The support system-2

According to the author 50% of intellect is controlled by nature (genetics) and the remaining is determined by environmental factors. It has 2 consequences:
- The might be limits to what an individual's intellect can acheive.
- Aspect of intelligence is influenced by what parents do.

This chapter talks about biological basis of intelligence. Einstein's brain had nothing surprising besides few structural abnormalities. The regions responsible for visiospatial cognition and math processing were 15% larger than average size. It was missing some sections than less agile brains possess and was accompanied with a little more glial cells than average's. Nothing out of the ordinary, and currently it is impossible to demonstrate that few physical differences can lead to a genius.

However with current imaging technologies, is it possible to study the brain while a person is using it to solve problems? Yes, but the trouble is that the problem solving and sensory processing do not look the same in any two brains. Scientists have found 14 separate regions responsible for various aspects of intelligence, these areas are spread throughout the brain. These regions are studied  as P-FIT (parietal-frontal integration theory). Imaging studies on children are difficult as they do not keep steady gait during the observational periods.

At the gene-level also it has been impossible to discover with certainty the  genes responsible for being a "genius". The author states that he does not believe the existence of such a gene.


About IQ

IQ is susceptible to environmental factors. It can change if one is stressed, old, or living in a different culture from the testing majority. For a child, it is influenced by his/her familty. Growing up in the same household tends to increase IQ similarities between siblings. Poor people tend to have significantly lower IQs than rich people. And if one is below a certain income level, economic factors will have a much greater influence on a child's' IQ than if a child were in a middle-class family. Intelligence is not easy to measure and it is not necessary that people are born with a fixed intelligence from birth.

7 ingredients of intelligence
Human intelligence has two ingredients which are linked to human's evolutionary need.
First is the ability to record information: crystallized intelligence
Second is the capacity to adapt that information to new scenarios

More intelligence probably means the ability to do the above two things better than others.
The author listed five things to contemplate while thinking about a child's intellectual calibre. They are:
-Desire to explore
-Self control
-Creativity
-Verbal communication
-Decoding nonverbal communication

Children learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-correcting experiences. They experience sensory data, make predictions about new things they observe, then they design and implement new experiments that attempt to test their predictions. Later they evaluate their results and add the leaned knowledge to their self-generated database. Children are naturally born scientists with the whole world being their laboratory.

The result of 6 years study with data collected from more than 3000 innovative executives. The study tried to identify the traits that separate creative, innovative people. These qualities are termed as "Innovator's DNA" and the study won an award from Harvard Business Review.

Innovator's DNA
-Ability to associate creatively: people can see connections between apparently unrelated concepts, problems, or concepts.
-Habit of consistently asking "What if": people constantly asked "why not", "how come you are doing it this way" and kept poking at the limits of the current status-quo.
-Desire to tinker and experiment.
-being great at a specific kind of networking, with people whose educational backgrounds are different from self's.
-ability to closely observe details of others behaviours.

Want your baby to grow up and be  asuccessful innovator?
Make sure he/she has nonverbal skills and inquisitiveness to go along with it.


A common feature among above three features is the interest to keep exploring and the biggest no-no was the non-exploration oriented system. The lead author Hal Gregersen of this study summarized a;; the skills of innovators are: Inquisitiveness.

The 4-year children are constantly asking wuestions, by the time they are 61/2 years old, they stop asking questions because they learn that their teachers value right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. After growing up as adults, in corporates, it is found that 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas.

Self-Control
The author  mentioned that executive function is a better predictor of academic success thatn IQ. By executive functions, he refers to  a child's ability to filter our distracting, tempting thoughts, which are critical in environments that are over-saturated with sensory stimuli and availability of on-demand choices.
Once the brain selects a relevant stimuli from the noise of distractions, the executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions. A child's brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other modes of executive functions.

Creativity
It involves a bit of risk-taking of functional impulsivity and no the abnormal risk-taking. Creative entrepreneurs have functional impusivity instincts and high risk-taking measurements and a high ability to cope with ambiguity

Human learning is primarily a relational exercise. Intelligence is not developed with the aid of electronic media, but develops with human interactions and relationships.

Learning sign language may boost cognition by 50%
Gestures and speech use similar neural circuits in the brain and consequently, people who can no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly loose their ability to communicate verbally. Similarly, babies do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary  until their fine-motor finger control improves. Gestures are windows into thought process.
 
Kids with normal hearing took American sign language class for nine months, in the first grade were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attention focus, spatial abilities, memory and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically by as much as 50% compared with controls who had no formal instruction.


Brain's day job is not learning
The brain is not interested in learning, it is hardwired to be interested in surviving. Learning occurs to serve the requirement of survival only. Humans do not survive for learning, but instead they learn so that they can survive.
For having a well educated child, create an environment of safety. When a brain's safety needs are catered to, it will allow its component neurons to expose themselves to other daily learning activities like education. A teacher should not be the source of danger (to students) in the class, instead the act of not learning should be the source of danger. Realizing that being ignorant of the class content can be dangerous to survival can perhaps help a brain to focus on the content, due to its survival instinct.



4 ingredients of the baby-parent interaction formula:

-mother's milk
-talking to baby
-guided play
-praising effort rather than the accomplishment
-Do not push a child to perform tasks that a child's brain is not yet developmentally ready to perform
stress to child to the point of a psychological "learned helplessness"
-No TV for under 2 years of child
-Marketed goods claiming additional benefits are optional to not necessary
-Strike a balance between intellectual balance and well-disciplined rigor


Mother's milk is a brain booster
Fact: Mother's milk fed babies in American score on an average of 8 points high than bottle-fed babies when given cognitive tests. It is observable even after a decade of having mother's milk. They get better grades in reading and writing.

American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers nurse their babies exclusively for first 6 months and continue to nurse as babies start eating solid foods and wean babies after the first year.

Talk to your baby-alot
It is one of the well established findings in the child's developmental studies. Taking to babies, even in the earliest age, with many words is encouraged. Equally, providing positive feedback is important. The reinforcement of language skills through interaction is beneficial. It can be done by looking at the child, imitating baby's speech, laughter, facial expressions. Providing additional attention on the responses of the child. Even though babies cannot respond to parents talk as adults, but they are always listening and it is good for babies.

Talking increases IQ
Fact: By age 3, children who were talked to regularly by their parents had IQ scores 1 + 1/2 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least. Point to note is that the talking to the child needs to be done by the live interacting adults and not via electronic gadgets.




Open-ended activities are an important part of child's neural development. Studies show that, kids who played such games were:
More creative
Better at language
Better at problem solving
Less stressed
Better at memory
More socially skilled


Tools of the mind: Mature dramatic play
Researchers have found that children who act out imaginative scenes during a child-pay are more able to control their impulses. The three important parts of an imaginative play include planning the play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which instructions place place.



What happens when the feedback to a child is "You are smart"
It is not recommended to praise a child for his/her fixed characteristic. If a child is praised on their fixed characteristics, one of the 3 may happen:

1) Child begins to think of any mistake committed by him/her as a failure as the child has got the feedback that his characteristic does not get results which might be a mistake. It is because he/she has been told that the success was due to some inherent ability of the child. As more mistakes happen in life, the child associates the mistakes as his/her characteristic of being a failure.

2) Child becomes used to being concerned of appearing to be smart than actually learning the things that gives successful results. Interest towards learning might reduce as the child is busy in appearing to be smart, in accordance to the feedback he/she obtained during childhood.

3) Child becomes less willing to confront the reasons, causes behind his/her deficiencies and less willing to amend those deficiencies. They have difficulty in admitting errors.

Instead try saying"You really worked hard"
The feed back given on the process, effort and the actions done by a child focuses the importance on the controllable effort rather than focusing the importance on the inherent qualities/characteristic of the child. Such a feed back is called Growth Mindset feedback. The previous kind of feedback is referred to as the fixed-mindset feedback. Over 30 years of research has shown that children raised in the growth mindset environment consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievements. Such growth mindset children have a refreshing attitude towards failure, they do not ruminate over their mistakes and think of their errors as problems that can be solved. They go  back to solving their mistakes due to their growth mindset.Children praised for their effort successfully complete 50 to 60% more hard math problems than their peers praised for their intelligence. They believe that mistakes happen from the lack of effort and not from the absence of ability. The mistakes can be rectified by applying more cognitive attention and concentration.

The act of putting effort by children utilizes all their potential in getting something at hand done.

TVs, video games, and the internet

By nature, brain gives a high priority to visual processing. It does not mean that letting kids watch TVs, play video games, etc provide beneficial results. The digital age has increased the screen times of children and except for  a few research of TV screen exposure, most of the other research findings are riddeled with messier research literature regarding brains, behaviors, and video games. A review of such work reveals shoddy designs, biased agenda, lack of controls, etc. that are needed for rigorous scientific study.

Why should parents be concerned about exposure to screens by children:

1) Kids are really good at imitations. Such characteristic of imitation after exposure to an event (only once) is called deferred imitation. This characteristic is well used by the advertising industry. Deferred imitation explains why most of us imitate our parents even after many years.

2) The content shown on the screens is very important as our expectations and assumptions pfrfoundly influence our perception of reality.  Every individual's brain inadvertently inserts its opinions directly into what we are currently experiencing and then fools us into thinking what we experience as a hybrib mixture of what the brain things and what really happens.
Our perceptions are a mixture of what our senses report to our brain and what the brain thinks from its previous experience.  What we expect to be going on is directly tied to what was allowed into our brain in the first place.

Experiences get mixed with the expectations and can influence an individual's behavior. What is allowed into a child's brain influences his/her expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he/she is capable of perceiving but also a child's behavior. This is true for all humans irrespective of their age.

Affect of deferred imitations: No TV before age 2, a recommendation of the book's author.

TV can cause hostility and issues with focusing

Hostile peer interactions in children could be a result of deferred imitations and loss of impulse-control. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9% that they might be involved in bullying behavior by the time they started school. American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 - 20% of real life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.

TV also interrupts with attention spans and the ability to focus which is an essential executive function of all humans. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under 3 years of age, the likelihood of attention problem by age 7 increased by about 10%. In other words, a preschooler who watches 3 hours of TV per day is 30% more likely to have attention-related problems than a child who watches no TV.

Interestingly, second hand exposure, the event of having the TV on while no one is watching also seemed to do damage too, possibly due to the distractions caused by it.  In laboratories tests, flashing images and booming sound tracks continually distracted children from their activities and American Association of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that stands valid today.

" Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers for healthy brain growth and development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills."


TV aimed at babies are not so brainy (Definitely read this part)
A group of researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle. They had tested a Disney product Baby Einstein DVDs and had attracted a phone call from Robert Iger, the then head of the Disney Company. So what happened...the researchers studied the claims of the educational DVDs and studied infants of 17 to 24 months age. They found that for every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of 6 - 8 fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Disney demanded a retraction of this findings by citing deficiencies of the research study. The university held its ground and two years later in October 2009, the company offered refunds to anyone who had purchased Baby Einstein materials and eventually dropped the word "educational" from the packaging.


After age 5
Some TC shows indicate an improvement in brain performance, the shows happen to be interactive in content. Other recommendations for TV viewing data suggests:
- Keep the TV off before the child turns 2
-After age 2, help the child to choose the shows by paying attention to a show that allows intelligent interaction
-Watch the chosen TV show with the children while interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they see on TV.
-Evaluate putting TV in a kids room. Children with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than those with TVs in the common room.




Video Games: Have some physical activity
Due to recentness of video games affect of brain development, the data concentrates on the physical affects of video games. Childhood obesity is 3 times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.
Exercise, especially aerobic exercise is great for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50-100% points. This is true irrespective of the age. Parents who introduce their kids to exercise schedule are more lively to help in making it a child's life-long habit. Its the consequence of deferred imitation that was mentioned earlier. Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts that can be given to a child.

What about texting
  From an anecdotal approach the author presents a case of a children's slumber party, that does not involve healthy face to face interactions between friends and instead the use of cell phones results in children texting other friends and spending time with the cell phones rather than interacting with the members present in their room. It appears that texting might result in the loss of direct communication via face-to-face interactions and this might lead to children not being able to decipher nonverbal cues that humans often use in daily lives. The best current advice of author: keep cell phones, texting away as long as possible.


Do not compare two baby's milestones
 As no two children are same, so are their developments. A comparison between children puts undesired pressure on a child that can be harmful to his/her development. Beside, it puts parents also under tremendous pressure. There are no prescribed growth steps that all children go through development stages at their own pace, they sometimes skip a step or two or repeat the same stage several times in a row. Some go through no definable stages at all. There is nothing wrong with children's developmental stages, the problem is with the researcher's current ( and limited) theories.

No Hyper-parenting
These are parents who seem to see their kids as a merit badges rather than as individuals. These parents try to pursue their child's intellectual success at the cost of the child's happiness. The author mentions that data on parental effects on children is not much available. David Elkind, a former faculty at Tufts University has following classifications of parents:

Gourmet parents:
These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did.

College-degree parents:
They are related to above gourmet parents but believe that it is better to have a sooner academic training.

Outward-bound parents:
They are interested in exposing their children to physical survival skills so that their children can survive in a dangerous world. Typically, these parents have an military, law enforcement backdround.

Prodigy parents:
Typically are financially successful and suspicious about educational system. They prefer having al alternative to educational system and are interested in preventing their children against the negative effects of schooling.


A cautionary information is provided by the author that South Korea's high school students have parental pressure to perform well on standardized tests and it is observed that after traffic accidents, suicide is a leading cause of deaths among 15-19 years olds.

Effects of Hyper-parenting on intellectual development

1) High expectations can stunt higher-level thinking among children as they look for options to please their parent's expectations.

2) Parental pressure can curb a child's curiosity. If their exploratory nature is not rewarded, it gets discarded as child is in the survival mode to please its parents.

3) Continuous disappointment from parents can lead to stress among children. It can create a psychological sate of helplessness among children and can physically alter a child's brain development. Let this be the guiding sentence: Parenting is not a race. Wonderful ways to maximize a child's development is to engage in open-ended play, verbal communications, praising the efforts, among others.