Ellen Galinsky-
7 life Skills to begin in Early Childhood
1. Focus and Self Control
Children need focus and self control in order to achieve their goals, especially in a world that is filled with distractions and information overload. This skill involves paying attention, remembering the rules, thinking flexibly, and exercising self control. Take the words often used to describe the world: complicated, distracting. Or the words about time: 24-7, rushed, time starved, too much to do and not enough time to do it. To navigate this world, children need to focus, to determine what is important and to pay attention to this, amid many distractions.
Focus and self control involve many executive functions of the brain, such as paying attention, remembering the rules, and inhibiting one’s initial response to achieve a larger goal. Scientists call these executive functions because these are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. Many scientists now believe that executive functions predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests.
Focus and self control can be broken down into four components: focus, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control.
Focus: Researchers talk about young children being “alert” and about “orienting” (being able to focus on achieving what they want to achieve) -- think of a fourteen-month-old trying to get Cheerios onto a spoon in order to feed herself or himself). For older children and adults, focus includes those two aspects, plus being able to concentrate.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your ability to focus.
Cognitive Flexibility: the ability to flexibly switch perspectives or change the focus of attention; and flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your own cognitive flexibility.
Working Memory: enables you to hold information in your mind while mentally working with it or updating it. For example, you need working memory in order to relate what you’re reading now to what you just read a minute ago.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your own working memory.
Inhibitory control: involves the ability to resist a strong inclination to do one thing and instead do what is most appropriate. Inhibitory control involves controlling your attention, your emotions, and your behavior to achieve a goal.Click here to take a quiz that will help you assess your own inhibitory control.
Focus and self control involve many executive functions of the brain, such as paying attention, remembering the rules, and inhibiting one’s initial response to achieve a larger goal. Scientists call these executive functions because these are the brain functions we use to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in pursuit of our goals. Many scientists now believe that executive functions predict children’s success as well as—if not better than—IQ tests.
Focus and self control can be broken down into four components: focus, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control.
Focus: Researchers talk about young children being “alert” and about “orienting” (being able to focus on achieving what they want to achieve) -- think of a fourteen-month-old trying to get Cheerios onto a spoon in order to feed herself or himself). For older children and adults, focus includes those two aspects, plus being able to concentrate.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your ability to focus.
Cognitive Flexibility: the ability to flexibly switch perspectives or change the focus of attention; and flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your own cognitive flexibility.
Working Memory: enables you to hold information in your mind while mentally working with it or updating it. For example, you need working memory in order to relate what you’re reading now to what you just read a minute ago.Click here for a quiz that will help you assess your own working memory.
Inhibitory control: involves the ability to resist a strong inclination to do one thing and instead do what is most appropriate. Inhibitory control involves controlling your attention, your emotions, and your behavior to achieve a goal.Click here to take a quiz that will help you assess your own inhibitory control.
2.Perspective Taking
Perspective taking goes far beyond empathy; it involves figuring out what others think and feel, and forms the basis for children’s understanding of their parents’, teachers’, and friends’ intentions. Children who can take others’ perspectives are also much less likely to get involved in conflicts. Think about the conflicts you have experienced recently -- whether it is with your child or someone else in your family, or with someone in a store or at work. And think about the hostilities in the world. Chances are that the inability to see things as others see them is at the heart of these problems.Perspective taking calls on many of the executive functions of the brain. It requires inhibitory control, or inhibiting our own thoughts and feelings to consider the perspectives of others; cognitive flexibility to see a situation in different ways; and reflection, or the ability to consider someone else’s thinking alongside our own.Although perspective taking is rarely on lists of essential skills for children to acquire, research makes it clear that it should be.
3. Communicating
Communicating involves much more than understanding language, speaking, reading, and writing—it is the skill of determining what one wants to communicate and realizing how our communications will be understood by others. Communicating well involves executive functions of the brain—for example, reflecting upon the goal of what we want to communicate and inhibiting our point of view so that we can understand the viewpoints of others. These are not simple tasks, as workplace research conducted by Families and Work Institute reveals. When we surveyed a nationally representative group of employers, asking them to name the gaps in skills they found among new entrants to the workforce, by far the largest proportion cited spoken and written communication skills.4. Making Connections
Making connections is at the heart of learning—figuring out what’s the same and what’s different—and making unusual connections is at the core of creativity. In a world where information is so accessible, it is the people who can see connections who are able to go beyond knowing information to using this information well. Think about your most recent “aha” moment—when you suddenly understood something that you didn’t understand before. Chances are this “aha” moment involved seeing a new connection. Making connections involves putting information into categories as well as seeing how one thing can represent or stand for something else. Ultimately, it involves:
- figuring out what’s the same or similar;
- figuring out how one thing relates to another; and
- finding unusual connections, often by being able to inhibit an automatic response, by reflecting, and by selecting something that is connected in a different way.
Making multiple connections is a skill that becomes possible during the later preschool and early school-age years and beyond as the prefrontal cortex of children’s brains matures. It calls on executive functions of the brain, including working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Making unusual connections is the basis of creativity.
Here are some ways you can help kids make connections:
Guide Play, Don’t Control it
Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and their colleagues conducted an experiment to determine what kind of play experiences contribute to an understanding and use of language related to space. They found that children’s learning was maximized when parents “guided” children’s play rather than stayed away or became the boss of it. So jump in and play with your child, but don’t try to take over! You are being the boss if you start telling children what to do, such as “Put the block here, don’t put it there.” You are being a guide if you ask questions, such as “Where do you think this block should go? Hmm. Looks like it doesn’t fit. Do you think it is too long? Can you find a shorter block?” You are also being a guide if you describe children’s experiences, such as “You made that building really tall.” If you listen carefully to your words when you are guiding children’s play, especially with objects, you will find that one of the things you are doing is helping children make connections between their experiences and larger concepts of quantity and space.
5. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the ongoing search for valid and reliable knowledge to guide our beliefs, decisions, and actions. Like the other essential life skills, critical thinking develops on a set course throughout childhood and into adulthood, but its use must be promoted. And like the other skills, critical thinking draws on executive functions of the brain. It is similar to the scientific method because it involves developing, testing, and refining theories about “what causes what” to happen.6. Taking on Challenges
As parents, we may want to shield our kids from all stress, but that’s neither possible nor positive. University of Minnesota’s Dr. Megan Gunnar says: “A childhood that had no stress in it would not prepare you for adulthood. A normal childhood has challenges in it, and we need to help our children understand how to manage themselves, but not protect them completely from those challenges.” How do you help children learn to take on challenges?
First, having a warm and caring relationship with parents helps children feel more safe and secure. Luckily for them, young children think their parents can do and know everything. So when they really trust that we are there for them, they can learn from everyday setbacks and challenges, while their body and brain stays out of stress mode. Help them figure out how to cope with challenges. We need to play detective to read our kids’ behavior and figure out how they cope best with challenging circumstances. Watch infants’ behavior when they get upset. Do their hands splay out? If so, give them something to hold on to. For young children, distraction is also effective. When one of my children would get into a crying jag, they would stop when I turned the lights off and on and then let them flip the light switch themselves. Power! Engage preschoolers and older children in a conversation about what helps them when they’re upset. Is it putting their head down on their desk or on the table until they calm down? Is it taking deep breaths?
7. Self-Directed, Engaged Learning
It is through learning that we realize our potential. It is through learning that our minds become attuned, ready to meet whatever life brings. As the world changes, so can we, for as long as we live—as long as we learn. We need to find ways to promote self-directed, engaged learning in our children throughout their lives.Why I Am Concerned About Learning
Featured article April 16, 2010 by Ellen Galinsky
Curiosity, according to Laura Schulz of MIT, is fueled by having two ideas that are at odds with each other. Her research shows that when this happens, children typically will explore and experiment until they figure things out. That’s my story too. Having two images of learning that disturbingly conflicted with each other has led to eight years of exploration—so far.
The first image was from interviews I conducted with children a few years ago as background for a study we were planning on children and learning. In my travels around the country, I interviewed groups of children from the third through the twelfth grades, asking them about their experiences in learning—at home, in their neighborhoods, in school, in church, anywhere. Despite the fact that these children came from very different backgrounds and communities—they told me very similar stories. They described learning as “learning stuff”—as the acquisition of facts, figures, and concepts. The learning experiences they described were primarily imposed—and their motivation was primarily extrinsic rather than also being intrinsic.
I asked the children to finish this sentence: “It is important to learn so I can….” And the children I interviewed all over the country said:
Get good grades.
Go to good schools.
Get a good job.
Support myself—have a good house—have a nice car.
Their reasons echo those of 81,499 students in a nationwide study conducted by the High School Survey of Youth Engagement from the University of Indiana. When asked why they go to school, 73% said because they want to get a degree and go to college, 69% said because of their friends, and 58% said because it’s the law.
These are valid reasons, but there’s a major problem, too. In the High School Survey, only 39% said they go to school to learn. Likewise, I heard little connection to learning in the children I interviewed. Even worse, I found that there was little, if any, fire in their eyes when they talked about learning.
So I pushed. I asked children to finish the sentence, “When I am learning, I feel….” Those few children who had experienced a broader connection to learning said things like:
Learning draws them in, makes them want more. One boy describes this experience:
It's like going to an education buffet—you just want to keep going back for more and more.
Learning isn’t necessarily easy—nor should it be—but they say that the struggle is worth it:
When I'm learning, I feel proud, because I feel I've improved.
When I'm learning I feel like I have a future.
There is no question that there are learning problems in this country. We are all too familiar with the problem of dropout rates, but I was seeing a different but equally disturbing kind of dropout. Young people aren’t just dropping out of school—far too many are dropping out of learning.
It is clear that our nation’s focus on performance (Race to the Top), on achievement and on testing does not necessarily mean that children are engaged in learning. This lack of engagement in learning is a huge problem for young people themselves, for their future employers and for our society as a whole.
The second image I had was a very different kind of image. It was an image of babies and young children. They are voracious learners, absolutely unrelenting, in their attempts to see, to touch, to understand, and to master everything. The fire in their eyes is burning brightly.
So I have spent eight years to try to reconcile these two images—of too many older children turned off to learning and of young children who can’t stop learning. My question was: “what happens to that fire in children’s eyes and what can we do to rekindle that fire if it has dimmed?
Eight years ago, I and my colleagues at New Screen Concepts began interviewing and filming more than 85 leading researchers who focus on early childhood development and neuroscience and I have read more than a thousand studies.
From my immersion in child development and workforce research, I could see that a primary focus on educational content and information is neglecting the development of skills. I could also see that certain skills have the most powerful short-term and long-term effects on children’s development. And these became the focus of my inquiry, determining which skills have the most positive effects on children now and in the future. Ultimately, I identified seven skills, which I call life skills because of their powerful potential to help children thrive socially, emotionally, and intellectually. These are a different set of skills than others have proposed. They include such skills as focus, perspective taking and taking on challenges.
All of these life skills are based, in one way or another, in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and involve what child development researchers call executive functions of the brain. Some people don’t like the word “executive” because it conjures up an image of a boss in your brain ordering you around. However, think of executive brain functions as “managing,” not ordering. We use them to “manage” our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in order to reach our goals.
Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia believes that executive functions predict children’s successes as well as IQ tests do, because they go beyond what we know; they tap our abilities to use what we know. It has become clear to me that we won’t be able to effectively address the achievement gap in this country unless we help all children gain life skills.
What then can we then do to keep the fire in children’s eyes burning brightly, to keep them engaged in learning? My wish is that each of us does at least one thing each day to promote engaged learning in children. Whether we are a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, a teacher or principal, a friend or neighbor, or a community leader or a policy maker—if each of us does just one thing each day to promote engaged learning in the children in our lives, just think of what a difference it would make!
John Medina parent quiz review
John Medina is a highly respected developmental molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules and Brain Rules for babies. On his website Brainrules.net, he offers advice on pregnancy, parenting, and relationships mainly through videos. His videos aren’t just informative but also very entertaining. I have developed an extreme liking for John Medina and would love to see him speak in person. One of the best features of his website, brainrules.net, is the parent quiz video.
A couple by the names of Michael and Pam are preparing to welcome a new addition to the family. Even before the baby has made his or her grand entrance, Michael is positive he knows the path to raise a healthy, intelligent child (as we all do, right?), however John Medina, shows and proves him to be extremely in the wrong.
Before the quiz starts Michael hilariously shows us how he will raise a prodigy child. Michael states that the key to a smart, successful child is to set high expectations and demand maturity from the child. Michael never misses a chance to teach his child, mostly information the rest of the population obtains in college. One of the highlights of the video is when Michael tests his future daughter on impulse control. Placing one cookie in front of “Michaela” at the ripe age of four, he tells her that if she can wait 15 minutes for his return without eating the cookie, he will give her two cookies. But if she can’t wait she will receive no extra cookies, all the while shoveling cookies in his mouth. Sadly, Michaela couldn’t resist eating the cookie; she actually ate the cookie as he was describing the task.
Michael believes that by talking to a child in a mature manner, the child will develop much more maturely at a young age. When his daughter comes to him upset that her fish has died he, with no empathy, tells her that that’s the circle of life, and explains no further. He believes in praising his children relentlessly, constantly telling them how brilliant they are. Hoping that by giving constant high praise will boost their self esteem. As John Medina’s quiz begins, Michael realizes his parenting methods he so strongly believes in, are surely off the mark.
How much do you know about raising a happy, healthy child? Take the quiz to find out! http://brainrules.net/brain-rules-for-baby-video
The parent quiz video was silly and fun, and a great way to learn how to raise a healthy, happy, intelligent child. Some of the questions include how to talk to your child, how to deal with the death of a pet, and if movies and DVDs developed for babies are effective. Parenting is a huge no joke responsibility, however, humor is a necessity in the life of a parent. I really thank John Medina for using a humorous approach to parenting advice. Please check out brainrules.net to answer all your parental questions and concerns. John Medina is an incredible tool to have as a parent, please take advantage of his information.
Brandy Lowe, toddler lab assistant
John Medina parent quiz review
John Medina is a highly respected developmental molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules and Brain Rules for babies. On his website Brainrules.net, he offers advice on pregnancy, parenting, and relationships mainly through videos. His videos aren’t just informative but also very entertaining. I have developed an extreme liking for John Medina and would love to see him speak in person. One of the best features of his website, brainrules.net, is the parent quiz video.
A couple by the names of Michael and Pam are preparing to welcome a new addition to the family. Even before the baby has made his or her grand entrance, Michael is positive he knows the path to raise a healthy, intelligent child (as we all do, right?), however John Medina, shows and proves him to be extremely in the wrong.
Before the quiz starts Michael hilariously shows us how he will raise a prodigy child. Michael states that the key to a smart, successful child is to set high expectations and demand maturity from the child. Michael never misses a chance to teach his child, mostly information the rest of the population obtains in college. One of the highlights of the video is when Michael tests his future daughter on impulse control. Placing one cookie in front of “Michaela” at the ripe age of four, he tells her that if she can wait 15 minutes for his return without eating the cookie, he will give her two cookies. But if she can’t wait she will receive no extra cookies, all the while shoveling cookies in his mouth. Sadly, Michaela couldn’t resist eating the cookie; she actually ate the cookie as he was describing the task.
Michael believes that by talking to a child in a mature manner, the child will develop much more maturely at a young age. When his daughter comes to him upset that her fish has died he, with no empathy, tells her that that’s the circle of life, and explains no further. He believes in praising his children relentlessly, constantly telling them how brilliant they are. Hoping that by giving constant high praise will boost their self esteem. As John Medina’s quiz begins, Michael realizes his parenting methods he so strongly believes in, are surely off the mark.
How much do you know about raising a happy, healthy child? Take the quiz to find out! http://brainrules.net/brain-rules-for-baby-video
The parent quiz video was silly and fun, and a great way to learn how to raise a healthy, happy, intelligent child. Some of the questions include how to talk to your child, how to deal with the death of a pet, and if movies and DVDs developed for babies are effective. Parenting is a huge no joke responsibility, however, humor is a necessity in the life of a parent. I really thank John Medina for using a humorous approach to parenting advice. Please check out brainrules.net to answer all your parental questions and concerns. John Medina is an incredible tool to have as a parent, please take advantage of his information.
Brandy Lowe, toddler lab assistant
