NurtureShock (4 page)

The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child.
The majority of the minutes were spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have
for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, “You didn’t concentrate when doing it,” and “Let’s look over your
test.” The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance.

After the break, the Chinese kids’ scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans.

The trade-off here would seem to be that the Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel—but that stereotype may not reflect modern
parenting in Hong Kong. Nor was it quite what Ng saw on the videotapes. While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually
smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their
voices).

My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. He seems supersensitive to the potential judgment of his peers. Luke justifies it by saying,
“I’m shy,” but he’s not really shy. He has no fear of strange cities or talking to strangers, and at his school, he has sung
in front of large audiences. Rather, I’d say he’s proud and self-conscious. His school has simple uniforms (navy T-shirt,
navy pants), and he loves that his choice of clothes can’t be ridiculed, “because then they’d be teasing themselves too.”

After reading Carol Dweck’s research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was
that the mindset Dweck wants students to have—a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder—sounds
awfully clichéd: try, try again.

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is
a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through
long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a
conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington
University in St. Louis located this neural network running through the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum. This circuit
monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it
switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success]
on the horizon.” While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In
others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully
not
rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn
that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence,
because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

That sold me. I’d thought “praise junkie” was just an expression—but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son’s
brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.

What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal,
each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids.
I didn’t want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser.

Then I tried to use the specific-type praise that Dweck recommends. I praised Luke, but I attempted to praise his “process.”
This was easier said than done. What are the processes that go on in a five-year-old’s mind? In my impression, 80 percent
of his brain processes lengthy scenarios for his action figures.

But every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates,
but he’s easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions
carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, “You played
great.” And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied.

Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable
how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that
I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts
of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a
way I expressed unconditional love.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast
to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say
during the day—
We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use
the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations
behind constant glowing praise. For me, the duplicity became glaring.

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it
up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer
to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Can I really leave this up to him, at his age?

I’m still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: “What happens to your brain, again, when it
gets to think about something hard?”

“It gets bigger, like a muscle,” he responded, having aced this one before.

Around the world, children get an hour less sleep than they did thirty years ago. The cost: IQ points, emotional well-being,
ADHD, and obesity.

M
organ Fichter is a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Roxbury, New Jersey. She’s fair-skinned and petite, with freckles across her
nose and wavy, light brown hair. Her father, Bill, is a police sergeant on duty until three a.m. Her mother, Heather, works
part-time, devoting herself to shuffling Morgan and her brother to their many activities. Morgan plays soccer (Heather’s the
team coach), but Morgan’s first love is competitive swimming, with year-round workouts that have broadened her shoulders.
She’s also a violinist in the school orchestra, with two practices and a private lesson each week, on top of the five nights
she practices alone. Every night, Heather and Morgan sit down to her homework, then watch
Flip This House
or another design show on TLC. Morgan has always appeared to be an enthusiastic, well-balanced child.

But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a hypercritical teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable
bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow.
On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each a vocabulary word Morgan had trouble with. Unable to sleep,
she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally.
During the day, she was crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally Morgan fell asleep in class.

Morgan moved on from that teacher’s classroom the next year, but the lack of sleep persisted. Heather began to worry why her
daughter couldn’t sleep. Was it stress, or hormones? Heather forbade caffeinated soda, especially after noon, having noticed
that one cola in the afternoon could keep her daughter awake until two a.m. Morgan held herself together as best she could,
but twice a month she suffered an emotional meltdown, a kind of overreacting crying tantrum usually seen only in three-year-olds
who missed their nap. “I feel very sad for her,” Heather agonized. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone—I was worried it was going
to be a problem forever.”

Concerned about her daughter’s well-being, Heather asked the pediatrician about her daughter’s sleep. “He kind of blew me
off, and didn’t seem interested in it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘So, she gets tired once in a while. She’ll outgrow it.’ ”

The opinion of Heather’s pediatrician is typical. According to surveys by the National Sleep Foundation, 90% of American parents
think their child is getting enough sleep.

The kids themselves say otherwise: 60% of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness. A quarter admit their grades have
dropped because of it. Depending on what study you look at, anywhere from 20% to 33% are falling asleep in class at least
once a week.

The raw numbers more than back them up. Half of all adolescents get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights. By the time
they are seniors in high school, according to studies by Dr. Frederick Danner at the University of Kentucky, they’re averaging
only slightly more than 6.5 hours of sleep a night. Only 5% of high school seniors average eight hours. Sure, we remember
being tired when we went to school. But not like today’s kids.

It is an overlooked fact that children—from elementary school through high school—get an hour less sleep each night than they
did thirty years ago. While modern parents obsess about our babies’ sleep, this concern falls off the priority list after
preschool. Even kindergartners get thirty minutes less a night than they used to.

There are as many causes for this lost hour of sleep as there are types of family. Overscheduling of activities, burdensome
homework, lax bedtimes, televisions and cell phones in the bedroom—they all contribute. So does guilt; home from work after
dark, parents want time with their children and are reluctant to play the hardass who orders them to bed. (One study from
Rhode Island found that 94% of high schoolers set their own bedtimes.) All these reasons converge on one simple twist of convenient
ignorance—until now, we could ignore the lost hour because we never really knew its true cost to children.

Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure
the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21, and because much
of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply
doesn’t have on adults.

The surprise is not merely that sleep
matters
—but how much it matters, demonstrably, not just to academic performance and emotional stability, but to phenomena that we
assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of ADHD. A few scientists theorize
that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure—damage that one can’t
sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness,
depression, and even binge eating—are actually just symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.

Dr. Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University is one of the dozen or so bigwigs in the field, frequently collaborating on papers with
the sleep scholars at Brown University. A couple years ago, Sadeh sent 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders home with randomly-drawn
instructions to either go to bed earlier or stay up later, for three nights. Each child was given an actigraph—a wristwatch-like
device that’s equivalent to a seismograph for sleep activity—which allows the researchers to see how much sleep a child is
really getting when she’s in bed. Using the actigraphy, Sadeh’s team learned that the first group managed to get 30 minutes
more of true sleep per night. The latter got 31 minutes less of true sleep.