What's with the feline in the millinery? As with yesterday's post, try not to shoot the blogger if you've already heard this one. It's an old study (early 80's – never mind that I can remember the time…just barely I'll have you know), but the media has gone wild with it ever since it first came out. I just could NOT think of a week of posting on methods in infant research without mentioning it. What about that title? Gotta love it!
This study used sucking to shed light on prenatal hearing.In earlier work, the researches had determined that very young infants would adjust their sucking rate to be rewarded with hearing their mothers voice (I bet this doesn't happen in the teenage years…but I digress…). Mothers read The Cat in the Hat Story or another one of two other stories to their unborn fetuses, 2x per day for the last 6 weeks or so of pregnancy. Soon after birth, the researchers measured infant sucking when they heard the story they heard prenatally vs. one of the other stories. What happened? The newborns worked hard (sucked faster or slower) to hear the story they heard in the womb – moreso than to hear the other story. By playing with this method a bit more, later work showed that it was the rhythm of the story and not the words that the babies were responding to. BTW, the babies also worked harder to hear mom do the reading over some other female voice reading the same story. This study was a real landmark in establishing at least a couple of things: 1). the state of development of hearing in the womb and 2). how the prenatal environment helps tweek perception.
If you're now thinking "Wow, amazing how far these researchers will go", consider this: in another (now old) study a pregnant woman was asked to swallow a tiny microphone so that researchers could gain a better sense of just exactly what the baby can hear in there. Can you imagine it? "It's in the name of science ma'am. Please just please swallow the technology."
So I'm on a roll now. Here's another interesting way that researchers have used sucking. The main question was whether information taken in through one sense (e.g. sight) is stored in such a way that it can be accessed through other senses (e.g. touch). The technical term is cross-modal or inter-modal perception. In one study, 1-month old babies were allowed to suck on either a smooth or a bumpy pacifier – but they were NOT allowed to see it. The babies were then shown two simultaneous pics, one of the smooth pacifier and one of the bumpy one. And guess what? They looked longer at the one they had sucked on but NEVER SAW, as though they recognized it. So what they had taken in through sucking or touch was stored in a more general way, a way that was accessible through another sense, sight.
Finally, I wanted to briefly mention the use of "geodesic nets" – think "hairnets with sensors" that provide real-time information on the patterns of brain activity as the brain processes something e.g. a picture, a sound, an event etc. The baby wears a get-up like the one shown here. It's not painful at all and many babies are surprisingly co-operative about the whole experience. For more on geodesic nets and language studies, put in user friendly terms, try here.
Phew. It's been a whirlwind tour through infant research this week. Now seems like a good time to ask how this stuff is all working out for you. Too technical? Nerdy? Boring? Less on studies, more on parenting connections? It would be great to hear some feedback. I hope that even if the details were too much or we covered too much ground that you might have gained a new respect for that bundle of sweet-smelling, soft, cuddly goodness. That's one amazing brain growing in there!
In response to yesterday's blog on clever techniques researchers use to get at the goings on of the infant brain, someone asked if the "habituation technique" I described with looking is also used with listening. If you missed that post, click here for a quick primer. The answer of course is YES!
I was going to post an example of a listening habituation study but if you read yesterday's post, you can probably figure out how that would go. Here, instead, is an example of a listening study using a different listening technique called "conditioned head turning". I wanted to include it because it is one of the more famous studies with mind-blowing findings (if you didn't already hear about it in the media), that have come from infant listening work. I hope you agree that it's incredibly cool!
Check it out:
The Scoop: All babies are born with the capacity to acquire language and which one (or ones) they end up using depends on which one (or ones) they are exposed to. So it's not so surprising that young babies can hear and tell the difference between speech sounds that us old folks can no longer hear e.g. Japanese infants can hear and discriminate between the "r" and "l" sounds in the English language more easily than Japanese adults. Interestingly, the paring down of your sound repertoire to the sounds in your language (s) of exposure happens around 10 months of age, just around the onset of language production. It's as though the brain is honing in on what it will need to find our way in the social world.
In fact, the evidence suggests that this "honing in" may apply to social stimuli in general i.e. not just language. Another study showed that young infants can discriminate between different faces of the same race, a phenomenon that holds for different races; Chinese, Caucasian, African etc. But by 9 months of age, they seem to lose that fine tuned ability and are best at discriminating faces of their own race! Read: social input goes a long way to influencing our social perception. Here's a link to one of the relevant papers in case you're really curious.
Notice that the speech and face processing narrowing is happening around the same time? Why? Probably because it's more efficient to be finely tuned to the social environment you have to deal with, the one you need to find your way in, to have your needs met in etc.
I don't know about you, but after reading this stuff I usually have two reactions: 1). Wow! Fascinating! and 2). Holy crap it's so much responsibility raising a child. What is he being exposed to? Do we educate bilingually? Is he getting multiracial/multicultural input? Is that necessarily good or bad or something I should worry about at all? Ughhh! Then I usually realize that time is marching on and stuff is happening anyway, like it or not. There's only so much we can control…
Ever look at your baby and wander what the heck is going on in that head? Ever read those articles in magazines or newspapers or hear stuff on the radio about scientific studies on human infants (non-medical) and wonder "How the heck do they know that?". Can't exactly ask the baby. Heck, they hardly stay awake long enough to find out anything anyway, even if they could talk.
This week I thought I'd take you behind the scenes of infant research to give you a peek into how scientists get inside that head. In a nutshell? They take advantage of the things that babies already like to do such as suck, listen to and look at new things. Looking has probably been explored the most. And dude, you'd be amazed and what we've learned from theses studies.
Looking studies typically use something called "visual habituation". The set-up looks something like this:
Mum or dad wears a pair of headphones, so they can't nudge, budge or influence baby's behaviour in any way (like try to make them look especially brilliant- kidding, kidding…). Baby is given something to look at on the screen (image, video etc.). At first the baby is interested and looks intently ("Hey, what's that?!"). But eventually, baby gets bored and starts to look away – "That again, whatever…" We say that the baby has "habituated". Then the display changes and baby sees something new. If they look with renewed interest – "What the…?!" (we call this "dishabituation")- then we know that the baby detected the difference between the old and new thing. That's it.
Ho hum, you say. But get this, sometimes the change between the old and new thing can be VERY subtle (we're talking teeny-weeny). By tweaking these subtle changes – while keeping everything else in the displays the same – we've learned a whole host of things about what 's going on in that noggin'. And we're talking tiny babies (newborns, 1-month olds) right up to toddlers.
Check out this example: In one study, 6 month olds who were habituated to displays of say 8 black dots on a white screen, looked longer when the display changed to 16 black dots. As the two displays contained the same brightness, density of dots, total area of the dots (i.e. the amount of black), the researchers concluded that the infants must have detected the difference in number. We're talking 6 month olds here people, they're not counting (at least not the way we do)! Cool huh?
Infant looking has been used to study everything plus the kitchen sink: we're talking awareness of spatial position, proportion, solidity of objects, understanding gravity, adults' intentions (did they mean to grab that object or just touch it by accident?), discriminating faces of the same race, sensitivity to facial expressions and even to rudimentary addition and subtraction (with some conclusions more hotly debated than others). And get this: it takes longer for babies of depressed moms to habituate to a happy face compared to babies of non-depressed moms, presumably because it's more novel to them!
Kinda makes you see that bundle of sweetness in a whole new light doesn't it? So what do you think? Are you surprised by some of these findings? Did you have other ideas about how researchers pried their way into the infant brain? Wanna know about anything in particular about the baby brain? Send your q's and stay tuned to hear more about ingenious ways of getting at the inner sanctum later this week.
I don't really know you guys that well, so I debated putting this up. But I figure you can tell me if you're offended just like the rest of the internets can yell at each other. And it might be fun, cathartic even!
I read this yesterday and snorted into my coffee several times. Do you guys know Cracked.com? It can be funny. If you're not into the f-word being bandied about (or any other "offensive" expletives) then it probably isn't for you. After reading way too many studies this week about one thing or another that made almost no sense to me when I put it all together, this "article" offered such a refreshing perspective. I particularly liked the fact that it hit on several issues we've discussed here (either in a post or in the comments). In fact, the number 1 "Thing that Good Parents Do (That Screw Kids up for Life)" was the topic of last week's featured blog post — and for the record, my rant seems like fairy dust compared to theirs.
Thanks to one of our readers, Bonnie, for suggesting the topic of today's post, this New York Times article. It would be silly for me to review the whole article here, given it's the NYTs and their writers are kinda good. So… go read it first and then we can talk a bit about some of the issues it raises.
Back? Excellent! So, the article presents a program that is attempting to teach children the kinds of self-control skills that we've been talking about this week — not just delaying gratification, but also being able to shift attention when you have to, being able to SUSTAIN attention when you have to, being able to wait patiently for your turn, being able to persevere without being distracted until you've solved a problem, and so on. Unlike other school programs, this particular one (called Tools of the Mind) doesn't try to teach kids with explicit directions to control themselves, nor does it advocate using behavioural principles like negative feedback for "bad" behaviour and positive reinforcement for "good" behaviour. Instead, the program is designed to foster self-control by creating a learning environment that is steeped with opportunities to USE and practice these skills. A large part of the day is spent encouraging (and even "teaching") children how to engage in "productive" pretend play. Yes, they're TEACHING children how to pretend to be princes, princesses, mommy with baby, batman and robin, and so on, all with the idea that this helps children practice and get better at sustained attention and self-control. Here's the most interesting quote out of the the whole article for me:
"Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky’s
followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can
control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations.
In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still
for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a
minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were
guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than
four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were
asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery
store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time,
though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the
children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong
say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when
their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their
level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills."
Interesting, huh? So, at least for the 3-6 year olds, making playdates (how I loathe that word) during which we encourage kids to dress up and play house, doctor, superheros and restaurant (and hope they leave us alone to eat our cake and gossip) is just what they need to acquire those self-control skills. MAAAAAAAAAAAAYBE.
The truth is, the jury is out on the science part of this claim. The crux of the article, if you read it all the way through, is
that they're not quite sure IF this whole pretend-play focus and Tools of the Mind in particular works. Equally important, even if it does turn out that it works, they have
no idea WHY. The current studies aren't even looking at the various elements in the program (and there are many) that may be facilitating greater cognitive and emotional control. And there are no other well-designed, replicated studies that have established effective strategies to teach children cognitive control.
My guess is that there are some things we can do to help (provide lots of practice with waiting for a reward, teach self-distraction strategies, play games that require turn-taking, enforce rules about listening to others at the dinner table, etc.), but that the vast majority of children are in environments that already naturally foster these skills at develomentally appropriate ages. Executive function or cognitive control or whatever you want to call it has been shown to increase steadily over the ages of 2 and 5-ish (and it keeps going, just at a slower rate). For a fabulous paper (Carlson, 2005) that reviews the neuropsychological and cognitive studies, click on the first link in this Google Scholar search (I keep trying different ways to post original scientific papers through links on this blog).
And in answer to the orginal question on Monday about what to do with a 1-year old that can't delay gratification: I'd say apart from Tracy's recommendations to just keep the enticing stuff out of sight, there's not much you can do… and that's TOTALLY fine. One-year olds don't have the mental capacity yet to control their impulses, thoughts, or emotions (nor will they until about the age of 2 and then, just barely).
So, at this point, your guess is as good as any scientist's: What do you do with your children that may be helping them to develop better self-control? Do you think there are some things we do that may delay these acquisitions?
I don’t know about you, but I have a bit of a sweet tooth.
When confronted with oh say, a slice of good quality chocolate cake, I’d have a hard time waiting to
eat it, such as after eating all of my green vegetables. So all this talk about
waiting to eat marshmallows got me thinking about how I would have fared with
the marshmallow task as a child. Probably terribly (but can I just point out
here that I’ve done okay…I’m just saying…). And naturally, I’m wondering what
my son would do (read: what are his future prospects in life and other enormous
parenting questions that I should know better than to worry about). So how do
young children cope when they have to delay gratification?What are those future Bill Gates doing
to help themselves keep their little fingies off of those marshmallows? And
yes, can parents influence this emerging development of self-control?
If you watched the video at the end of Isabel’s post on
Monday (if not then try here), you were probably amused, as I was, at some of
the strategies children attempted to keep from eating that sweet, seductive
cloud of confection. They covered the gamut from the girl who just stuffed it
into her mouth, unapologetically (even remembering to clear her plate from the
table after wards – nice!), to the boy who pushed it up against his nose, to
those who just studied it carefully. But it was the boy who turned his head to
the side and just did not look at it, that really got me. Hmm… that seemed like
it might help.
Turns out that in Mischel’s early work he gave children
choices about what they could and could not look at while they were waiting
such as the real reward vs. a colour photograph of it. He also asked them what
they preferred to look at. Get this, preschool children actually looked at, and
preferred, the actual reward over the picture! In other words, they seemed
unable to anticipate that this would only drive them into a frenzy of
frustration and effectively sabotage their efforts to wait for the bigger
reward. Oh, the agony.
Children start to see the light around their 6th
birthday. So e.g. they start to prefer to cover the reward rather than to leave
it out in the open. By grade 3, their prefer to think more about the waiting
than on the eating of the marshmallows. And by grade 6, they’ve moved on to
prefer thinking of marshmallow properties e.g. that they are puffy like clouds.
So don’t worry, it’s not a write off if your preschooler is having trouble
waiting now.
The good news is: you can probably help your little one
along the way. For one thing,out
of sight is out of mind baby!So
whatever you do, take the tempting item away. Put it on a high shelf, in the
other room or cover it up. When you have dessert planned for after dinner,
leave the pie in the fridge until you are ready to serve it. You’ll have a
better shot at getting your little one to focus on the task at hand – dinner. You
can also help by distracting your child. Get them to focus on things other than EATING that ice cream.
Here’s one last thing to chew on…As you become more aware
that it is actually quite hard for young children to control their natural
impulses, wait, delay gratification etc., you may become tempted to be more
lenient. “It’s so hard for them, this insistence on getting that Halloween
candy now is part of normal development etc., it will come in time", so you reason. But perhaps when
parents insist that children wait for that treat for after dinner, they are
effectively training them to get used to waiting and to find ways to make it
work. Maybe those kids who managed to “step away from” the marshmallow in
Mischel’s studies came from homes where this was more the case (too bad they
didn’t interview or give questionnaires to the parents). Since, according to the
research, they would go on to fare better on a host of measures including
academic achievement, you could be doing your child a huge favour by saving the
chocolate cake for after they’ve eaten their brussels sprouts (well okay, maybe
not brussels sprouts). Just a thought.
Ahem… Sorry about last week's blog neglect. Many forces conspired against us and, well, you know how it is. But upward and onward!
This week's topic was inspired by a recent questions sent in by a reader:
I was wondering if you could also address the development of
inhibition/delay gratification in children? So there's all this
literature linking children's ability to forgo immediate gratification
and later success in life. But when is it a good time to start
fostering the ability to delay gratification? I'm asking because I
don't quite know whether to say no to my 12-month-old when he wants to
mooch off of us (on healthy foods, mind you – like cheese, crackers,
fruit, our dinner). E.g., he'll have eaten a good sized dinner while
we cook, and once we sit down to eat (we give him nibbles – peas,
carrots, etc), he wants to eat off of our plates. Another example:
He'll just have drank 7 oz of milk and I'm getting myself a snack of
hummus and pita, and he basically points at my food and makes noises
at me ("Ba? Ma?" looks at food, looks at me, points) until I give him
something. Is my behaviour just going to foster an inability to delay
gratification, or is he too young for that to even matter?
GREAT question! This is such a HUGE field of research. The question hits on the science of inhibition, executive functioning (basically, cognitive control), emotion regulation, attention difficulties, and so on. So, this is my not-so-subtle way of saying there is NO WAY I can cover that whole area in one or even 5 posts. But let's explore the topic from various angles this week.
The first thing that lept to mind when I read this question was that the reader gives the example of fostering control in her child in a context that deals with food. I'm going to bet that it's because she's read, heard or watched something about the famous psychologist Walter Mischel's research. One of his most famous experiments began in the 1960s and it is well-known as the "marshmallow experiement." The experiment goes like this: Preschool children, one by one, are asked to come into a room that is bare and boring (in which there is also a hidden video camera). The experimenter places one plump marshmallow in front of the child and says, "You can eat this now or, if you wait 15 min and DON'T eat it, you'll get TWO marshmallows to eat later." Then the experimenter leaves the room for (up to) FIFTEEN MINUTES (can you IMAGINE the craziness that this must put most preschoolers in?). The researchers documented how long it took for kids to take a bite out of the marshmallow. Most took a bite around the 3 min mark, way before the 15 min were up; a small proportion of kids actually made it all the way through and somehow managed to resist the temptation. Then a decade and more later, the researchers went back to get data on the grown-up versions of these children (I think they're up to 18 or 20 years later by now). The extent to which preschoolers were able to delay their gratification (so, the number of seconds before they ate the marshmallow or the extent to which they could actually wait all the way through for a "bigger" prize) predicted INSANE stuff, not the least of which was SAT scores and self-control abilities in adolescence and adulthood. Here's one link to the empirical paper of the adolescent follow-up (as usual, with some of these original articles, I can't directly link to the whole paper, just the abstract). And here's a nice summary of the study from The New Yorker.
The experiment has been replicated a bazillion times on various news shows and youtube clips. I'd like to actually point you to my favourite discussion of the topic — I think it could foster some interesting discussions. It is TOTALLY worth your 15 min to listen to this (there are very few things I'd say this about to very, very busy parents). I'm a HUGE RadioLab fan and here's the link to the show they did in which they interviewed Walter Mischel, described the "marshmallow experiment," and summarized some of the coolest findings and their implications.
We'll talk next about what we can do as parents to foster our children's abilities to delay gratification, which was more to the point of the original question from our reader. We'll also try to consider what might be developmentally appropriate expectations to have about self-control (which I also think is at the heart of the reader's question: a one-year old is a very different story from a 5 year old in this context). Really, we're talking about will power and general self-control here, in its various complex forms. And as much as I KNOW it's a good thing for us to help our children with controlling their impulses, I also know that I, for one, would have gobbled the marshmallow up in the first few seconds it was placed in front of me.
What about you? Would you have waited for the second gooey marshmallow on the horizon or would you just have said f%$# it! and gone for it? What do you think your child would do? Check out some of these INSANELY cute kids and watch how difficult it really can be (this isn't from the original sample, but it captures the feel of the experiment nicely).
Many of you must have heard by now about the big kerfuffle regarding Disney's offer to compensate parents' for the price of their Baby Einstein DVDs. Turns out that the claims made on these products were WRONG. The claims I'm primarily talking about, of course, is that these videos are "educational" or "help cognitive development" or "Help your baby learn language." Oops, that last one is really, really wrong. Not just wrong, but the precise opposite seems to be the case. In a study that came out originally a couple of years ago, researchers from the University of Washington found that for every extra hour of DVDs or videos that babies watched (specifically, 8 – 16 month olds), they learned 6-8 words LESS than kids who were not watching. I find the age-span particularly interesting, since that period is JUST BEFORE the stage that the vast majority of children get a HUGE spurt in language development at around 18-21 months. A recent study out of Thailand also found that early (before 12 months of age) intense t.v. exposure (defined as 2 hours or more per day) was associated with a six-fold increase in the probability of language delays.
I have two main responses to the whole Baby Einstein thing. The first goes something like: The bastards SHOULD pay. There has NEVER been any research to back up the "educational" claims made by Baby Einstein inc. and all the videos associated with the brand. And there have been plenty of studies that have, for years, debunked myths like playing (Baby) Mozart to your child (in or out of the womb) has anything to do with the development of intellect,musicality, etc. (links to come, I can't find them now). I can kind of deal with every leggo box having a blurb on its packaging about "promoting fine-motor skills" and every wooden castle "enhancing children's imagination skills." These are sort of no-brainers (pun intended) without as much baggage associated with the claims. But what gets me all fired up is the massive industry that's been built up to prey on parents' fears, particularly the fear of not providing enough for their children's intellectual growth. The sales of videos geared at children under the age of two are estimated at over a BILLION dollars. Check out the Kaiser Family Foundation report for many more details. I remember the guy who painted our house 2 years ago urging me to start playing these Baby Einstein videos for my boys otherwise they'll fall behind and not be ready for school — he was seriously and sweetly concerned for my boys and their clueless mother. Then I went and looked at one of the videos and did a bit of my own research and proceeded to be HORRIFIED by the subtle and not-so-subtle marketing ploys made by these DVD companies (it's not JUST Baby Einstein, they're just the most popular). But my painter was not alone in his concerns: In that same Kaiser report (which is way out of date by now, given it was published in 2003), 27 percent of young children were found to own Baby Einstein videos and 49 percent of parents thought that educational videos were “very important” in the intellectual development of children.
Let me put it as clearly as possible: Scientific evidence strongly suggests that children learn language better from native speakers in person or even from audiotapes (or whatever the cool kids are calling audiofiles and such lately) compared to learning from screens (TV or computers). For a review of these findings (and a very clear description of the state of the science in this area), just google this fellow's name: Dimitri A Christakis and the year 2009. There's a PDF document of his review article that I can't link to, but it's available for free for anyone who wants it.
So, yeah, in sum, I think Disney and that self-promoting, money-grubbing founder of Baby Einstein should pay back all the parents they lied to. It may be a tad harsh, but I think setting a precedent that stipulates that toy companies and media developers need to back up their claims with REAL SCIENCE (or just SHUT UP about any scientific claims) is a good precedent to set.
<end rant>
But I said I had two main responses and here's my (blessedly more brief) second point: Baby Einstein videos are well-designed attention-catchers (albeit VERY creepy, IMO) that can save a parent's sanity. I don't think they're evil, I just don't think they teach language or anything else particularly valuable for that matter. But they DO entertain babies. And there are so FEW things that entertain babies for more than .003 seconds. If your baby loves these DVDs (and not all babies do, btw), I'd say use them in moderation without fear of screwing up your child. If I had had one of these DVDs when I had my infant twins, it may have allowed me to, oh… I don't know, maybe SHOWER more than once per week. So many of us know that feeling of having a needy infant and desperately needing to pee, cook dinner, brush our teeth, put a load of laundry in, answer the phone, engage our older son/daughter in some playful game without the baby interfering, or just stare out the window for 5 min of uninterrupted peace. Seriously… if a DVD can give us that little bit of time we need to take care of ourselves or the gazillion things we need to do around the house, I am ALL for it. OF COURSE it's important to limit the viewing time (most babies won't sit still for more than 15 min or so anyway) and OF COURSE we should continue to do lots of cooing and gooing and talking and cuddling and singing with our babies throughout the day. It's not a good idea to use these DVDs in place of quality time spent face-to-face with parents and other loved ones… but once in a while, for mom's sake, I wouldn't fret too much over it. Since Disney's taking it on the chin anyway over all this "false advertising," maybe I should suggest to them a change in the name from Baby Einstein to Baby Hypnotics or Mama Valium (ok, shutting up now, we already know how bad at funny I am).
So… what do you think about Baby Einstein? Have you played them for your baby? Were you suprised by the "quasi-recall"?
I took my
kids today to the doctor to get them some shots that they were missing. I told
them that they were getting new "superpowers" that would make them
even stronger and more powerful; that their bodies would now be able to fight
even bigger germs and other teeny tiny things that could make them sick. It was
silly, but they got SO into it and it worked to not only help them sit still
for a needle, but also to feel great about it afterwards. And that got me
thinking… What kinds of things do we do, and can we do, to try to lessen our
children's fears? I'm talking about those everyday fears, the reasonable,
relatively common, everyday fears. I thought I'd throw out some ideas and then
ask you, dear readers, to chime in with your own suggestions. Tell us: What are
your chidlren's everyday fears and what do you say to them, what do you do,
watch, read, play, that makes them feel better?
This isn't going to be a heavily science-based post. I just
wanted to let you know about a few books that my own kids love and share with
you some others that my mom friends have recommended. If you have some others
you'd like to add to the list, please do…
There are some GREAT books out there that deal with
children's common fears. I think books are so helpful because they provide a
safe context in which a child can talk about her fears and face them in the
light of day, with your emotional support (if you read the book to her or
listen to her read it aloud). Books are once-removed from the actual thing that
is so frightening, so children don't feel overwhelmed by addressing them
(compared to trying to expose them gradually to something they fear, for
example, which may be too difficult for some kids). Books also give kids the
unbeatable feeling that their fears are shared by other people: Look! A book
has been written about it! Other children also have the same feelings! For many
children, part of the horror of their fears is that they feel so alone with
them; they feel like they're the only ones that are so scared and the only ones
that can't be brave enough or strong enough to deal with these things. I'm not
an expert in children's books, so I am in no way suggesting that this list is a
definitive, or even great, list. But see what you think…
For fear of the dark (and/or the monsters that lurk
therein):
• What's that Noise?: "This cheery tale proves
that there's safety in numbers, at least in the dead of night. With the lights
out, a chilly violet glow falls over the bedroom of Alex and his younger
brother, Ben and suddenly it feels as if the boys are hosting a veritable
convention of spooky noises ("aroo aroo aroo") and spectral shadows
(a branch outside casts a shape that's a dead ringer for a boy-eating dragon).
Ben wants Alex to come over to his bed and sing a silly song to buck up their
spirits…" (From Publisher's Weekly)
·My kids love Can't You Sleep Little Bear? I think I've read it to them 200 times
now. It's a classic: Big Bear helps Little Bear feel less afraid by putting
bigger and bigger lights into his room to get rid of the dark. But what really
helps the most, in the end, is Big Bear snuggling Little Bear outside, by the
moon, the biggest light at night.
·Scaredy Squirrel at Night: I have a thing
for this little neurotic squirrel. So do my kids. “Scaredy is too terrified to sleep, and on lively pages
formatted as charts and diagrams, he presents potential night visitors
(unicorns, polka-dotted monsters) and how he will guard against them (molasses,
banana peels). Some vocabulary words will be a stretch for a young audience
(hallucinations, drowsiness), but kids will be amused by the lively, busy
compositions packed with silly details, and those who share Scaredy’s insomniac
tendencies will enjoy the reassuring outcome.” (From Booklist)
For children dealing with separation anxiety, particularly from mom:
Mama Always Comes Home: My kids LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book. And they request it like clockwork when I've been working too much or too late or when one or the other is just feeling like they want more mama time. It can help all mothers, but I think it's particularly relevant to moms who work outside the home and therefore have to leave their kids daily. The "Mama always comes home" refrain can often be heard when I'm heading out the door in the morning… and it does WONDERS for my boys. "Mama Bird… feeds her babies, then tucks them
beneath a quilt in their nest before digging up more worms; Mama Cat
leaves her kittens in the barn to have a sip of cream in the house;
Mama Dog runs out to play with her boy. Each example ends with the
refrain: "Mama always comes home." At the end of the story, the human
mother explains to her little one, "I want to stay,/but while I'm gone
have fun and play,/and soon, before you know,/time will fly right by,
and then/I'll be coming home again." (From School Library Journal).
For children
with general worries/anxieties:
·Wemberly Worried: I really like Kevin
Henkes’ books. My boys are just getting into them, but they’ve loved this book
for a while, constantly asking “But WHY is she so worried?” and “What’s going
to happen to her?” Wemberly worries about really teeny things (shrinking in the
tub) and big, bad stuff (not fitting in at school). The book acknowledges that
all sorts of anxieties can come up in the course of a day and ends reassuringly
hopeful.
Finally, I’m
going to go out on a limb with this last one (and probably freak my co-blogger
out as I go all “psychoanalytic”). I think one of the biggest fears children
have is the fear of their own emotions, particularly the negative ones, and
more specifically their own feelings of anger. It can be a very intense
experience to feel the rush of intense anger that can take over children’s
little bodies. Often these feelings of anger are accompanied by scary or
violent images and “appraisals” or thoughts about wanting to destroy, hit,
bite, or just generally go nuts. (These ideas I'm putting out here now are heavily laden with principles
from psychoanalytic theory and, for once, I’m making no apologies.) Little kids’
anger can be particularly frightening when it’s directed at people they love –
it can really freak them out to feel the intensity of their desire to want to
hurt their little brother or annihilate their mother or to just GO WILD against
anything and anyone. We’re usually ok with trying to talk about concrete stuff
– fears of the first day of school, fears of the dark, fears of the funky
shadows, strange noises and bumps in the night. But the scary stuff that
bubbles up from children’s own little minds (and adults’, let’s be real), the
images and thoughts that are dark and shaming and overwhelming, those we’re not
so good with getting at with our kids. And that’s where another book, probably
my favourite, comes in handy. It’s not exactly a hidden gem; it’s probably the
most popular book in children’s literature (it’s certainly in the running). Of
course, I’m talking about Where the Wild Things Are. Max is sent to his room
for being wild and disobedient and his is PISSED. He takes off and battles with
his “demons,” lets his freak flag fly and then comes home to realize that it’s
all acceptable. Because inside all of us, is a WILD THING.
Halloween is a great week to talk about fears! Just leaving home this
morning revealed a spookier neighbourhood than I remember seeing the
last time I looked up to take it all in on the way to work.
So why do we fear? Makes sense that one explanation appeals to evolution. The idea is that we have evolved a tendency to notice quickly potentially scary things. The sooner you can pick up on that snake in the grass, ferocious lion coming at you, or huge brown bear within swiping reach, the faster you can act to avoid it, flee, get help, make some noise etc. In other words, it's essential for your survival.
Some very cool recent research has shown that children as young as 3 years of age will notice potentially scary things more quickly than non-scary things (think snakes vs. flowers). Since we find the same pattern in adults, this suggests that the rapid response to potentially scary stuff kicks in rather early. Good thing, if you want to make it past early childhood! Rather than summarize how the researchers came to these conclusions, take a look at the video and see for yourself. Just keep in mind that since they didn't actually measure fear (which you could do by say, looking at heart rate or other biological markers), the study is really getting at PAYING ATTENTION to fearful stimuli rather than being afraid of it. Still, it makes the point quite nicely that we may be equipped to pick up on that thing that just might be about to pounce fairly early on. Check it out.
My point here is to say that fear serves an important purpose. You want your child to notice potentially harmful things and to act accordingly. Thing is, not everything is a predator about to leap. So children need time to sort out what they should be afraid of and what they don't need to fear. Think of the differences between a cartoon snake on television vs. in a 3-D movie vs. a real snake in the zoo or in your back yard.
As with everything in development, there are also individual differences in fear responses. Children vary in how sensitive they are to scary things, in how strongly they react and in what they find scary. They may also cycle through times of being scared and times when they are not. My advise? First of all, acknowledge the fear. I hate snakes, but have no problem with heights. Others may not be the same. But telling me to just forget about it, or how so and so doesn't fear snakes will not help. So even if it's hard to understand what's scary about a Disney character, the fact is, your child finds it scary. It can be very reassuring to hear someone say, "it's okay to be afraid" or "I can understand how you feel, sometimes I feel scared too". Second, don't force the issue. There's no timetable for getting over your fears. I like to use a bit of cognitive behavioural therapy or talking my son through his fears. In other words, I try to get him to think differently about what he is afraid of in the hopes that it will affect his behaviour e.g. "That's something in your book, it's not here in your room. It can't come out of the page to hurt you.". We revisit the fearful thing every once in a while but I don't push it. Eventually, he moves on.
My little guy helped me pick out a witch's hat for Halloween, then made sure to stress that I should be a good and friendly witch. It's a small thing to ask for while we work through our fears. And hey, I kinda like to think of myself of as a good and friendly witch anyway.
Please share your stories on dealing with fears. I"m particularly interested in the first time you noticed a fear response in your child or children, the context, how old they were etc. On my next post, I'll talk a bit more about what might contribute to those early fear responses.
