has shown that, in fact, having a mindlessly positive viewpoint is not only not helpful to learning, but can sometimes be detrimental to learning. The New York Times’ “The Trouble with Self-Esteem” offers some details on this.

Why is this important? First of all, it’s important to realize that all of us are born with a physical body that has its limits. When I was young, I wanted to be a marathon runner. That didn’t happen, not because I didn’t try hard enough, but because it turned out that my body isn’t built for marathon running.

The brain is, let’s face it, a piece of meat. We can improve our brains by using them, just as we improve our muscles by using them. But we are all born with limited potential. If we weren’t, we’d be gods. On top of that, some of us are born with brains built for marathons, and others with brains that are happiest taking an evening stroll.

Don’t expect a stroller to win the 100 meter sprint

When you tell children who are working really, really hard on something that challenges the capacity of their brains to the highest that they will succeed if they try hard enough, the message is pretty clear: If you don’t succeed at learning algebra/salsa dancing/Chinese, it’s your fault.

This, of course, is nonsense. Anyone who has raised or worked with gifted children will have plenty of experience in how nonsensical mindless positivity is. There are people in this world who have potential to do things that the rest of us can’t do. If you don’t have a certain kind of brain that “gets” abstract mathematical reasoning, and someone tells you that you can become a leading theoretical physicist if you just try hard enough, they’re lying. Or deluded.

Pushing mindless positivity inhibits learning

  • Children do not learn to have reasonable expectations of themselves. They learn that there’s something wrong with them for having potential in some areas and not much potential in other areas, when in fact that’s the definition of being human.
  • Educators come to believe that it’s not worth challenging gifted learners, because obviously, they are already challenging themselves enough. The message is that all brains are the same; therefore, all education should be the same. Gifted learners end up bored, frustrated, and confused when people think they worked hard on something that came easily to them.
  • Parents teach their kids that everything they do is great, so they don’t have to work to the point of frustration. But working to frustration is the way that most people succeed at what they do. Ask anyone who’s successful at pretty much any enterprise, and they will tell you about the time they “hit the wall” and what it taught them. You only hit the wall if you keep pushing. And you only keep pushing if you believe that you haven’t yet done your best.

So what’s a parent or teacher to do? Dweck says that we should tell kids that they can improve if they work on something, but some kids will clearly be able to do more than others.

Don’t turn Dweck’s research into positivity religion

The answer is one that good sports coaches have known forever. If you’re coaching a typical student team, you’re going to have great players, mediocre players, and let’s face it, really crappy players. Good coaches accept this reality and know that a team is only as good as it can be if all the players try their best.

When I was on my high school track team, there was no nonsense about “you all can be the best runner in the world if you try hard enough.” My coaches were really specific for each runner’s situation. In my case, no matter what race I was running I tended to start out slowly and speed up the longer I ran. My coaches pointed that out and suggested that I needed to push harder in warm-ups so that I was ready to go from the outset.

No one else on my team had that particular pattern, and no one else on my team got that advice.

In academics, we don’t have to tell all kids they can be—or should be—theoretical physicists. But we should tell them that their outlook will affect their performance. And we should tell them that no matter how well they perform at one specific academic task, they’re an important part of the team.

We don’t all have to be stars

Frankly, I don’t care much whether my mechanic is good at theoretical physics, whether my doctor is good at basketball, or whether my child’s music teacher passed high school chemistry.

I do want them to have a positive mindset, so they can strive to be the best they can be at their jobs. But mindless positivity just leads to mediocrity and complacence.

A good word about teenagers

Posted on by Suki

I’ve got teenagers. One of them is official—16—and the other one is some months off from having “teen” in her age. From what some parents say, you might expect that my next words will be complaints.

Teenagers are great!

Teenagers!
©2013-2015 LucasTsilva

Ha, fooled you! Or did I? Because I know that a few silent parents out there are like me. We are having a fabulous time raising our teens, and we read all those horrid articles wondering if a) we have exceptionally wonderful teenagers (unlikely), or b) we’re just incurably optimistic, sunny-faced people who don’t notice that we’re living with ogres.

Despite the fact that a few people lately have described me as “generally cheerful” (huh?), I can assure you that (b) is also incorrect. I’m not happy about having teens in my house because I only look at the bright side of things, because I fail to see my kids’ faults, or because I have a secret pill that I’m taking and that you want in on.

I’m happy with having my teens because teens are—this may shock you—so darn great to be around.

Why focus on the problems?

We all know about teens: They’re self-absorbed, snotty, rude, untrustworthy, messy, disordered, willful, self-righteous, yadda yadda yadda.

It’s all true, of course, with variation from individual to individual.

But what else is true about teens is much more worth discussing. Here are some true things about teens (both mine and the others I teach and know socially) that I value.

1. Teens care about justice

We adults have learned that the world is not black and white, and thus we are much more willing to settle for a muddy grey. Teens are not willing to settle. They are out there yelling themselves hoarse trying to get the rest of us to notice. But what the rest of us spend most of our time trying to do is shut up those darn, loud-mouthed teens who are so naive that they actually think they can solve the world’s problems. Perhaps we should admire them instead.

2. Teens can, and do, solve problems

Go to any high school and identify problems. Go to the administration and ask them to fix those problems, and you’ll most likely get a big yawn. No one cares about that, you’ll be told, or it’s not such a big problem, or that problem is minor considering how hard we’re going to have to work to get our test scores up so we don’t all get fired. If you want to solve a problem at a school, just get the teens interested in it. When they get fired up, they’re like an unstoppable army.

3. Teens are thoughtful

Many people, once they grow up, relax into the busy-ness of their daily lives and hardly give a thought to the way they’re living. But teens are full of thoughts. They’re full of ideas. Some of them are already shutting down and it’s hard to engage them in a conversation, but once you do, you’ll find that their brains are going full-tilt, even if the most common word you hear out of them is “whatever.”

4. Teens haven’t become themselves yet

This can be very frustrating for parents and teachers. We ask them, What do you want to do with your life? and they might not be able to answer. They seem to change daily, one day a model citizen and a juvenile delinquent (or so it seems) the next. Their opinions are strong but flighty. But the cool thing is how fascinating they are to watch as they flit through their ephemeral personas in search of who they will become. It’s instructive as an adult to remember that who we are, how we act, what we believe—all of this is by choice. Teens may change their choices daily, and that may not be optimal, but all of us could use a bit of self-questioning once in a while.

5. Teens bring new ideas and attitudes into our lives

I remember perhaps the first time that we were sitting at the dinner table and our son informed us about a current event he’d been reading about and his opinion on it. Perhaps he slowly grew into this, but it didn’t seem like it. To his parents, it seemed like one day he was a kid, and we were telling him things and listening to his droll, uninformed opinions, and the next we had this fascinating adult-in-the-making sitting across from us, bringing a new topic and viewpoint into our dinner table conversation.

This is not to say that I didn’t love my children’s droll childhood ramblings—I did and I’m sure I related a few of them on this blog in years past. But when your kids cross that invisible line and start taking part in conversations on something approaching an adult level, it’s wonderful and fascinating and thrilling. And like so many developmental changes, it seems to happen all at once, leaving parents gaping on the sidelines as their kids zoom past, developing (for the moment) at lightspeed.

6. Teens are people, too

One of the biggest failings of parenting approaches of the past (and some of the present ones as well) is that adults forgot the basic fact that each child is a unique, important, incredible person. With teens, it’s truly easy to shove them in a group and grumble about them. But taking the harder route is much more rewarding: when we treat teens as fully their own selves—capable, thoughtful, fascinating, lovely people—they work much harder to attain what we expect.

One of the most important realizations I had about parenting (and teaching) was when I learned about how educators who work with kids with special needs go about their jobs. They are trying to help kids with disabilities, but they don’t focus on the disability. (Not the ones I cared to listen to, in any case.) Long before mainstream education even got a whiff of this, special educators found a universal truth about humans: If you teach to their capabilities, their disabilities will come along for the ride. Focus on the positive, and encourage skills. Don’t forget about the disabilities, but don’t make it seem as if the child is the disability.

Teens are complex, growing, changing, fascinating human beings, and I am having a great time helping two of them along their path.

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