How to ruin a child: Too much esteem, too little sleep

[Pat McCotter]

How to ruin a child: Too much esteem, too little sleep
By George F. Will
Thursday, March 4, 2010; A21

Memo to that Massachusetts school where children in physical education classes jump rope without using ropes: Get some ropes. And you -- you are about 85 percent of all parents -- who are constantly telling your children how intelligent they are: Do your children a favor and pipe down.

These are nuggets from "NutureShock: New Thinking About Children" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It is another book to torment modern parents who are determined to bring to bear on their offspring the accumulated science of child-rearing. Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

Those Massachusetts children are jumping rope without ropes because of a self-esteem obsession. The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is a prerequisite for high achievement. That is why some children's soccer teams stopped counting goals (think of the damaged psyches of children who rarely scored) and shower trophies on everyone. No child at that Massachusetts school suffers damaged self-esteem by tripping on the jump rope.

But the theory that praise, self-esteem and accomplishment increase in tandem is false. Children incessantly praised for their intelligence (often by parents who are really praising themselves) often underrate the importance of effort. Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers' handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties. Also, Bronson and Merryman say that overpraised children are prone to cheating because they have not developed strategies for coping with failure.

"We put our children in high-pressure environments," Bronson and Merryman write, "seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments." But children excessively praised for their intelligence become risk-adverse in order to preserve their reputations. Instead, Bronson and Merryman say, praise effort ("I like how you keep trying"): It is a variable children can control.

They often cannot control cars. In 1999, a Johns Hopkins University study found that some school districts that abolished driver's education courses experienced a 27 percent decrease in auto accidents among 16- and 17-year-olds. Odd.

Not really. Bronson and Merryman say driver's ed teaches the rules of the road and mechanics of driving, but teenagers are in fatal crashes at twice the rate of other drivers because of poor decisions, not poor skills. The wiring in the frontal lobe of the teenage brain is not fully formed. Driver's ed courses make getting a license easy, thereby increasing the supply of young drivers who actually have holes in their heads.

Their unfinished heads should spend more time on pillows. Only 5 percent of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get a hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.

Until age 21, the circuitry of a child's brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that "the performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader." In high school, there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.

Tired children have trouble retaining learning "because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. . . . The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night."

The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin, which makes them sleepy. This is one reason young adults are responsible for half of the 100,000 annual "fall asleep" automobile crashes. When Edina, Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.

Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between less sleep and more obesity.

Bronson and Merryman slay a slew of myths. But perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people. Only recently -- about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy -- have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that "as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Twigs are not limitlessly bendable; trees will be what they will be.

[Sam A. Robrin]

I'm disinclined to agree with anyone who once wrote a book advocating "Statecraft as Soulcraft," but like the proverbial stopped clock, there are some good points made here.

[dalebert]

Yeah, I didn't even read the whole thing, but I got the gist of it. I can't help but focus on the part about putting kids in those high-pressure environments in the first place before I can care about whether they praised the kids too much.

I recall being told and having my parents be told that I was very bright but just wouldn't "apply myself". You have talent, Dale, but you're not conforming! We're putting a series of tasks in front of you that we're making everybody do and you don't give a shit about. The teacher would walk around a class full of 30 kids to check whether they did their assigned homework. I kept forgetting to do my homework, day after day. She would stand there, LEERING at me for what felt like an eternity, as classmates giggled at the one kid who could never get with the program. Each day when she started this routine, I would suddenly remember that I once again didn't do it and the terror would build in me long before she'd even gotten to my desk that she was going to draw all that attention to me for not obeying like everybody else had.

And now, because I didn't do my English homework as a kid like everyone else, I am a hopeless idiot with no command of the English language.

[Tom Sawyer]

And now, because I didn't do my English homework as a kid like everyone else, I am a hopeless idiot with no command of the English language.

They should have an author teach English... inspire kids to express themselves... who cares about the rules of English, if you have nothing worth sharing with others.

Engineers to teach Math... instead of some boring old fart that finds solving the "puzzles" so fascinating ... give me a real world use and reason to solve the "puzzle".

Bottom line is I think "Academics" are the problem... they have such a myopic view of things.

[WithoutAPaddle]

I never heard the term "self esteem" used in the context of education until after I had graduated from high school.  Where I went to elementary school, the message of the day, every day, was humility.

My third grade teacher announced at the start of the school year that there would be no "A"s on the report card.  She said that an "A" represented perfection, but only God was perfect (this was, of course, before the Madeline Murray O'Hare court decision).   She said that the grade of "A" was like a 10 in Olympic gymnastics or a 6 in figure skating.  It was something we could aspire to, but never attain.  She used to tell us that no matter what we did, we always could do better and we always HAD to do better.  She said that if someone did something exceptional, she might give that paper an A, but if we turned in something after that which was comparable in quality, it wouldn't be an A because it was supposed to be better.

This teacher never complimented us on the answers we got right.  She only wanted to talk about the ones we got wrong.  And since I got fewer wrong than did anyone else, she always put bigger "X"s on my papers, just so my success wouldn't go to my head.

For two terms I got straight "A-"s in the academic subjects, but only a "C" in penmanship.  That was because about half the kids had better penmanship and half had worse.  If I had gone to a more modern school with younger teachers, I'm sure I would have been given a "B" in penmanship, just because they wouldn't want to have hurt my feelings, but at this school, no one gave a damn about my feelings.

In the third term, I screwed up this teacher's grading plans.  In arithmetic, I got a hundred on every single thing I did that term.  Every test, quiz, assignment and oral answer, so she had no choice but to give me an "A".  She was pissed and let me know it.  She said that just because she was giving me an "A" this one time, it didn't mean I was perfect.  It just meant that she hadn't made the work hard enough, and if I had any notion that I was going to get an "A" next term, well, I should get it out of my head right now because she was going to make sure it didn't happen.

My best friend got mostly "B"s.  He is now a pharmacist.  Another close friend got "C"s in arithmetic.  A decade later, he passed a Calculus course and then got an A in Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory at our state university when it was being taught by the professor who mathematized it most heavily.  It slayed me to hear an educator on TV a few months ago explaining that it is important to give young children "A"s in math so that they will learn to believe they can do math.  My friends, who were not as adept at math in their early years as I was, learned math by confronting their wrong answers.  For them, there was no better way to learn than to learn from their mistakes.