Children and Mobiles

When is the right age to get your child a mobile?

As you know I have wrote a lot about this in the past see When should you get your child a mobile phone?.

Just found this great video on the matter so thought I would share it.

Delayed gratification an indication of Future Success

Our job as Parents is not to do what is easy!

Following on from my review of the great book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genes, Talent and Intelligence is Wrong: The New Science of Genes, Talent and Human Potential by David Shenk, I have some information about a great piece of learning for me.

I have always known that as parents our job is not to do what is easy, but to do what is right and I have suspected that we need to step back more and allow our children to fail; this was all affirmed in the book. I also suspected that giving in too easily could have massive consequences later on in life, but I was not sure why until I read this book and then it all made sense.

The book talks about an experiment involving children and marshmallows. The children were left in the room and told that they could have one marshmallow now or wait a while and have two. I don’t want go into the ins and outs of the experiment but the interesting bit came when they went back to the children later on in life and found that the ones who waited and had two marshmallows had far exceeded academically those who ate the marshmallow straight away.

What this study showed was that children who could delay gratification early in life were more likely to be able to put in the persistence required to succeed in life.

It affirmed for me that frequent rewards will not give children this persistence as they will give up too easily. And delayed gratification is an early indication for a tendency towards self discipline needed to do well in exams. Interestingly, the study also found that the children who delayed their marshmallow eating craving also had fewer social problems.

What they also found in the study was that children can be taught to delay gratification, for example being told to think of the marshmallows as pictures and to not see them as real decreased the number of children who ate the marshmallow straight away.

In a world where everything is instant, it is so important for us as parents to think of how we can teach our children to wait.

Here are some tips from the book on teaching delayed gratification.

1. Be a model of self-control

Show your children how to do it by not giving in to all your wants and desires.

2. Help them practice

Give them opportunities to practice and wait for things.

3. Don’t give in to everyday pleas

Just because your child wants it now does not mean you should give it. Don’t give in so easily.

4. Let them deal with frustration so they can teach themselves

Don’t rush in to make a sad child happy; let them learn for themselves how to deal with frustration.

And my gem from the book…

True failure is to give up and sell your children short.

We are not supposed to make things easy for our children, we need to present the problem, monitor their response and moderate the behaviour for next time.

Developing your children’s talent

Your Children’s Talent

I have just read the most fantastic book;The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genes, Talent and Intelligence is Wrong: The New Science of Genes, Talent and Human Potential by David Shenk

Basically, this book turns on its head everthing we think we know about genius and talent. It reminds me of another great book called The Outliers, but this to me is much more practical. The premise of the book is that it is not our genetics that make us smart, but our genetics multiplied by our environment. What I love most about this book is that you read it, thinking thay you could do anything if only you could put your mind to it. It is a book that makes you feel you can rather than you can’t.

The book introuduces the concept of what it call Dynamic Development, stating that we do not develop just as our genes predict we should, but we develop in relation to our environment, including how we are parented, what we eat and what is expected of us.

The book clearly states that talent is the outcome of persistence and uses many example to explain this using the fabled 10,000 hour rule. The author suggests that persitence is the difference between medioracy and enourmous success. He suggests that developing a talent is a dynamic system and a process which is affected by our state, the intensity to which we train our mindset, how we respond to failure, the strategies we adopt and more importantly, the time we put in. He explains in the book how our development has plasticity and is not set in stone, which I believe is a message we all need to hear.

So, what is his advice to parents in supporting their children’s talent development?

1. Speak to your children and speak often. Talking, as the Hart and Risley study shows, can improve academic performance.

2. Have a stimulating environment – children that grow in stimulating environments are most likely to become more intelligent.

3. Nurture and encourage. By the time a child in a professional family is five years old it has heard 560,000 encouraging words. In comparison, a child from a working class family has only heard 100,000, while a child from a welfare family has received 100,000 words of discouragement.

4, Set high expectations that stretch your child

5. Embrace failure

6, Encouarge a growth mindset.

There is also a whole piece in this book on how to help children with delayed gratifcation, but I will save that for another post.

Just get this book, it is great!

Do we stifle our children’s creativity through fear and perfectonsim?

How Parents get in the way

As some of you may know, Freya has started doing her own web shows. Really, they are just Freya ranting to the camera and showing off. They are not very good or entertaining, but she is very proud of them. She has done 5 of them now and has some fans and even has some people sending requests in for her to do things.

However what has shocked me is other people’s reactions to me letting her do this. It is only at times like these that I realise how different I am.

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Living with Teen putting a strain on your relationship …

Love is in the air, or is it…….

For Parents with children and especially teenagers, love and romance well forget about it……

The other night I was watching an episode of the Simpsons, and Marge and Homer were doing everything to try and get some time alone, in obvious Simpson style. It included flying half away across America and back again. While amusing, it certainly resonated with me as I am sure it does many Parents, so what do you do, how do you get time alone?

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Cookie Monster helps Kids eat healthy

Children and healthy eating.

Well done cookie monster for saying you love fruit!

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