Nurture for the Future

Is Cognitive Advancement Linked to Juvenile Deliquency?

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Since Aristotle started school, it seems we have had more than our fair share of meetings with his teachers to address his misdemeanours at school. All in all, I think he’s been to the school’s office more times in his short experience of school than I have in all my schooling years. It’s a scary thought for a parent considering how many more years of school he has in store.

It was recently suggested to me that this is happening because Aristotle is too advanced for most of his peers at school which tends to isolate him. In turn, he expresses his frustrations through these minor transgressions. The solution that was suggested to me was to hold back his mental development and stop whatever activities I do with him outside of school. The belief is that once the other children catch up with him and he becomes “more like them”, these disciplinary issues should right themselves.

I have to say that I cringed when I heard that. The very idea of holding back a child’s development so that he can be “more like everyone else”? I was speechless. Would you tell a child to stop swimming so that the other children can catch up to him?

As much as I dislike dwelling on genetics and in-born talent (what we are is 50% nature and 50% nurture and I usually tend not to focus on the former because it seems pointless to waste my thoughts on that which I cannot change), it is evident that Aristotle’s talent is his acuity. By acuity I do not mean that he started talking early, or that he has always been very articulate for his age, or even that he reads well for his age. By some of these measures, I would say that Hercules is ahead of him, and yet, I do not feel that Hercules has the mental acuity of Aristotle. There is a certain quality to Aristotle’s mind that I cannot describe adequately and I know that to deny his development is to deny him the opportunity to hone that talent much as we would be denying the swimmer by asking him not to swim.

Besides, even if I stopped all his developmental activities, I do not believe that it would be the answer to his disciplinary problems at school. I will not go so far as to say that there is no link between the two but regardless of whether there is a link or not, the answer is definitely not holding a child back.

It reminds me of an argument I used to hear regarding early learning that goes something like, “Oh, if your child learns all this before school, won’t he be bored at school?” Why are we trying so hard to make our children fit into a preset mould, especially if it means compromising their development? That’s the worst reason I have ever heard for not wanting our children to do any special pre-school activities. Even the misconceived notion that teaching children math and reading and other subjects in infancy or toddlerhood is damaging is not as bad. At least this is a real perceived reason even if it misconceived.

Aristotle may be cognitively advanced, but emotionally, he is still a child of his physical age. Just because I was never in the school’s office as much doesn’t mean that I was a “normal” child and Aristotle “abnormal”. If the stories are true, it would appear that hubby spent a great deal of his childhood in mischief making. Perhaps Aristotle is simply more like his father in this regard and this is just something I’m going to have to learn to deal with. For what it’s worth, Aristotle has never had a repeat offense after we have “dealt with the issue”, he just comes up with new ones. Is it fair to say that we are making progress as far as disciplinary measures go? After all, if hubby became a law-abiding citizen, a good and kind husband, and a responsible father in spite of all the trouble he used to get into, surely there is hope still for my son.

These are just my thoughts. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments – I welcome them. I know there are many other parents reading this with cognitively advanced children in school so I hope you can share your experiences and your thoughts about this particular subject.

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Life Lessons: Religious Education

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Children ask the most innocent question to subjects we are often ill-equipped to answer. As a result, I think it is often best to raise the topics ahead of time or at least prepare for them. I think the three toughest questions are:

  1. Life and death
  2. How babies are made
  3. Religion

Well, we’ve covered the first two fairly well, I think. After reading the books by Pat Thomas, we had several mini discussions about it and I think Aristotle is satisfied by the answers. All that remains unspoken is the third topic – religion.

I’ve left this one for a while because hubby’s family are Taoists, although the level of devotion varies from family member to family member. My family is… um Christian? Well, my brother and I are, but my parents are probably best described as free thinkers. I won’t go so far as to call them atheists because my mother makes references to God being a higher power and Dad used to teach in a Methodist school (at least I think they were Methodist).

Religion is a complicated subject even for me because I have always understood Taoism to be a philosophy rather than a religion but the practice of it (at least in this household) appears to be more like a religion rather than a philosophy (if you know the difference, feel free to enlighten me). As far as Christianity goes, I’ve read the Bible and I know all the stories. I’ve been to church, but I’m not a regular attendee.

Hubby and I once said we would not influence the children’s religious decisions but we would leave it up to them to choose. Initially, I took it to mean that we didn’t teach them about religion. Or rather not about the specific religions. But I’ve come to realise that the hands off approach isn’t right either. If you want to make choices, you have to know what you’re choosing between. Rather than leave my children to the mercy of a religious zealot who may or may not have my children’s best interests at heart, I should be the one to provide them with the foundation and understanding of the different religions so that they can understand what they are all about and appreciate the different beliefs systems in place. I want to arm them with the information to make the right choices for themselves – if that’s possible.

The last is probably the most important of all because the value of honesty hinges upon it. A child sees truth only in black and white and will think a man is lying when he speaks something different to what the child believes. For example, “Why is that man lying?” Well, he isn’t. He really believes that what he says is true. It is also important for children to understand about the different belief systems because it helps your child accept those that are different.

Some time back, I wrote about a chapter in the book “Nurture Shock” that explained that children notice differences between themselves and those around them and if you don’t talk about those differences, your child will develop biasses against those that are different from your child. If you don’t talk about the different races, your child will naturally develop his own racial biasses. If that is so, then I’m sure the same can be said of religious biasses. If your child doesn’t understand the different belief systems that other people have, he will develop his own religious biasses.

I have always been a big believer in respecting the beliefs of others – no matter what I think of their belief systems. I hope that my children, too, will respect the beliefs of others even if they don’t share those beliefs.

So this Christmas, I talked to Aristotle about its significance. Rather than it simply being a holiday with snow and decorated pine trees where fake Santa comes around to give people presents, I want him to understand that it symbolises the day a God named Jesus came to walk on Earth. I want him to know this as he will know about his grandmother’s religion and why she prays to his ancestors and the goddess of Mercy.

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5 Ways to Maximise Your Child’s Cognitive Potential

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One of the benefits of keeping an open mind and being willing to listen is that you often stumble across little gems of information… Just like the article in Scientific American, that talks about 5 ways you can do to maximise your cognitive potential. Anything that is about brain development and increasing cognitive potential is always on my radar so this one naturally took the cake.

The author, Andrea Kuszewski, wrote about an interesting study “Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory” by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig.

Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning is the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. – Wikipedia

Working memory is the ability to actively hold information in the mind needed to do complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning. – Wikipedia

Although working memory and intelligence are not the same, Kuszewski likens working memory to giving a machine the best parts to help it perform at its peak. Developing and improving our working memory has a direct effect on our fluid intelligence because it allows us to think better. Kuszewski summarised the findings of the study as follows:

1. Fluid intelligence is trainable.

2. The training and subsequent gains are dose-dependent—meaning, the more you train, the more you gain.

3. Anyone can increase their cognitive ability, no matter what your starting point is.

4. The effect can be gained by training on tasks that don’t resemble the test questions.

In the study, they used an intensive, multimodal (visual and auditory input) working memory task (called the dual-n-back), however, there are limitations to this task in improving fluid intelligence in the real world. Firstly, although it is a tough task, you will eventually run out of variations which will limit your cognitive improvement. Secondly, you’ll eventually get bored of doing it.

To apply the findings in the study to our lives in a practical way, Kuszewski recommended the following five ways to increase fluid intelligence:

1. Seek Novelty

2. Challenge Yourself

3. Think Creatively

4. Do Things The Hard Way

5. Network

Seeking Novelty and Challenging Yourself

Before when I wrote about brain training programs, what you want is a variety of brain training programs rather than sticking to only one program because the variety provides novelty and the novelty provides new challenges. Once you get good at it, it’s time to move on to the next activity.

It is a little like a fitness program. When you first start, your initial gains are great – you build muscle, you lose weight, etc. After a while, you start to notice a plateauing of your gains – your weight starts to stabilise and your muscles seem to stop growing or are growing very slowly. That’s because your body has acclimatised to the activity and has figured out how to perform the activity in the most efficient manner. In order to kick start your weight loss again, you would have to do something different. And so it is with brain training.

Thinking Creatively

Here are some examples of teaching children to think creatively in “Raising the Achievement of All Students: Teaching for Successful Intelligence” by Robert J. Sternberg:

  • Create a game for learning the names of the states, or a poem, or a new numerical operation, or a scientific experiment.
  • Invent a toy, or a new way of solving a difficult mathematics problem, or a new system of government that builds on old systems of government, or a haiku.
  • Explore new ways of solving a mathematics problem beyond those taught by the teacher, or how to achieve a certain chemical reaction or different ways of reading so as to improve your reading comprehension or the nature of volcanoes.
  • Imagine what it would be like to live in another country, or what will happen if temperatures on the Earth keep rising, or what Picasso might have been thinking when he painted Guernica, or what might happen if the United States switched to the metric system of measurement.
  • Suppose that people were paid to inform on their neighbors to the political party in power—what would happen? Or that all lakes instantly dried up—what would happen? Or that schools stopped teaching mathematics—what would happen? Or that Germany had won WorldWar II—what would have happened?
  • Synthesize your knowledge of the Vietnam War and the recent War in Afghanistan to propose a set of battle techniques that is likely to work in many unfamiliar kinds of terrains.

Do Things the Hard Way

One example Kuszewski gives is to stop using a GPS if you are using one. Make your brain work for you rather than relying on technology to simply for your life for you. Here is another example I can think of – instead of reaching for the calculator, use your brain to work it out.

Networking

Well, I guess this one speaks for itself. For our children, it comes in the form of socialising and making new friends.

 

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What if Your Child is Too Smart for School?

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I bought Gavin the Grolier Logico Piccolo series a year ago and we have been working on it on and off. Although the recommendation is to do two cards from one topic a day, I usually let him choose what he wants to do and how much he wants to do. If he doesn’t want to do it, I don’t force the issue. I have noticed that the best time to get him interested to do it is when we’re out and there are no other options, because children who are bored would rather do something than nothing.

Lately, Gavin’s been very focussed and he has been completing one folder (16 cards) per sitting. He takes it as a challenge because he wants a new folder and I find that I’m the one telling him it’s time to stop while he insists he just wants to do one more. If he keeps this up, we’ll need to get the Maximo series soon.

When I mentioned it to hubby, he raised a concern I am sure other parents would have. If our child is too advanced, will he be bored at school? This has been one of the arguments against early childhood education – if you teach your child too much too early, he will be bored at school. Personally, I think this is the most ridiculous argument ever – to hold your child back from reaching his full potential because you are scared he will be bored at school.

Our children’s learning potential will never be as great as it is now in their earliest years of life. To squander these years just because we’re afraid they will be bored at school simply addresses society’s fears, not the problem. Not utilising these years would be like not giving our babies colostrum in the first three to five days after delivery because we think the breast milk to come will be adequate. Sure breast milk is good, but colostrum is even better. Likewise, learning later in life is good, but early learning is even better.

Yes, I think it is a problem when your child is bored at school because the material being taught does not stimulate him sufficiently. But the answer is clearly not to stop teaching him at home especially when he is the driving force for his learning. As a parent, it is our duty to help our children reach their potential, not to cut them down because society deems it necessary in order for our children to conform.

This is one of the arguments for homeschooling – you can follow your child’s pace and you are not restricted by a set curriculum. So whether your child is ahead or behind his peers, it doesn’t matter because your curriculum is tailored specifically for your child.

What happens if you aren’t going to homeschool your child? What can you do to ensure that your children’s needs are met in the school environment? The problem with the school environment is that it only reaches the children who fall in the middle band. This is where the choice of school becomes important. Parents need to communicate regularly with teachers to monitor their child’s progress at school. If your child is ahead, what is being done to make sure he remains engaged? If your child is behind, what is being done to reconnect with your child?

In the latter case, I believe the problem lies not with the child but with the environment. Children are individuals who approach learning differently. Just as some individuals are audio learners and some are visual learners, some children, for example, need tactile stimulation to learn. The children who do not approach learning in the “conventional” manner will be the ones who are viewed as less intelligent when this may not be the case.

Sir Ken Robinson wrote about Gillian Lynne who was performing so poorly at school that her mother took her to see a doctor to enquire about her daughter’s constant fidgeting and lack of focus. After hearing her case and observing her reaction during a “test”, the doctor explained to Gillian’s mother than Gillian was a dancer. Gillian’s mother sent her to dance school and after that, all her subjects at school began to improve.

We have heard that movement is important for brain development. For some children, especially, movement is essential for learning. Without movement, they can’t learn – as in Gillian’s case. It wasn’t that she needed to move in class to learn, but she needed an outlet for movement – a place to go where she was given the freedom to move, such as dance school. This highlights the importance of exposing our children to a variety of subjects, not just the ones we deem important for life.

Sir Ken Robinson highlighted in his book that many schools have been phasing out the “less important” subjects. Subjects like art and music have taken a back seat to academic subjects and it is affecting our children’s overall development, particularly, their creativity. He talked about the subject hierarchy of importance. Not only are music and art lower down on the ladder, but there are hierarchies within these subjects. For example, learning an instrument is higher up on the ladder compared to dance and theatre.

In summary, I think it is important to ensure that our children are exposed to a variety of subjects at school – even the “unimportant” ones. It is also essential that we communicate regularly with our children’s teachers to monitor our children’s development at school. And if our children’s teachers are disinterested and/or our children’s needs are still not being met, then perhaps it is time to speak to the principal or to find a new school.

If you have any other suggestions on what can be done to address this issue, please share them in the comments section.

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Understanding the Brain’s Amazing Potential from an Autistic Savant

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I’ve been trying to understand right brain education and the potential of the right brain ever since I heard about it. But the more I read, the more questions seem to crop up. Everything I read and hear leads me to further redefine what I have learned about right brain education, the potential abilities of the brain, and how we can develop them.

When I try to understand the right brain, I often come back to such individuals as autistic savants whose impediment on their left brain unveils the potential ability of the right brain, thereby allowing them to perform amazing feats that leave the rest of the world breathless in amazement. So when I heard about Daniel Tammet’s talk on TED I was very eager to hear what he had to say. Here’s the video of his talk:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzd7ReqiQnE

You may be wondering who the heck is Daniel Tammet (I hadn’t heard of him before this either). Daniel Tammet is a high-functioning autistic savant with linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia. Although there are other high-functioning autistic savants, Daniel Tammet has caught the attention of some of the world’s leading neuroscientists because of his ability to explain how his mind works. Scientists have called him the Rosetta Stone because they believe he could be the key to discovering how the savant’s mind works and how normal people can become savants. To observe Daniel Tammet’s abilities, you can watch the full documentary about him on The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

What I found interesting was the way Daniel “works out” the answers to challenging Mathematical equations in his head. In his own explanation, he doesn’t “work it out”, he sees images that translate to the answer because numbers to him have their own shape, colour and texture. When you put different numbers together (as in an equation), they create a new image in the center that reveal the answer. Here is something he said on Scientific American:

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them.

That sounds like a very right brain explanation of Maths to me, which leads me to ponder: could this be how children with right brain training work out the solutions to complicated Mathematical equations? I wondered about this because I recall a newsletter from Right Brain Kids talking about how children perceive colours as having different textures and hence were able to figure out the hidden colour through touch alone. If colours have different textures to differentiate them, then why not numbers with different colours and shapes?

In every measure of ability, children undergoing right brain education who have come into the realisation of their potential abilities are very much like autistic savants:

Autistic savants have displayed a wide range of talents, from reciting all nine volumes of Grove’s Dictionary Of Music to measuring exact distances with the naked eye. The blind American savant Leslie Lemke played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No1, after he heard it for the first time, and he never had so much as a piano lesson. And the British savant Stephen Wiltshire was able to draw a highly accurate map of the London skyline from memory after a single helicopter trip over the city. – The Guardian.

Look at the testimonials from right brain education and you will see that there are children capable of the following: perfect pitch, rapid mental math, photographic memory, and speed reading – similar to those abilities demonstrated by autistic savants. Because these children have full function of their entire brain, they do not have the limitations that autistic savants have as a result of their condition – they can empathise, socialise and interact easily with other individuals.

Is it fair then to say that right brain education is the answer to developing savants?

As I read the comments from TED on Daniel Tammet, I noticed that some watchers were accusing him of being a fraud. They claimed to have proof that he was not autistic and that everything he could do were the result of memory tricks. Personally, I’m disinclined to think he is a fraud. A clever individual might be able to fool the lay public, but to fool a specialist on Autism would be an impressive feat. Daniel Tammet was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen who is a professor of Developmental Psychopatholgy in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and the director of the University’s Autism Research Centre. To call Daniel Tammet a fraud would be the same as saying that Professor Baron-Cohen is incompetent because surely someone best known for his work on autism would not have made such a gross error.

But for the sake of argument, even if Daniel Tammet was a fraud, I would still be very interested to discover how he managed to correctly recite pi to 22,514 digits from memory and learn a new language in one week. I would love to discover the secret to his linguistic genius and his uncanny mathematical abilities. Even if he was a fraud, he would still be an amazing individual who holds the key to some very powerful secrets to the human brain. Either way, he is an individual worth understanding. If he was a fraud then how did he develop his amazing memory and his mathematical and linguistic genius?

They say that autistic savants usually have a history of some sort of trauma to the brain that damages a part of it. This damage then leads to the development of these amazing abilities. Similar to Shichida’s research on brain development, that suggests that we all possess this genius ability but something inhibits us from accessing it. Shichida says we can unlock this hidden potential with right brain training and that it is easiest when it begins as early in life as possible.

Daniel Tammet wrote “Born on a Blue Day” and “Embracing the Wide Sky” which talks about his life, his unique abilities and his perception of the world.

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Right Brain Education Rule: Love, Relationship, then Knowledge

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After our last class at Heguru, the parents were given a short video presentation from Mr Henmi. The subject matter he covered is nothing new but extremely important if we want our children to benefit from our teachings. It is the connection between love, relationship with your child, and knowledge. Far too often, parents jump straight to knowledge without ensuring that the first two requirements are met – love and the relationship with the child. Without meeting the first two requirements, the amount of knowledge that our children can absorb is limited and the process is inefficient.

As I said, this is nothing new because we know babies need love to learn and that it is the most important element to the successful implementation of right brain education. However, I think it is important to constantly remind ourselves because it is too easy to get caught up trying to impart knowledge to our children and forget to make sure our relationship with our children is strong and that they feel loved. It is also easy to overlook the importance of love and relationship.

Providing knowledge without meeting our children’s love and relationship requirements is like trying to build a house without a proper foundation. You can still build the house, but without a proper foundation, it crumbles easily and is not a strong structure.

Many parents take the trouble to send their children for right brain classes and other early childhood development programs. The fact that they have done so clearly indicates how much they love their children and how important their children are to them. But remember that this expression of love is not necessarily one our children recognise. Many parents love their children but if you ask those children, they may reply that their parents do not love them or that they do not love them that much. This is very likely because their parents have not communicated their love adequately or used a language that their children understand.

Mr Henmi talked about the importance of physical contact with our children. Providing lots of hugs and skin to skin contact is important. I also remember reading somewhere (perhaps it was Bright from the Start – I cannot recall now) a study on how much physical contact people need from others on a daily basis. They found that the need for physical contact does not decrease as we get older. What they also discovered, unfortunately, was that as our children grow older, they often receive less and less physical contact from their parents. The need for physical contact isn’t less, but somehow parents just offer less of it. As to why this is so, perhaps because they feel their children don’t want it. When asked, the children responded that they still wanted the physical contact from their parents but they just didn’t ask for it. And when they didn’t get it from their parents, teenagers would turn to members of the opposite sex to get the physical contact they needed.

Someone once said to me that children can still learn even if they didn’t feel loved. That is true – the left brain doesn’t need it to learn. The right brain, however, does. And if you want to open up the functions of the right brain, it is important that your child feels loved. If you want to see the results of right brain education, concentrate on developing your relationship with your child first.

This subject has probably been discussed to death and you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I know this.” It is a topic that requires revisitng because it is so important. If there is one part of the mix that we’re going to get wrong, this is usually it – not because we don’t love our children, but because we fail to adequately express it to our children.

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Raising Successful Children

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