Listening to Children

Why exert effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old? First, you willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him or herself to be valued and therefore feel valuable. Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value.

They will rise to your expectation of them. Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amoungst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. Listen to your child enough and you'll come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you'll will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

What’s behind Anger

According to Albert Ellis, the most common irrational ideas behind anger are the following:

1. I must do well and win the approval of others for my performances, or else I will rate as a rotten person.

2. Others must treat me considerately and kindly and in precisely the way I want them to treat me.

3. The world (and the people in it) must arrange conditions under which I live, so that I get everything that I want when I want it.

Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger

When praise is a detriment to learning

Certain kinds of verbal praise can be detrimental to learning. Young children who constantly hear “person” praise (“you’re so smart to do this well”) as opposed to “task” praise (“you did that well”) are more likely to believe that intelligence is fixed rather than expandable with hard work. When they subsequently face setbacks after receiving person praise, their views of intelligence can cause them to develop a sense of helplessness (“I’m not as smart as I once thought I was”). 

When researchers asked these children to describe what made them feel smart, they talked about tasks they found easy, that required little effort, and they could do before anyone else without making mistakes. In contrast, their peers who they thought they got smarter by trying harder and learning new things said they felt intelligent when they didn’t understand something, tried really hard, and then go it, or figured out something new. 

In other words, the children with the fixed view of intelligence and a sense of helplessness felt smart only when they avoided those activities most likely to help them learn – struggling, grappling, and making mistakes.

These children are likely to have “performance goals”. They want to achieve perfection or get the “right” answer to impress other people because they want to appear to be one of the “smart people”. They are afraid of making mistakes. They will often carefully calculate how much they need to achieve to win the proper praise and do no more than that, for fear that they might fail in the eyes of others. Some of these people do excel by some standards, but they still achieve primarily for the sake of that external recognition and fall short of where they might go. 

In contrast, students who believe that they can become more intelligent by learning (a “mastery orientation’) often work essentially to increase their own competence (adopting “learning goals”), not to win rewards. They are more likely to take risks in learning, to try harder tasks, and consequently learn more than children who are performance-oriented. 

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do