How To Make Your Children Smarter: 10
Steps Backed By Science
We all want
to give our children every advantage so as parents we ask questions like what
will make them happier? What type of parenting is best? We also want our
children to be as smart as possible.
But what
makes children — from babies up through the teen years — smarter? Here are 10
things science says can help:
1) Music
Lessons
Plain and
simple: research show music lessons make kids smarter: Compared with children in the
control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in
full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ
subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement.
A growing
body of research finds musical training gives students learning advantages in
the classroom. Now a Northwestern University study finds musical training can
benefit Grandma, too, by offsetting some of the deleterious effects of aging.
2) The Dumb
Jock Is A Myth
Dumb jocks
are dumb because they spend more time on the field than in the library. But
what if you make sure your child devotes time to both?
Being in good
shape increases
your ability to learn. After exercise people pick up new vocabulary words 20% faster.
Via Spark: The Revolutionary New
Science of Exercise and the Brain: Indeed, in a 2007 study of humans,
German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words 20 percent faster
following exercise than they did before exercise, and that the rate of learning
correlated directly with levels of BDNF.
A 3 month
exercise regimen increased blood flow to the part of the brain focused on
memory and learning by 30%.
Via Spark: The Revolutionary New
Science of Exercise and the Brain: In his study, Small put a group of
volunteers on a three-month exercise regimen and then took pictures of their
brains… What he saw was that the capillary volume in the memory area of the
hippocampus increased by 30 percent, a truly remarkable change.
3) Don’t Read
To Your Kids, Read With Them
Got a little
one who is learning to read? Don’t let them just stare at the pictures in a
book while you do all the reading.
Call
attention to the words. Read with them, not to them. Research shows it helps build their reading
skills:
…when shared
book reading is enriched with explicit attention to the development of
children’s reading skills and strategies, then shared book reading is an
effective vehicle for promoting the early literacy ability even of
disadvantaged children.
4) Sleep
Deprivation Makes Kids Stupid
Missing an
hour of sleep turns a sixth grader’s brain into that of a fourth grader.
Via NurtureShock: “A loss of one hour of sleep is
equivalent to the loss of two years of cognitive maturation and
development,” Sadeh explained.
There is a
correlation between grades and average amount of sleep.
Via NurtureShock: Teens who received A’s averaged
about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged
fifteen more minutes than the C’s, and so on. Wahlstrom’s data was an
almost perfect replication of results from an earlier study of over 3,000 Rhode
Island high schoolers by Brown’s Carskadon. Certainly, these are averages, but
the consistency of the two studies stands out. Every fifteen minutes counts.
5) IQ Isn’t
Worth Much Without Self-Discipline
Self-discipline beats IQ at predicting who will be
successful in life.
Dozens of
studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for
individual success… Students who exerted high levels of willpower were
more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more
selective schools. They had fewer absences and spent less time watching
television and more hours on homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents
outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance
variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic
performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which
students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas
IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than
does intellectual talent.”
Grades have
more to do with conscientiousness than raw smarts.
Via How Children Succeed: Grit,
Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character: …conscientiousness was the trait that
best predicted workplace success. What intrigues Roberts about conscientiousness
is that it predicts so many outcomes that go far beyond the workplace. People
high in conscientiousness get better grades in school and college; they commit
fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer – and not just
because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood
pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
Who does best
in life? Kids with grit.
Via Drive: The Surprising Truth
About What Motivates Us: The best predictor of success, the researchers
found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait
known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”
6) Learning
Is An Active Process
Baby Einstein
and braintraining games don’t work.
In fact,
there’s reason to believe they make kids dumber.
Via Brain Rules for Baby: How to
Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five: The products didn’t work at all.
They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants
17-24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent
watching certain baby DVD’s and videos, the infants understood an average of
six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.
Real learning
isn’t passive, it’s active.
What does Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code recommend? Stop merely reading and test
yourself: Our
brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one
of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two
thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a
rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorise a passage, it’s better to
spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time
testing yourself on that knowledge.
7) Treats Can
Be A Good Thing — At The Right Time
Overall, it
would be better if kids ate healthy all the time. Research shows eating makes a
difference in children’s grades: Everybody knows you should eat
breakfast the day of a big test. High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods
like oatmeal are best, research shows. But what you eat a week in advance matters,
too. When 16 college students were tested on attention and thinking speed, then
fed a five-day high-fat, low-carb diet heavy on meat, eggs, cheese and cream
and tested again, their performance declined.
There are
always exceptions. No kid eats healthy all the time. But the irony is that
kids often get “bad” foods at the wrong time.
Research shows caffeine and sugar can be
brain boosters: Caffeine and glucose can have beneficial effects on cognitive
performance… Since these areas have been related to the sustained attention and
working memory processes, results would suggest that combined caffeine and
glucose could increase the efficiency of the attentional system.
They’re also
potent rewards kids love.
So if kids
are going to occasionally eat candy and soda maybe it’s better to give it
to them while they study then when they’re relaxing.
8) Happy Kids
= Successful Kids
Happier kids
are more likely to turn into successful, accomplished adults.
Via Raising Happiness: 10 Simple
Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents: …happiness is a tremendous advantage
in a world that emphasiess performance. On average, happy people are more
successful than unhappy people at both work and love. They get better
performance reviews, have more prestigious jobs, and earn higher salaries. They
are more likely to get married, and once married, they are more satisfied with
their marriage.
9) Peer Group
Matters
Your genetics
and the genetics of your partner have a huge effect on your kids. But the way
you raise your kids?
Not nearly as
much.
Via Malcolm
Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little
Things Can Make a Big Difference: On things like measures of
intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological
children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however,
the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in
common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their
personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them,
clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than
they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.
So what does
have an enormous affect on your children’s behavior? Their peer group.
We usually
only talk about peer pressure when it’s a negative but more
often than not, it’s a positive.
Living in a
nice neighborhood, going to solid schools and making sure your children hang
out with good kids can make a huge difference.
What’s the
easiest way for a college student to improve their GPA? Pick a smart
roommate.
Via The Happiness Advantage: The
Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at
Work: One
study of Dartmouth College students by economist Bruce Sacerdote illustrates
how powerful this influence is. He found that when students with low
grade-point averages simply began rooming with higher-scoring students, their
grade-point averages increased. These students, according to the
researchers, “appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits—such
that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of
his lower-scoring roommate.”
10) Believe
In Them
Believing
your kid is smarter than average makes a difference.
When teachers
were told certain kids were sharper, those kids did better — even though the
kids were selected at random.
Via The Heart of Social Psychology:
A Backstage View of a Passionate Science: …Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968)
did the same study in a classroom, telling elementary school teachers that
they had certain students in their class who were “academic spurters.” In fact,
these students were selected at random. Absolutely nothing else was done by the
researchers to single out these children. Yet by the end of the school year, 30
percent of the the children arbitrarily named as spurters had gained an average
of 22 IQ points, and almost all had gained at least 10 IQ points.
At this point, I know what
some of you are saying: Where are the bullet points? I need bullet points to
follow!
No problem. Here you go:
Sum Up
Music Lessons
The Dumb Jock Is A Myth
Don’t Read To Your Kids, Read With Them
Sleep Deprivation Makes Kids Stupid
IQ Isn’t Worth Much Without
Self-Discipline
Learning Is An Active Process
Treats Can Be a Good Thing — At The
Right Time
Happy Kids = Successful Kids
Peer Group Matters
Believe In Them
One final
note: Intelligence isn’t everything. Without ethics and
empathy really smart people can be scary.
As P.J. O’Rourke once said: ‘Smart people don’t
start many bar fights. But stupid people don’t build many hydrogen bombs.’
I hope this
helps your child be brilliant.
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