Brain Rules for Baby (18 page)

Clearly, speech is great soil for your baby’s developing mind. As your child gets older, other elements become just as important. The next nutrient in our fertilizer is self-generated play, a delightful example of which I encountered when our boys were both younger than the age of 4.

It was Christmas morning. Wrapped under the tree was a racetrack toy for our two boys, and I was excited for them to open it. I knew they would immediately let out oohs and ahhs as they discovered their gift. They tore open the box, and—puzzled silence. A minute passed. Then they tossed aside the racetrack and held the box over their heads. Their enthusiasm returned like inflation.

“I know! one of them yelled. “It’s an airplane!” “No”, the other boy yelled, “It’s a spaceship!” “Yeah, it’s a
spaceship,
” the first quickly agreed, and they both seized some crayons lying on the floor. Soon they were drawing shapes all over the racetrack box, cryptic little circles, lines, and squares, completely neglecting the toy parts lying scattered around them. I was left wondering why I wasted the money.

The older child went upstairs looking for more crayons, then let out a war whoop. He had spotted an enormous, discarded cardboard box, which earlier that morning had carried a new chair my wife and I had purchased. “Yahoo! he cried, struggling successfully to bring the box downstairs. “Our
cockpit!
” The next two hours became consumed with crayons and paints and tape and furious scribbling. They fastened the racetrack box to the big box. “Place to store aliens”, one of them solemnly explained. They drew tiny dials. They fashioned laser cannons from wrapping paper tubes. They drew something that could cook French fries. For the rest of the day they flew their spacecraft, making up enemies with such diverse names as Evil Mountain Beaver and Kelp Queen. They were no longer in Seattle. They were in Alpha Quadrant, Captain Toddlerhood with Boy Pull-up in the World of Tomorrow.

We laughed ’til we cried watching them. Their creativity was a joy to behold for any parent. But there was something much deeper, too: This kind of open-ended play was fertilizing their brains with the behavioral equivalent of MiracleGro. That sentence might seem strange.

Open-ended
play?
Not “open-ended purchase of electronic educational toys”? Not French lessons, followed by hours of militant drilling? Actually, I do believe in a form of disciplined repetition as children begin formal schooling. But many parents are so preoccupied with their young child’s future that they transform every step of the journey into a type of product development, recoiling at open-ended
anything.
From 1981 to 1997, the amount of free time parents gave their kids dropped by about a quarter. The making-baby-smart product industry—fashioning toys that are the opposite of open-ended (what could possibly be more claustrophobic than a DVD for
infants?
)—is a multibillion-dollar industry.

We now know that open-ended activities are as important to a child’s neural growth as protein. Indeed, the box the flashcards come in is probably more beneficial to a toddler’s brain than the flashcards themselves. Depending upon what you study and how you measure it, the benefits can be stunning. Studies show that, compared with controls, kids allowed a specific type of open-ended play time were:

Chicken-or-egg questions are plentiful in these data, so we need to keep our grump factor high. Is play the method of learning something, for example, or is it merely practice or consolidation of skills that are already developing? Happily, such controversies triggered an event dear to the heart of any scientist: additional rounds of research funding. New studies asked, Were there specific behaviors embedded in open-ended play that produced the benefit? That answer, unequivocally, turned out to be yes.

Not just any type of open-ended play will give you the extraordinary findings. The secret sauce is not unstructured, do-anything-you-want play. Advocacy for this hands-off model hearkens back to the old romantic notion that children are born with effervescent, perfectly formed imaginations and an unerring instinct to create make-believe worlds. The assumption is that if we just allowed children to guide us, then all would be well. I subscribe to parts of this notion deeply. Kids are inventive and curious, and I’ve learned more about imagination from my children than from probably any other single source. But kids are also very inexperienced. Most don’t have all the keys that can unlock their potential; that’s why they need parents.

No, the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation—those executive-function behaviors we discussed in the previous chapter as an
ingredient of intelligence, revealed by the cookie experiment. The data are so clear, you could use them to design the family playroom.

The type of play is mature dramatic play, or MDP. To get the benefits in those bullet points, MDP has to be engaged in many hours a day. This has been codified into a school program called Tools of the Mind, one of the few programs of its type that has been studied in randomized trials.

The ideas for Tools of the Mind come from Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a handsome polymath who burned out quickly in the early years of the Soviet era. He was an inspiration for all budding geniuses who couldn’t make up their minds about what they wanted to do when they grew up. He started out in literary analysis, writing a famous essay on Hamlet at the age of 18, then decided to go to Moscow University’s medical school to become a doctor. He soon changed his mind, switching to law school, then immediately and simultaneously enrolled at a private university to study literature. Still not satisfied, he got a Ph.D. in psychology. A few years later, at the ripe old age of 38, he was dead. But the 10 years he actively pursued psychology were quite productive and, for the time, groundbreaking.

Vygotsky was one of the few researchers of his era to study dramatic play in children. He predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity—including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors.

Hardly the carefree activity we think of in the United States, Vygotsky saw imaginative play as one of the most tightly restricting behaviors children experience. If little Sasha was going to be a chef, he would have to follow the rules, expectations, and limitations of “chef-ness”. If this imaginative exercise included friends, they would
have to follow the rules, too. They might push and pull and argue with each other until they agreed on what those rules were and how they should be executed. That’s how self-control developed, he posited. In a group setting, such a task is extremely intellectually demanding, even for adults. If this sounds like a prelude to the more modern notion of executive function, you are right on the money. Vygotksy’s followers showed that children acting out imaginative scenes controlled their impulses much better than they did in non-MDP situations. While other parts of Vygotsky’s work are starting to show some intellectual arthritis, his ideas on self-regulation have held up well.

The cascade of confirmatory research that followed these findings led directly to the Tools of the Mind program. It has a number of moving parts, but the three most relevant to our discussion involve planning play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which the instruction takes place. Here’s what happens in a Tools of the Mind classroom:

 

Before the preschoolers take off into a day filled with imaginative play, they take colored markers and fill out a printed form called a play plan. This announces in explicit terms what the activity du jour will be: “I am going to have tea with my dollies at the zoo”, or “I am going to make a Lego castle and pretend I’m the knight”. The kids carry around a clipboard with the activities written on them.

 

The children are then coached on dramatic play in a technique called “make-believe play practice. The kids receive direct, open-ended instruction about the mechanics of pretending! Here’s a sentence from the training manual: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”

The little ones are then let loose to their imaginations. At the end of each week, the children have a short “learning conference” with
the instructor, listing what they experienced and learned during the period. They also have group meetings. Any discipline intervention usually becomes a group discussion centered around problem solving.

 

Most Tools of the Mind classrooms look like the equivalent of a late-Christmas-morning living room. Legos are scattered everywhere. Sandboxes are sprinkled around the room. There are jigsaw puzzles to figure out. Blocks with which to build entire new worlds. Clothes for dress-up. Places for crafts. Boxes! Lots of time—and space—for interaction with other kids. The combinations of situations in which individual imagination and creativity could be deployed are seemingly endless.

Many other activities occur in the course of a Tools of the Mind day, and we don’t yet know which combination works best. We also don’t know about the long-term effects of the program. As of this writing, no fewer than four long-term, large-scale studies are under way to answer these questions. But we do know this about the program: It
works
. Kids in the program typically perform 30 percent to 100 percent better than controls on just about any executive function test you throw at them. That means better grades, too, as high executive function is one of the two greatest predictors of academic success that exist in the research literature. And it means the many benefits we described earlier, most of which come from studies of the Tools program.

These data radiate a light that can hurt unaccustomed eyes. They challenge the notion that rote-drilled learning atmospheres always equal better performance. These data flatly state that
emotional
regulation—reining in impulses—predicts better
cognitive
performance. That’s a bombshell of an idea. It directly ties intellectual horsepower to emotional processing. I am not dismissing rote drills, as a memorized database is an extremely important part of human learning. But it is clear: Vygotsky was on to something.

Though their lives are separated by many years, I imagine Vygotsky would have really liked Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie. She is the world’s foremost percussionist and possibly the most versatile. She loves imaginative play, too, though her friends range from entire symphony orchestras, like the New York Philharmonic, to rock groups like Genesis, to the performance artist Björk. Glennie studied at Eaton and at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and she won a Grammy in 1989. As accomplished and powerful a musician as Glennie is, her musical talent is not her most remarkable feature.

Glennie is deaf. The effort she must put into her craft cannot be imagined. After her hearing collapsed at the age of 12, she would put her hands against the classroom wall to sense the vibrations when her music teachers played. Born with perfect pitch, she was able to translate what were now only rough sounds, felt in her body. She often plays barefoot on stage, saying it helps her feel the music. Glennie’s genius is revealed through sheer determination, a resolve detectable in the response she once gave to a reporter who was annoyingly dwelling on her hearing loss. “If you want to know about deafness, she retorted, “you should interview an audiologist. My specialty is
music.
”

We know accomplishment like that comes from gritty effort, not necessarily from high IQ. As every experienced parent understands, a child’s naturally high native intelligence will not automatically guarantee her a starting spot on Harvard’s entering freshman roster. It will not even guarantee her an A on a math test. Though it is a reliable predictor of high academic performance, IQ has a real love-hate relationship with an individual student’s GPA, and it is ambiguously related even to other intellectually rich activities (chess is one surprising example).

What separates high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is, the most recent findings suggest, a much more
boring—but ultimately more controllable—factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. Good old-fashioned neural elbow grease. Deliberate practice. From a psychological perspective, effort is in part the willingness to focus one’s attention and then sustain that focus. Effort also involves impulse control and a persistent ability to delay gratification. Sounds like executive function, spiced with a few unique ingredients.