Raising Kids who Thrive Lecture 1

This is the first post of summarizing and commenting on the Scientific Secrets For Raising Kids Who Thrive. 

I've decided to summarize the main points and write a few paragraphs with my thoughts. Here's lecture one.

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Lecture 1--Self Control: From Tummy Time to Tae Kwon Do

Main Points:

• Science provides a set of tools to determine what works and doesn't work. This course focuses on parenting ideas that have been supported by careful research as opposed to anecdotal evidence.

• Give your child supervised tummy time. Since people have started having their children sleep on their backs to avoid SIDS, crawling has been delayed. Fifteen minutes of tummy time a day can counteract this.

• Motor development is a long series of problems children learn to solve, which generally occur in the same order.

• Crawling infants begin to code locations based on a world-centric. Precrawling infants code locations relative to themselves.

• Set up a cruising course with hand holds that allow the child to explore a room.

• For older kids, involvement in a disciplined form of physical activity like Tae Kwon Do promotes self mastery. The study cited randomly assigned students to Tae Kwon Do vs non-TKD activity. Students in the TKD class showed more self control and improvement in other cognitive areas. The TKD instructors had the kids ask themselves, where am I? What am I doing? What should I be doing? This supported self monitoring, self regulation, and self discipline. It worked well with 3,4 and 5 graders. More benefits for boys than girls. It's the mental control portion that helps.

• The marshmallow test was discussed. See the video below. Five year olds were the one's who struggled with waiting for the second marshmallows. Three year olds would just eat it; seven year olds would wait.

The lecturer discussed some principles of science:
Was there a careful study?
Were kids randomly assigned?
Are there biases in how the groups were assigned?
Results of studies. How they were done? What are the results?

My comments:
 I enjoyed this as an introductory lecture. As I remember, he does a good job of discussing how studies were done and when they were supported by additional research. 

Great Courses: Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids who Thrive

Before our LO was born Theresa and I listened to this lecture series put on by The Great Courses. The course gives tons helpful hints and ideas for child rearing with a basis in scientific studies. The topics include everything from tummy time to eating habits to reading to sleep. I particularly enjoyed the teacher's emphasis on the studies, how they are interpreted (and misinterpreted). 

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to be relistening to the course and summarizing the lectures on this blog. If you want to listen or watch, you can find the DVD's here, the audible version here, and the CDs here.

The Master Question

I want my child to grow up to be responsible, hard working, creative, independent, and happy.

When polled, these are among the most common responses American parents give when they ask what they want their kids to be when they grow up. Just as our little guy was born, The Objective Standard published an article titled "How to Raise a Life Loving Child." In it, the authors apply the idea of the purpose of parenting is to "enable a child to learn about the world, to develop his mind and skills, and to make his own choices so that he can live well and love life—not only in adulthood, but also throughout childhood."

With the "end in mind" thinking, they transformed the purpose into an organizing question:

What can I do (or refrain from doing) to enable my child to learn about reality to develop his mind and skills and to make his own choices so that he can live well and love life?

This is the "master question," which can be modified to be more concrete in various situations.

My wife and I have a weekly meeting and we use this question as one of the triggers to help us focus on what we might need to do with our little one over the next week.

We have applied it in three concrete ways so far:

First, as covered in the TOS article, reading is one of the most important things related to living life well. Reading opens the door to all education and to the entire world. It helps to expand language skills at all levels of growing up. I listed some of our favorite board books in an previous post. We also have been reading Anne of Green Gables to him to break it up.

A second way we have approached this is by trying to help our guy be an adventurous eater, who is willing to eat healthy foods throughout life. The book I mentioned in last week's post, First Bite by Bee Wilson mentioned that children around four months go through a phase where they will eat nearly anything. Familiar foods stay with children for life. However, after this adventurous phase, there is a picky phase where new foods become difficult to introduce. We have tried to be aggressive in introducing new foods while he's in the adventurous phase.

A final thing we've done is to try to create an environment which he can explore the world. The floor bed and baby-proofing among them. I talked about this in a previous post as well. The authors of the article above also discuss how they approached it.

I have found this master question a good organizing principle for our parenting over the last nine months. It helps keep the end goal in mind. The specific tactics and strategies are in lots of places, but master question helps guide them all.