Category: Psychology

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.

On brain understanding and mental health

Posted on by Suki

I recently had a conversation with two people, one adult and one teen, about intelligence. I pointed out that modern research is showing that to a certain extent “intelligence” (however we define it) is determined by our genes. Just like our height, the color of our hair, and other clearly physical characteristics, we’re given a physical brain at birth that is all we have to work with for the rest of our life. Of course, raise a child with “tall genes” in poverty with an extremely restricted diet, and he’s unlikely to achieve his full height. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have “tall genes” that his children, raised with a healthy diet, will be able to express.

When I pointed out this fact about intelligence, the adult responded that talking about intelligence, even in this way, sounds like bragging.

What is intelligence?

brain scan
Modern science shows us that brains are different, and we need to stop pretending that they aren’t if we want all kids to be able to reach their potential and live fulfilling adult lives.

It’s true: as a culture, we are very uncomfortable talking about intelligence as an attribute. First of all, we can’t seem to come to a popular definition of intelligence. What the average person might view as intelligence is not necessarily what shows up on an IQ test. But even when we get past that, we react very differently to a mom talking about her child’s sports prowess and a mom talking about her child’s academic achievements.

So why talk about intelligence at all? If Gardner’s theory is true, don’t we all have multiple intelligences, and isn’t this a good thing? Although brain research hasn’t actually given any support to Gardner, I do like his approach in the sense of reminding everyone who works with children that all sorts of skills and interests are valuable in this world.

What I think is interesting and important about talking about intelligence, though, is that by talking about it we can promote self-understanding, which in general leads to happier people who find fulfilling work and meaning in their lives.

Strengths and deficits

I find it sad that we persist as a culture in denying that people’s brains are different and that this is meaningful. Imagine that we as a culture denied that height had anything to do with being a good basketball player. No one admitted it, and every single child was expected to be able to excel at basketball if he or she really wanted to. The short kids would pretty quickly get the message that they simply weren’t trying hard enough, which would lead to the obvious conclusion that there was something wrong with their general ability to achieve.

Just as damaging would be a culture in which every tall person is expected to be phenomenal at basketball. (My very tall brother-in-law tells me that this is actually pretty true of our culture!) What if a tall person simply hated basketball or simply wasn’t good at it, no matter how hard he or she worked? These tall kids would receive an equally damaging message that they have some problem with their general ability to achieve.

But I don’t like math!

When I was a child I took some sort of aptitude test and received the results at school. I remember looking at that piece of paper that said that I should look forward to a future as a mathematician. Math? Sure, I was good enough at math, but I had no interest in it. I wanted to be a writer. It’s not that my verbal skills were particularly bad, but they certainly didn’t test high enough that I had a “should be a writer” note on my test results. Now, let’s not even get into the question of why students in my school received this piece of paper to take home, rather than having it sent to the parents! But past that, if an adult had explained the results to me our conversation might have led me down a very different path.

“These results show that you have a very high aptitude in math. That means that math probably comes easier to you than average. The test shows that you have pretty average verbal skills, and I want to make sure you understand that it’s fine to be average. You’re doing well. This test doesn’t tell you what you enjoy, just how easy or hard certain tasks will be compared to people in general. Many people end up pursuing careers in things they enjoy but have to work hard at it.”

Instead, I remember looking at dismay at the piece of paper, wondering what am I going to do? I don’t want to be a mathematician! I want to be a writer. And that was it, the end of any education I got into how my brain works.

Mental health from self-understanding

Though I can’t say I would have made any different choices in my life, I am certain that my feeling of well-being would have been enhanced by understanding myself as a person, which starts with understanding oneself as a brain.

This is how I’d like to see us use our growing understanding of how the brain works in education and parenting:

  1. Kids should learn that every person is born with a physical brain that may have strengths and deficits
  2. Kids should learn that how we use our brain affects how it develops over our lifetimes
  3. Kids should learn that far from limiting your options in life, understanding your brain can lead you to greater growth and achievements

With those little pieces of knowledge, we could raise children to withstand all the uncertainty, self-doubt, jealousy, and unnecessary comparisons that kids struggle with every day. Few short kids feel bad that they aren’t star basketball players—they would be unable to proceed with life if they let a simple fact of their biology stop them. They figure out that it’s a goal they can’t achieve, and they find something else.

Yet when it comes to other possible careers, so many kids are uncertain whether they can attain goals that they secretly have.

So many kids suffer from self-doubt as they try to achieve something they don’t seem to have a natural ability for.

So many kids suffer from the jealousy they feel—and the jealousy that others feel toward them—because our culture pits kids against each other rather than celebrating the hard work and achievements of each individual.

It’s a lot to work against. My own children, who have grown up with a homeschooling mom who has tried to raise them with a “growth mindset,” say things about themselves that stem from culturally instilled ideas about their abilities and deficits. It’s frustrating to hear my kids limit themselves like this.

This is a task that needs to be championed by more than just a few parents, a few teachers, and a few psychologists. All of us need to agree to stop paying attention to which kids are “smarter” than others, and, conversely, stop insisting that all kids are the same.

We need to stop assuming that a bored kid who refuses to do easy, repetitive homework is lazy. We need to stop making one-size-fits-all educational decisions like standardized high school exit exams that keep some kids from demonstrating their very important skills and interests. We need to start emphasizing how fun it is to work hard for a goal, whether or not you achieve it.

The data is in: The outdated idea that your genes determine your destiny is wrong. The newfangled idea that you can do anything you set your mind to is wrong.

We need to put our modern understanding of brain health squarely in the middle of how we parent and teach.

Taking ownership

Posted on by Suki

I was out on a mushroom hunt this morning with my mother, going to a place where we knew there would be chanterelles, but we took a wrong turn in the forest and weren’t sure we were on the right path.

So we tried three solutions: first, push on to see if we were mistaken that we were on the wrong trail (we weren’t); second, go up to the top of a hill to see if we could get a sense of which direction we were off by (we couldn’t); finally, start back at a new starting point where we knew we could find the right trail—success!

Three enormous bags of chanterelles. Don't ask me where we found them!
Three enormous bags of very dirty chanterelles. Don’t ask me where we found them!

Result: Bucket full o’ lovely chanterelles!

I got to thinking that the mushrooming experience is a perfect metaphor for how I want my kids to approach their education. People in homeschooling groups have been discussing this article that ran in the New York Times a few days ago. In one group I’m in, someone pointed out something a professor posted in the comments:

“… By and large home-schooled kids tend to be bright, energetic, and with appalling focus issues – they are great at doing what immediately interests them, dreadful at doing “the boring stuff”. They also have remarkable amounts of detail about some topics and huge lacunae in other areas. …”

I actually agree with the professor that this is a danger that homeschoolers face: In allowing our kids to pursue their own educations, we sometimes don’t encourage them to develop the focus and grit that will help them be successful as college students and beyond.

In our house, we take a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, we let our younger kids follow their muse when it came to education. Certainly, we tried to expose them to a variety of things, but we didn’t force them to continue studying something they hated. We modeled perseverance, but we didn’t enforce it.

But now that we’re homeschooling a teen, we’ve altered that approach. While following your muse is great, sometimes when you pursue a goal you come upon obstacles. We feel it’s very important to help him learn to navigate the real world, in which not every class is interesting, not every teacher is a soulmate, and not every subject you study rocks your world. But, for example, if you want to be a computer scientist you are simply going to have to study algebra (sorry, kid).

So how do we foster perseverance and grit while also allowing for personal choice, inspiration, and dabbling—all important in their own right?

Cleaned, chopped, and ready to cook. Without perseverance, no yummy mushrooms!
Cleaned, chopped, and ready to cook. Without perseverance, no yummy mushrooms!

For us, it’s like my mushrooming trip:

First, simply deal with the fact that not every class you take is going to be fun, not every skill you learn will be easy to master, not every person you have to interact with will be a bosom buddy.

Second, be willing to push on and persevere if there still seems to be benefit in the path you’re taking.

And finally, know when to give up and try a better path.

Balance is the key here: But balance absolutely doesn’t mean that kids should be taught always to suck it up and continue with something that’s not working. That’s the school approach, one we have rejected.

In our house, we believe in following through with commitments. If our kids make a commitment and then one day say, ‘Oh, this is getting hard, I’m going to drop it,’ we don’t simply let them do it. We ask them to take stock of the situation, be clear about why they want to quit, and consider whether they’re quitting because of something important (the teacher is truly awful and they’re getting nothing from the experience) or something easily surmountable (this teacher’s style is not one they terribly like, but when they look at what they’ve done so far in the class, they’ve learned a lot in unexpected ways).

If they end up deciding to quit something, they are expected to take ownership of that decision. They can’t blame the teacher for not being a good teacher, for example. Instead, they can make a positive decision to use their time in a different way to achieve the goals of the class they were taking.

I hope this is teaching them that when working toward goals, they will almost always run across obstacles along the way.*

I hope that when they come up against “the boring stuff” that they have to do in order to succeed in their field, they see it as an obstacle that they can tackle in one way or another.

If not, perhaps they’ve started down the path that leads to amanitas instead of chanterelles.

 

* I hope that when they get to college, if they run into that professor, they’ll perhaps alter his opinion about homeschoolers a bit. However, anecdotal evidence shows that many people out in the wider world only notice homeschoolers when the homeschoolers do something to justify their low opinion of homeschoolers. So perhaps the professor won’t notice our kids at all, which would be a victory as well.

The comfortable closets we live in

Posted on by Suki

Sometimes advocating for something you believe in can mean stepping out of a very comfortable closet that you’ve spent much of your life in. In my case, I was so comfortable, I didn’t even notice that I’d locked myself in the closet till I had children. My particular closet is the one that we hide in when we’re afraid of pointing out our own differences from the norm. It’s a very, very comfortable closet, but usually a solitary one.

Since the sixties, however, understanding has been growing that people sometimes need to seek others who share some aspect of their life experiences in order to learn more about themselves.

Here I am in paragraph three, and I’m still enjoying the comfort of my closet, so I guess I should just out with it! Once I had children, I started to notice how parenting, education, and healthcare resources were all set up to satisfy the needs of the many, but there was a group of few whose needs were not being served well: that group of kids who have been given the unfortunate label of “gifted.”

My discomfort with the word, and with even pointing out differences in intellectual ability, is deeply ingrained, pounded into my psyche by years of cultural pressure. If a mom says they’re choosing a new school because their daughter is an avid volleyball player and the new school has a good coach, we think that’s completely reasonable. If a mom says they’re choosing a new school because the current one doesn’t offer advanced enough education, suddenly she’s a) bragging, b) being pushy, and c) probably deluded about her son’s intellectual ability in the first place.

That’s how it was when I was growing up in the 70’s midwest, and that’s pretty much how it is for kids across the US now. There are some positive changes. For one, I stuck my neck out and typed the dreaded word “gifted” into Google and found out that I share my closet with all sorts of parents I’d never noticed. They, too, are wondering if they can figure out a way to save their kids from the boredom and self-hatred that our emphasis on not pointing out differences in intellectual needs has led to. We parents have come up with a variety of solutions, from educating teachers, to fixing our local schools, to joining national organizations, to homeschooling. But the thing we have in common is that we have reluctantly come out of the closet in order to advocate for our kids.

Parenting is a balancing act between supporting our children and also letting them go to soar or fall as they need to.
Parenting is a balancing act between supporting our children and also letting them go to soar or fall as they need to.

Pretty much the only time I feel like writing on this subject is when someone asks me to; in this case, I’m joining other bloggers in Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop. Hoagies’ is one of the first stops that parents new to giftedness make on the Internet. Carolyn K, who runs the site, is one of the pioneers of online gifted advocacy. She’s one of those people who decided to throw open the closet door while the rest of us were just trying to get comfortable and not make waves.

Like all minorities, gifted kids need their advocates. Schools are not set up to fulfill the needs of unusual learners. Parenting manuals get it all wrong when it comes to parenting intense, unusual children. Doctors, therapists, and other professionals get no training in the needs of their gifted patients. Pretty much everyone assumes that if your child taught herself to read and is quick in math, you’ve got nothing to worry about. But of course, just like everyone else, gifted children have their own challenges that, while sometimes different from the norm, still deserve the attention and support of the adults around them.

We parents are drawn to trying to fulfill our own children’s needs, but everything we do to make their lives better helps advocate for the wider community. I am deeply indebted to Hoagies‘, SENG, my gifted homeschooling group, Great Potential Press, my state and national advocacy groups, and probably other organizations I am forgetting to name. All of us who have stepped tentatively out of our comfortable closet improve the lives of gifted children everywhere.

giftedadvocacyThis post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted blog hop. Gifted advocacy takes place in many places. From schools to homeschool groups, from our houses of worship to the YMCA and JCC, from the grocery store to the family gatherings… we are Gifted Advocates everywhere, and at every age.

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