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A Key Skill for Kids’ Success
By Shlomo Maital
What is the one key skill that is most important for children’s success?
Writing on inc.com, Jessica Stillman reports that “a team of dedicated psychologists who have been following and intimately recording the lives of more than 1,000 kids from the New Zealand town of Dunedin since 1972,” That’s 40 years of research!
What they found, summarized, is this: “What is the most useful [skill] for parents hoping to give their kids the best shot at a good life? Perhaps the incredible importance of building kids’ emotional intelligence for later-in-life success. The best predictor of kids’ success? Emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence — EQ — is “the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions.” It was popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman, in a 1995 book.
Years ago, I ran a management workshop for Intel engineers and managers, in Ireland. A very brief one-hour session, out of a four-day workshop, was devoted to EQ. At the end of the workshop, we asked participants, what did you find most valuable? EQ won, hands-down, despite the very brief session. It was a skill that unlike thermodynamics or calculus, was not taught or even noted.
Success requires that we interact, engage and collaborate with others. Doing this well requires the ability to read others’ emotions and deal with our own. In my own experience, I recall occasions when I spoke harshly to colleagues – and sealed my fate as a team player.
We teach kids lots of things – but self-awareness, a key first step to high EQ, may not be one of them. For me – I gained some self-awareness rather late in life, doing basic training in the military, running a marathon (at age 42) and climbing Kilimanjaro.
I find that young parents have become really good at instilling EQ. They encourage their kids to express their feelings in words. Recognizing emotions, giving them a name, is a key initial step toward managing them. I think this is partly why speech is so important for child development. Prior to gaining the ability to speak, when young children can’t express their needs and communicate them in words, frustration results ..and some supersonic tantrums.
We all know many adults who have low EQ. They can be very unpleasant. As grandparents, we can play a role, in helping our grandchildren to hone their EQ. Such as, when we play games with them – and they lose. I think one key reason EQ is so vital, is that the way we deal with failure and frustration is crucial in later success. Strong EQ can help us navigate the perils of failure and despair.
J
Parenting: Gardening? Or Carpentry
By Shlomo Maital
I have not yet read Alison Gopnik’s 2016 book, The Gardener and the Carpenter – but I am writing about it, after hearing her on a Hidden Brain podcast. I will certainly read this book soon and highly recommend it. Gopnik is a professor of psychology at U. of California, Berkeley.
Here is her main argument about our children: We worry too much and do too much for them: children flourish when they are given freedom. When it comes to looking after kids, be a gardener not a carpenter . ‘Parents should be like gardeners. The aim is to provide a protected space in which children can become themselves’
In Gopnik’s metaphor – a carpenter builds a table or a bookshelf, starting with a plan, and then executes the plan. Some parents think parenting is like carpentry – plan the children’s nature, and development, and see it unfold according to plan.
Gopnik sees parenting as gardening. Create a secure, rich environment for children. Turn them loose. Watch them grow and develop. Be prepared for many surprises. Give them freedom to explore who they are and what they want. And then, like a garden, watch the results, that will often amaze, maybe sometimes sadden, you.
Here is a small experiment that conveys this message:
In 2011, a team of psychologists did an experiment with some preschool children. The scientists gave the children a toy made of many plastic tubes, each with a different function: one squeaked, one lit up, one made music and the final tube had a hidden mirror. With half the children, an experimenter came into the room and bumped – apparently accidentally – into the tube that squeaked. “Oops!” she said. With the other children, the scientist acted more deliberately, like a teacher. “Oh look at my neat toy! Let me show you how it works,” she said while purposely pressing the beeper. The children were then left alone to play with the toy.
In the “accidental” group, the children freely played with the toy in various random ways. Through experimenting, they discovered all the different functions of the tubes: the light, the music, the mirror. The other group, the children who had been deliberately taught how to use the toy by the teacher, played with it in a much more limited and repetitive way. They squeaked the beeper over and over again, never discovering all the other things the toy could do.
Gopnik observed, in the podcast, that “parenting” is a relatively new word, a 20th C. word. And it implies a measure of control, of shaping, of design, of ‘carpentry’. Of course, parents educate children, teach them values, and keep them safe. But all this, she says, should be done in an atmosphere of discovery and exploration.
A book review sums it up well: “To seek to parent a child, Gopnik argues, is to behave like a carpenter, chiselling away at something to achieve a particular end-goal – in this case, a certain kind of person. A carpenter believes that he or she has the power to transform a block of wood into a chair. When we garden, on the other hand, we do not believe we are the ones who single-handedly create the cabbages or the roses. Rather, we toil to create the conditions in which plants have the best chance of flourishing. The gardener knows that plans will often be thwarted, Gopnik writes. “The poppy comes up neon orange instead of pale pink … black spot and rust and aphids can never be defeated.” If parents are like gardeners, the aim is to create a protected space in which our children can become themselves, rather than trying to mould them.”
TIMnovate 