Another inroad to dialogue is to remind your child that you’ve been through some tough situations, and say, “When that happens, there’s something I do. Do you want to hear what it is?” Again, if she says no, don’t share it. But often at this point she’ll say yes.
If she’s open to dialogue, you might say something like, “Have you noticed how sometimes we talk to ourselves in ways we wouldn’t speak to others? Imagine if we were on a softball team together. A routine ground ball is hit right at me, but goes between my legs. What would you say? Probably something like, ‘It’s all right. You’ll get the next one.’ Why? It certainly was a bad mistake. But instinctively you know that vocalizing support and encouragement will make me more likely to get the next one than throwing your glove in the dirt and screaming about how lousy I am.”
Teach your kids to be as supportive of themselves as they are of their best friend—to say, “C’mon! You can do this, Heather.” Third-person self-talk is much more powerful than first-person self-talk. If your daughter refers to herself by name, she is more likely to take the more distanced, supportive-friend stance than to act as critic in chief.4
Let’s delve a little more into how we process a mistake like a missed ball. If your child views the error as having no rational explanation, and chastises herself as stupid, she has no sense of being able to fix it next time. There’s nothing she can do to get a better outcome, except to not be stupid. Effective self-talk allows her to hold on to the notion that she’s capable—definitely not stupid—but simply made a mistake. She can then investigate what went wrong. This gives her agency, by suggesting that there is an explanation for what went wrong and thus something in the process that she can work on and change.5
The key here is not to take it personally. If there’s an explanation that’s not threatening to your child’s identity, she can look at the mistake, learn from it, and move on.
Exercise #5: Practice reframing problems.
So much of our work involves helping kids to think more skillfully by questioning their thought process and reframing things. Consider stress itself. Simply labeling stress differently will change performance results. Po Bronson reported that professional musicians and athletes experience anxiety prior to a performance, but they interpret it as energizing, whereas amateurs interpret it as detrimental.6 For one group, anxiety leads to flow. For the other, it is a threat. Much as it is one’s sense of control more than control itself that increases motivation and calms anxiety, it’s the subjective perception (“Cool! An audience of fifteen hundred people!”) rather than the objective reality that impacts the brain and how it responds.
Language is enormously powerful. “I want to” is preferable to “I have to,” just as “I’m choosing to” is better than “I have to.” It helps to think, “This is annoying but it’s not awful,” or “This is a setback but it’s not a disaster.”
We like to think of life as a game of “Choose Your Point of View.” You get to decide how to frame events. Imagine that your sixteen-year-old daughter is out at a school dance and you had agreed she would text you at 9:00 P.M. It’s 9:15 and she hasn’t texted you yet and isn’t responding to your texts. Is it useful to think that she’s trapped in a ditch somewhere? Not really. Is it useful to think that she has most likely forgotten and is so busy with her friends that she hasn’t seen your texts? Obviously, the latter is a less crazy-making option, so let’s choose that one. That doesn’t mean the facts are any different. But what point of view will best serve you while you wait? (If it’s 10:00 and you still haven’t heard from her, you are likely to choose to be more concerned.) Brent Toleman, a friend and linguistic psychologist, argues that in any given situation, you can choose the point of view that is most helpful. When you ask yourself what the most likely explanation is, it’s usually not disaster. There are certainly times when really bad things happen, but it doesn’t make sense to catastrophize every day of your life.
Consider this story from our friend Aaron. He was rear-ended on his way to an important meeting at work. As he got out of his car, he was not feeling particularly generous toward the other driver. Then he noticed that the car that had hit him had a “Marine Corps Dad” license plate. The driver apologized profusely and explained that he and his wife were rushing to the hospital for their daughter’s surgery. Poof! Point of view changed. Anger and frustration gave way to concern and offers of help. We have the choice to view another driver as a self-absorbed jerk or as someone rightfully in a hurry. We have the choice to view a mistake as proof of our own inadequacy or as a necessary and perhaps even inadvertently helpful part of our life’s course.
Reframing involves looking at our own thoughts with care and actively redirecting them. This is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy. As we discussed, this is also an idea that’s incorporated in mindfulness.
Explain to your child that many body sensations are caused by thoughts. Help them connect the two, and pay attention to signs from their body that they are getting nervous, sad, or mad. Teach them to start “hearing” their thoughts and to distinguish between rational and irrational thoughts.
Just the other day one of Ned’s students vividly described what happens to him during tests. “Nothing goes into my head,” he said. “Nothing makes sense. Then I get down on myself and start thinking I’ll never get good scores, will never get into Penn, will never become an architect.”
Ned’s response went something like this: “Is it true that if you don’t get an answer right, you won’t do well on that section? Is it true that if you don’t do well on that section, you can’t get a good score? Is it true that if you don’t get a good score, you will never get a good score? Is it true that if you don’t get a good score, you can’t go to a good college? Is it true that if you don’t go to a ‘good’ college, you can’t become an architect?
“What I know,” Ned went on, “is that people as curious as you are can get a fantastic education from even the least selective college, and that you can become a great architect regardless of where you go to college. And, of course, you can take the ACT over and over and over. So really think about those ideas that come into your head at moments when you’re stressed. Can you trust them?”
One of the most common mental habits that makes us feel out of control is catastrophizing—otherwise known as making a mountain out of a molehill. A simple way to help kids avoid catastrophizing is to teach them to ask themselves, whenever they’re upset, “Is this a big problem or a little problem?” In cognitive behavioral therapy, kids are taught to distinguish between a disaster (like famine) and something that’s temporarily frustrating or embarrassing, between “I’ll die if this happens” and “I’ll be disappointed but I probably won’t die.” If it’s a little problem, the first line of defense is to use self-soothing mechanisms, like a cool-down spot, deep breathing, or Plan B thinking, to calm themselves down. For most problems, these tools will be enough. When problems feel too big, we want kids to seek help.
Exercise #6: Move your body and/or play.
One of Ned’s students, a regular runner who was susceptible to anxiety, confided that her parents had told her she shouldn’t take time away from studying to exercise. This struck Ned as the worst advice he’d heard in a long time.
The Latin root of the word emotion, emovere, means “to move.” Our bodies and minds are linked, and the part of the brain that tells the body to move is adjacent to the part that’s responsible for clearheaded thinking. There is a close overlap between our motor control functions and our mental control, or executive functions, which is one reason why exercise is so beneficial for developing self-regulation.
Exercise is more generally good for the brain and body. It increases levels of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, which provide stability, focus, mental alertness, and calmness. Exercise stimulates the production of the protein BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which is considered a brain “fertilizer�
� because it’s important for the growth of the brain and for helping cells wire together. Exercise provides more glucose and oxygen to the brain, which promotes neurogenesis, the growing of brain cells. In short, it’s often said that exercise does more to help clear thinking than thinking does, in part because it stimulates and strengthens the prefrontal cortex’s control functions.
Exercise is also critical to a state of relaxed alertness. As John Ratey showed in his book Spark, when students exercised heavily as part of their school curriculum, academic performance dramatically improved.7 Again, Finland is at the head of the class here: they mandate twenty minutes of outdoor play for every forty minutes of instructional time.
For all these reasons, Ned told his student to keep running and encourages all his students to adopt some sort of habit of exercise. (But it’s important that they not feel forced. Forced exercise is boot camp, not a road to low stress.) Aerobic exercise confers greater brain benefits than anaerobic, but a good rule of thumb for the right level of intensity is that you should be able to talk but not sing. Exercise should be strenuous, but shouldn’t feel like it’s killing you.
Adele Diamond, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, is particularly supportive of physical activities that simultaneously demand the core executive functions, working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Consider dance. When you learn a dance, you have to use your working memory to learn moves. You also have to inhibit your movements (or know when you are moving your leg too slowly or too quickly), and you have to flexibly adjust your moves to changes in the music or to your partner’s steps. Yoga, martial arts, horseback riding, fencing, drumming, and rock climbing all fall in a category of exercise in which you are using your mental and motor skills to develop your executive functions.
It’s one thing to get a group of high schoolers rock climbing, but the prospect of getting younger kids to engage in this sort of brain-healthy exercise is more daunting. This is where play comes in. Play is crucial for the development of a healthy brain—including a well-functioning cerebellum.
The cerebellum is located at the base of the brain, just above the spinal cord. For at least a hundred years, we’ve known that coordinated movement depends on the cerebellum, and that if you injure your cerebellum, you will have a hard time even standing upright. But what we’ve just begun to learn in the last several years is how the cerebellum affects thinking. Patients with cerebellar damage have problems with things like planning, word selection, judging the shape of objects, and creating proportioned drawings.8 We now know that the cerebellum plays a role in all aspects of learning. Differences in cerebellum functioning have also been linked to ADHD and are a factor in autism. The cerebellum is one of the least heritable brain structures, which means that experience—not genetics—is key to how well it functions.
Play is how children strengthen their cerebellum and learn to master their world. This is not just true of our species: a graph of playfulness in almost every species looks like an inverted U, with rates of play matching the growth of the cerebellum. This suggests that the brain needs the whole-body movements of play to achieve maturity, and that there’s a sensitive period in which play is needed for brain stimulation.9
For the good of the cerebellum, resist the urge to have your kid do something “useful.” Resist the worry that tells you he shouldn’t be out of your line of sight for more than a minute. Resist the inclination to sign him up for more organized activities where he will be told what to do. Let him be. Let him play.
What to Do Tonight
Consider the exercises in this chapter and ask your child if he thinks there’s one that would help him, you, or the whole family.
Have a family meeting in which you share your written goals. Ask your kids for their thoughts on your goals or those of their siblings. Validate their suggestions.
Encourage your kids to set their own goals—and to visualize achieving them. Ask, “What would you like to do or accomplish for the next week/ month/ semester/ by the end of summer?” Help them make SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound). When you break a goal down into discrete, actionable steps, you increase the dopamine released when they see progress.
Build on your child’s SMART goals to add in mental contrasting. Are there inner obstacles? How will your child handle it if he is thwarted? How will he feel, and how will he recuperate and move on?
Make Plan B thinking a family practice. Ask your kids if they want to hear your thoughts about their Plan As and Bs. If they don’t, back off.
Model positive self-talk and self-compassion. You might say something like, “I realized yesterday that I was being really hard on myself about something I screwed up at work, harder than I would have been on anyone else. Everyone messes things up sometimes and getting down on myself won’t help me avoid mistakes.”
Make physical fitness a family value. Don’t force your child to play a sport and don’t choose an activity for him, but explain that it is important that everyone in the family make physical activity a part of their life, and help them to decide what they would like to do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Navigating Learning Disabilities, ADHD, and Autism Spectrum Disorders
A SENSE OF CONTROL is good for all kids—at all ages—but parents of kids with learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face an extra set of challenges. Sometimes the interventions these kids receive will actually lower their sense of autonomy, when they need as much as anyone to feel that they are in control.
Studies have shown that structure and external motivators are often the most effective ways to help kids with autism or ADHD to focus on a task, finish their work, and behave well in class and at home. As a result, many parents and professionals resist giving these children much of a say in the decisions governing their lives. But we take issue with the notion that structure and autonomy are mutually exclusive. Our view is that a high level of structure and organizational support should be provided to these kids, so long as they don’t fight it constantly. Kids with learning disabilities and other special needs will learn and perform better when they feel that help is not being done to them. Rewards and other external motivators tend to undermine internal motivation for these kids, too, and should be used with care.
Many parents feel that kids with developmental difficulties can’t make appropriate life decisions for themselves. It might be fine for Typical Tom to choose his coursework or decide whether to participate in an after-school enrichment program, but Hyperactive Harry couldn’t possibly do that. Again, we disagree. Throughout our decades of work we have seen that when children with ADHD, dyslexia, or other learning difficulties are given all the information necessary to make a decision and don’t feel forced, they are extremely capable of choosing thoughtfully. They are still the experts on them. They want their lives to work, and they will often welcome the help that is offered to them and the accommodations that will enable them to learn and perform better.
A few studies have confirmed the benefits of giving kids with special needs autonomy. One showed that when elementary and junior high students with learning disabilities felt a sense of autonomy at home, they tended to do better in the classroom and to navigate personal setbacks more smoothly.1 A second study found that high-functioning students with ASD who rated their teachers as higher in autonomy reported greater self-determination in school, which in turn correlated with higher academic competence.2 A new approach to therapy with ADHD adolescents and their parents that places a strong emphasis on the promotion of teen autonomy (the STAND program—Supporting Teens’ Autonomy Daily) has recently been developed by Margaret Sibley of Florida International University.3 But the research in this area is sparse. Our experience, however, is not. We have both seen for years, Bill especially, that when kids with special needs have a sense of control over their lives, they thriv
e. If you consider the way the brain works, you will quickly see why that is. Brains develop as they’re used, and we don’t want any child to develop a brain that’s accustomed to chronically fighting attempts to be controlled. We know it’s stressful to struggle at school or have problems with impulse control. We know that a sense of control combats stress and encourages healthy brain growth. If we want kids without special needs to have these advantages, then it’s all the more important that kids with special needs have them, too.
This chapter won’t be relevant to everyone, but it will be relevant to more people than you might think. Six and a half million American kids and teens received special education services in 2013–2014.4 As many as 20 percent of students have at least one learning disability, 11 percent of children are diagnosed with ADHD, and one in sixty-eight kids has an autism disorder.5 These statistics are almost certainly low estimates of the actual incidence of learning, attentional, and social difficulties, in part because they do not include students with disorders who have not yet been diagnosed. On a more anecdotal level, we’re hard pressed to think of a family with three kids in which at least one does not have a learning disability, ADHD, or an autism spectrum disorder.
This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive discussion of all special needs and what you should do if your child has one. Each category could be a book in itself. Rather, what we hope to do is to show you what gets in the way of giving these kids a sense of control, and to assure you that you can do it, even if you need to think about it with more care.
Learning Disabilities
The Self-Driven Child Page 24