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Why Toddlers Don't Do What They're Told
Hugh Pickens writes "New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. 'There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they're just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,' says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Munakata's team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. 'For example, let's say it's cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,' says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. 'You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.'"
When future parents are awaiting their first child, I hope they spend some time to learn how to handle small children. I don't expect them to study and evaluate original research papers, but original research papers sooner or later (usually: later) make it into what we call the "common sense". Therefore, scientific research may indeed help.
Additionally (I didn't go into the researcher's biographies), maybe they got the idea for their project while observing their own kids.
Disclaimer: I am a neuroscientist and I indeed believe that lots of behavioral and, in fact, neurological research is utter rubbish, but this belief doesn't invalidate sound studies.
Reminds me of some really great research I read about in relation to morality.
Before the age of I think ~3.5 children are unable to see the world from any other perspective but their own. If you run a test where you do something that the child would know about but someone not present wouldn't, they would be unable to understand the concept that they know something someone else doesn't.
This applies strongly to empathy where a child is incapable of empathising with something else unless they themselves are feeling it.
So when you ask a very small child "How do you think it makes so and so feel when you..." they have absolutely no clue. They incapable of creating a scenario in their head where they're on the receiving ends of their actions. Essentially they're little sociopaths. But it also means a lot of parents waste a lot of time and breath trying to get their children to understand something their brains just simply can't process. You can only give them very specific rules which they can understand. If you hit Tommy then you'll have to sit in time out. As opposed to trying to explain to your child "it makes tommy feel bad when you hit him."
No. ;)
Concerning behavioral research (my career has nothing particular to do with this, I'm a molecular biologist concerned with early brain development), there are repeatedly studies presented here on /. with crappy conclusions (and good commentaries from the /. crowd).
And I think the current study is indeed insightful, because I always become desperate when confronted with small children that simply don't listen to my arguments. Maybe I can use a different approach when handling kids in the future. (Yes, you guessed it, I'm the child-less sort of /.ter I have already described. ;))
Concerning neurological research, I won't elaborate in detail. Not that my boss would ever read /., but I'd rather stay on the safe and AC side. It works like this:
Some time later:
No, while this narrative is somewhat comprehensive and prepared for easy digestion by the reader, this is not made up. Actually, the boss' comments are somewhat more harsh at times.
And our lab is fairly well known in the research area in question, our boss has some good friends in competing labs, and since many results are not reproducible, I believe that many of the competing labs have similar standards of scientific methodology.
What could I do about this? I have found my niche where I think I can work somewhat untainted by the boss; and in some time I will leave. I know the /. crowd will shout and throw stones and evil words on me, but to bring up proven evidence that our lab's research is not as scientific as it seems at first glance, and, furthermore, to make this a public scandal, needs you to be very, very strong and committed. And since we are all small ones, those who'll make it public will lose their jobs and find no other one, afterwards. That's like it is, face it.
No more comments from my side.
Very true.
I like the idea of "it takes a village to raise a child", even though it really isn't practical these days. The good part of that idea is that half the village has probably already had kids and learned a few things along the way, and can possibly offer you some advice should you choose to listen. That's the other part of the problem - parents start out with a firm idea of how it's going to be, and won't listen to reason even when it's not working (speaking from experience :)
Also, given the smaller families these days and the lesser contact with close family once you 'leave the nest', the first real exposure a lot of couples have to a new baby is when it pops out of one of them. It's one hell of a steep learning curve.
I remember when I was younger and my wife and I were first planning to have kids; we went to a parenting course and the guy giving the course (a pastor from some church or something) was explaining why corporal punishment was bad and tantamount to assaulting one's own kids.
He said that toddlers will always be toddlers; they will always do things that they have been warned against, and perhaps been punished for before, over and over again. The reason, he said, was because toddlers only remember the consequences of their actions after the action. "They don't look ahead at the consequences of the action that they might be about to commit, but rather look back after the action and realise what the likely consequence is going to be."
That was about 9 years ago!
Toddlers unlike slugs are also stubborn, selfish and attention seeking. Refusing to put on the coat can also reflect the learnt skill, that refusing instruction results in more attention and becomes a fun game, the toddler training the adult rather than the adult training the toddler.
To really understand the learning patterns of children you need to combine it with the learning patterns of their parents ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
They learn faster when you punctuate their lessons with the back of your hand.
It only subjectively seems like this is true. Objective data indicates otherwise.
Punishment is a strong negative reinforcer to the person doing the punishing (it makes the aversive stimulus stop). This reinforcement influences the punisher's perceptions and makes the punisher feel like the punishment action is being effective. Objectively, however, the punisher is just conditioning him- or herself to hit the kid more.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
From the article:
What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face.
The wonderful thing is that this knowledge is already being put into widespread practice today. After "fixing deficient children" and having them score equally to "normal" children on exams, Dr. Montessori was given an opportunity to open a school in a ghetto in Rome. The law at the time would not allow her to work with Elementary aged children because she was not a certified teacher, so she was initially forced to work with children between 3 - 7 yrs. It was there that she came to the same conclusion (and others) about developmental psychology.
The school evolved into an environment where the children of the younger plane (3-6) could use autodidactic materials in order to "trigger this reactive function" and "highlight the conflicts that they were going to face". Even the teachers in the school were instructed on how to become part of this environment, while guiding the children to new challenges. This is in stark contrast to the "teacher-centric" environments that we still have today, in which the teacher tries to control the activities through adult reasoning and psychology.
Towards the end of her life, after working with all ages, she considered that developmental psychology could be looked on as 4 distinct age groups, she called "plains of development": (0 - 6), (6 - 12), (12 - 18), (18 - 24). Each has a number of characteristics and tendencies that strengthen or become marginalized depending on their natural development. These tendencies are strongest in the middle (which is why Dr. Munakata's research worked so well), and blend in between.
Dr. Montessori gave up her career as a doctor to create materials, open schools, train teachers, and put her findings into useful practice. I'd recommend anyone with children to look into it further. As with Dr. Munakata's research, there's much that can be done in both home and school. There's a fairly good, quick overview from Milwaukee Public schools where many public schools were converted into Montessori schools. Most Montessori schools you'll find are private.
But be warned, the name "Montessori" is not copyrighted, and many use it to make money. I'd suggest starting with schools associated with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale [this is the association Dr. Montessori created herself]), NAMTA (North American Montessori Teacher's Association), or AMS (American Montessori Society), as they seem to be the more reputable organizations.
The Wikipedia article mainly focuses on (3-6) education, and other aspects are sparse. One book that attempts to explain the approach through modern psychological findings is: "Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius"
But probably the best thing to do, after a bit of web research, would probably be to visit a school run by AMI or AMS trained teachers and see for yourself.