NurtureShock (24 page)

That the children in Tools choose their own work is also significant, said Bunge. “When a child gets to choose, they presumably
choose activities they’re motivated to do. Motivation is crucial. Motivation is experienced in the brain as the release of
dopamine. It’s not released like other neurotransmitters into the synapses, but rather it’s sort of spritzed onto large areas
of the brain, which enhances the signaling of neurons.” The motivated brain, literally, operates better, signals faster. When
children are motivated, they learn more.

This chapter began with the statistical science of Driver’s Ed, and progressed to the neuroscience of preschool. The two are
indeed connected, by the neural systems that regulate attention and cognitive control. Teenage drivers can score 100% on a
paper test of the rules, but when driving, their reaction times are delayed because they have not yet internalized the
grammar
of driving—they have to think about it. This increases the cognitive load, and their ability to maintain attention is stressed
to capacity. They are on the verge of making poor decisions. Put a friend in the car and the attention systems are easily
overloaded—the driver’s brain no longer proactively anticipates what could happen, glancing seconds ahead and preloading the
rules. Instead, he is left to react, and can’t always react accurately, no matter how fast his reflexes are.

Performing amid distractions is a daily challenge for students. In a previous chapter, we wrote about the predictive power
of intelligence tests. One reason IQ tests don’t predict better is that in a child’s school life, academics don’t take place
in a quiet, controlled room, one-on-one with a teacher—the way IQ tests are administered. Academics occur among a whirlwind
of distractions and pressures. Psychologists call this the difference between hot and cold cognition. Many people perform
far worse under pressure, but some perform far better.

This notion comes under many names in the research: effortful control, impulsivity, self-discipline. Depending on the way
it’s measured, the predictive values of self-discipline in many cases are better than those of IQ scores. In simpler words,
being disciplined is more important than being smart. Being both is not just a little better—it’s exponentially better. In
one study, Dr. Clancy Blair, of Pennsylvania State University, found that children who were above average in IQ
and
executive functioning were 300% more likely to do well in math class than children who just had a high IQ alone.

Just like the science of intelligence, the science of self-control has shifted in the last decade from the assumption that
it’s a fixed trait—some have it, others don’t—to the assumption it’s malleable. It’s affected by everything from parenting
styles to how recently you ate (the brain burns a lot of glucose when exercising self-control). The neural systems that govern
control can get fatigued, and—according to one study—those with higher IQs suffer more from this kind of fatigue.

“Due to a multitude of empirical evidence, there is now consensus on the effectiveness of self-regulated learning on academic
achievement, as well as on learning motivation,” wrote Dr. Charlotte Dignath, in a recent meta-analysis of self-control interventions.

Both Ashley and I have borrowed some of the Tools of the Mind strategies. Children of every grade show up in the evenings
at Ashley’s tutoring facility; she now makes them write down a plan for how they’ll spend their two hours, to teach them to
think proactively. When they get distracted, she refers them back to their plan. She no longer simply corrects children’s
grammar mistakes in their homework; instead, she first points to the line containing the mistake, and asks the child to find
it. This makes them think critically about what they’re doing rather than mechanically completing the assignment. With kindergartners
who are just learning to write, Ashley has them use private speech as they form a letter, saying aloud, “Start at the top
and go around….”

I use similar techniques with my daughter. Every night, she comes home from preschool with a page of penmanship, filled with
whatever letter she learned that day. I ask her to circle the best example on each line—so she’ll recognize the difference
between a good one and a better one. At bedtime, she and I do a version of buddy reading: after I’ve read her a book, I hand
it to her. Then she tells the story back to me, creatively narrating from the illustrations and whatever lines she remembers
verbatim. Occasionally, when she and I have the whole day together, we write up a plan for what we’ll do. (I wish I did this
more, because she loves it.) I also give her prompts that extend her play scenarios. For instance, she loves baby dolls; she’ll
collect them all, and put them to bed—this might take five or ten minutes. At that point, she no longer knows what to do.
So I’ll encourage her to wake the babies up, take them to school, and go on a field trip. That’s usually all it takes to spark
her imagination for over an hour.

In Neptune, New Jersey, one of the kids in the first Tools preschool class was Sally Millaway’s own three-year-old son, George.
“He had special needs,” Millaway said. She was convinced Tools would work for the normal children, but would it work for George?
“My son had speech and language delays, very severely—he didn’t speak at all. He wasn’t yet diagnosed with autism, but he
had all the red flags of it.” Later that fall, George was instead diagnosed with a hearing problem—he could hear tones, but
it was like he was hearing underwater, the sounds blurred. “In November, his adenoids were taken out. He began talking within
three days of the surgery.”

“I suddenly went from thinking he would have a lifelong disability to realizing he had all this time he had to make up for,”
Millaway said. “Would he ever catch up to the other kids?”

Millaway’s concerns were short-lived. She couldn’t believe the rapid progress he made, and she attributed it entirely to Tools.
After three years of the program—two in preschool, one in kindergarten—he completely overcame his early deficits. George is
now in a second-grade gifted program, and Tools is taught in all Neptune kindergarten classes.

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

A
couple years ago, an expert on preschool children’s aggression, Dr. Jamie Ostrov, teamed up with Dr. Douglas Gentile, a leading
expert on the effects of media exposure. The two men spent two years monitoring the kids at two Minnesota preschools, cross-referencing
the children’s behavior against parent reports of what television shows and DVDs the kids watched. Ranging from 2.5 to 5 years
old, these were well-off children, from well-off families.

Ostrov and Gentile fully expected that kids who watched violent shows like
Power Rangers
and
Star Wars
would be more physically aggressive during playtime at school. They also expected kids who watched educational television,
like
Arthur
and
Clifford the Big Red Dog
, would be not just less aggressive, but the kids would be more
prosocial—
sharing, helpful, and inclusive, etc. These weren’t original hypotheses, but the study’s importance was its long-term methodology:
Ostrov and Gentile would be able to track the precise incremental increase in aggression over the course of the preschool
years.

Ostrov had previously found that videocameras were too intrusive and couldn’t capture the sound from far away, so his researchers
hovered near children with clipboards in hand. The children quickly grew bored with the note taking and ignored the researchers.

The observers had been trained to distinguish between physical aggression, relational aggression, and verbal aggression. Physical
aggression included grabbing toys from other children’s hands, pushing, pulling, and hitting of any sort. Relational aggression,
at the preschool age, involved saying things like, “You can’t play with us,” or just ignoring a child who wanted to play,
and withdrawing friendship or telling lies about another child—all of which attack a relationship at its core. Verbal aggression
included calling someone a mean name and saying things like “Shut up!” or “You’re stupid”—it often accompanied physical aggression.

Ostrov cross-referenced what his observers recorded with teacher ratings of the children’s behavior, the parents’ own ratings,
and their reports on how much television the children were watching. Over the course of the study, the children watched an
average of eleven hours of media per week, according to the parents—a normal mix of television shows and DVDs.

At first glance, the scholars’ hypotheses were confirmed—but something unexpected was also revealed in the data.
The more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were.
They were increasingly bossy, controlling, and manipulative. This wasn’t a small effect. It was stronger than the connection
between violent media and physical aggression.

Curious why this could be, Ostrov’s team sat down and watched several programs on PBS, Nickelodeon, and the Disney Channel.
Ostrov saw that, in some shows, relational aggression is modeled at a fairly high rate. Ostrov theorized that many educational
shows spend most of the half-hour establishing a conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving that conflict.

“Preschoolers have a difficult time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier,” Ostrov
wrote in his paper. “It is likely that young children do not attend to the overall ‘lesson’ in the manner an older child or
adult can, but instead learn from each of the behaviors shown.”

The results took the entire team by surprise. Ostrov doesn’t yet have children, but his colleagues who did immediately started
changing their kids’ viewing patterns.

Ostrov decided to replicate the study at four diverse preschools in Buffalo, New York. (Ostrov is now a professor at the University
at Buffalo, State University of New York.) “Given the fact that [the result] was so novel and so surprising, we really wanted
to find out that the findings would generalize—that we weren’t just finding something with this one set of kids,” said Ostrov.

After the first year in Buffalo, Ostrov ran the numbers. The children in Buffalo watched a ratio of about two parts educational
media to one part violent media, on average. More exposure to violent media did increase the rate of physical aggression shown
at school—however, it did so only modestly. In fact, watching educational television
also
increased the rate of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV. And just like in the Minnesota study, educational
television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates.
This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.

Essentially, Ostrov had just found that
Arthur
is more dangerous for children than
Power Rangers.

Data from a team at Ithaca College confirms Ostrov’s assessment: there is a stunning amount of relational and verbal aggression
in kids’ television.

Under the supervision of professor Dr. Cynthia Scheibe, Ithaca undergrads patiently studied 470 half-hour television programs
commonly watched by children, recording every time a character insulted someone, called someone a mean name, or put someone
down.

Scheibe’s analysis subsequently revealed that 96% of all children’s programming includes verbal insults and put-downs, averaging
7.7 put-downs per half-hour episode. Programs specifically considered “prosocial” weren’t much better—66.7% of them still
contained insults. Had the insult lines been said in real life, they would have been breathtaking in their cruelty. (“How
do you sleep at night knowing you’re a complete failure?” from
SpongeBob SquarePants
.) We can imagine educational television might use an initial insult to then teach a lesson about how insults are hurtful,
but that never was the case, Schiebe found. Of the 2,628 put-downs the team identified, in only 50 instances was the insulter
reprimanded or corrected—and not once in an educational show. Fully 84% of the time, there was either only laughter or no
response at all.