Story Time

The other night, at a friend’s house for an early evening barbeque, I tried and failed repeatedly to get my 3-year-old son to eat his dinner.

It didn’t matter that the other kids at the table were eating. It didn’t matter that these were hot dogs we were talking about. And it definitely didn’t matter whether I pleaded or demanded that Leo fill his belly. He was, quite simply, not having it. And there was nothing I could do to change his mind.

Sensing my exasperation, my friend Jeremy leaned over and whispered: “Watch this.”

“Would anyone like to hear a story?” he asked. Leo stopped what he was doing, nodded, and listened intently as Jeremy spun a tale about a little boy lost in the forest who followed a single firefly, discovered a Sembar tree where all the other fireflies gathered to light up the night sky, and gained entrance to a secret, magical world.

Although there was a moral to Jeremy’s story, its message was not so symmetrical as to suggest that good boys clean their plates. And yet for the duration of the story, Leo listened, fully engaged in the wonders of an imaginary landscape, and absent-mindedly ate his dinner.

I was grateful for Jeremy’s clever parenting – and annoyed I didn’t think of it myself. After all, a convergence of recent research has confirmed something we have always instinctively known to be true: when we follow the trail of a well-crafted story, our brains light up like a Sembar tree.

Dr. James Zull is a professor of Biology at Case Western University, and the author of the book The Art of Changing the Brain. As he puts it, “We judge people by their stories, and we decide they are intelligent when their stories fit with our own stories. Recalling and creating stories are key parts of learning. We remember by connecting things with our stories, we create by connecting our stories together in unique and memorable ways, and we act out our stories in our behaviors.”

Zull says using vivid metaphors is a particularly effective way to foster new connections between the more than 100 billion neurons in a human brain. These connections are called neuronal networks, and once they’re made, they possess specific physical relationships to each other in the brain, and thus embody the concept of the relationship itself. “If you believe that learning is deepest when it engages the most parts of our brain,” Zull adds, “you can see the value of stories for the teacher. We should tell stories, create stories, and repeat stories, and we should ask our students to do the same.”

Of course, the same can be said for parents, and not just before bedtime.  If we want our children to develop the internal hardware to understand the world – and then imagine that world through the eyes of experiences of others – we should help them make sense of their surroundings through the stories we read and share. It is, quite simply, how people learn – and oh by the way, it may even help your child finish his dinner.

Kid Whisperers

In theory, Buck is a documentary about horses, and a cinematic profile of the laconic cowboy who has learned to speak their silent animal language.

In fact, Buck is a documentary about how people (and animals) learn – and a reminder that just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to do it.

Against a backdrop of horizontal landscapes, azure skies, and shape-shifting clouds, the movie follows Buck Brannaman as he conducts horse clinics across the country. But these clinics aren’t solely about helping people learn to ride horses. “A lot of times, rather than helping people with horse problems,” he explains in the film’s opening minute, “I’m helping horses with people problems.”

Buck’s own life story bears this out. A professional rodeo entertainer by the age of six, he was beaten mercilessly by his hard-driving father, Ace. By the time a gym teacher spotted the network of thick welts on his back and buttocks, the young boy had grown silent with fear and mistrust. Swift interventions by caring adults and a loving foster family slowly restored Buck’s sense of self-worth, but the father’s beatings left a permanent wound the son sought to heal through a different understanding of human and animal nature. “I was looking for a peaceful place to be,” he explains in a clipped, twangy rhythm.  “There’s a lot of fear in both the horse and the human. So there has to be trust.”

Unfortunately, the historic approach to horse training was about anything but trust. Horses were tied to posts, whipped, prodded, and constrained – the logic being that the only way to get such strong animals to submit to a human’s will was by literally “breaking” them down. Brannaman’s clinics demonstrate a different approach, one based on a deep sense of empathy, respect, and communication – and filled with valuable lessons for the participants that extend beyond the riding circle.

“You can’t be a good guy when you leave the barn, and a bad guy when you enter the barn. Human nature doesn’t work that way.”

“Your energy moves the horse.”

“Everything’s a dance.”

“Respect isn’t fear; it’s acceptance.”

“It’s not the young-un’s fault. He just doesn’t know what’s expected of him.”

At one point, Brannaman demonstrates what he means by holding one end of a rope and asking a participant to hold the other. “If I jerk at you, hard and sudden, like this, you’re going to flinch every time I approach you. And that’s definitely one way to get the horse’s attention. But if I just pull gently and steadily until you feel the tightening of the rope, like this, then I’m operating on feel, and I don’t even need to grip the rope tightly. It’s how you get there, to that point of deep communication, that matters.”

What makes Buck such a powerful film is the way he proves what we instinctively know to be true about how people learn – and struggle to act upon. Too often, instead of providing the parental or pedagogical equivalent of what Buck does with horses – call it “kid whispering” – our actions result in whispering kids. Instead of engendering a deep sensitivity to the invisible, orderly dance that occurs between two beings learning to trust one another, our efforts result in visible indicators of control. It’s the modern manifestation of the age-old saying: children are to be seen, not heard. And it’s just as out of tune with how we learn as horse breaking is with how they learn.

Buck reminds us that when learning is understood as the effort to empathize with another, it transforms both teacher and student. He reminds us that the journey is certain to surface what is submerged, and require us to make sense of what we see. And whether we’re parents, teachers or trainers, he demonstrates that the art of the whisper comes in the search for, and discovery of, the delicate balance between reassuring structures and empowering freedoms, something Buck describes as the ‘soft feel.’

“Most people think of a feel as when you touch someone,” he tells us. “But a feel can have a thousand meanings. Sometimes a feel is a mental thing. Sometimes it’s a glance exchanged between horse and human from across the arena. But always it’s an invitation from the horse to come closer, and it’s a moment of perfect balance.”

Hey Parents – It’s Time to Stop Playing Favorites

The other night over dinner, hours after my mother-in-law had returned home to New York, I casually asked my son Leo: “What was your favorite part of the weekend?”

As I watched him stare blankly back at me, struggling to find an answer, I found myself wishing I could have a parental do-over. Why do we ask children this question so often? Would it make a difference if we asked it a different way?

Anyone who’s a parent knows what I’m talking about: we’re always asking kids to tell us their favorite color, pick their favorite TV show, or select their favorite relative. And our intentions are in the right place; after all, we’re trying to learn about how they see themselves and others, and to give them a chance to reflect on what feels good and pleasing.

But here’s the problem: children don’t see the world as a set of isolatable favorites; we make them see it this way.  Watching Leo’s face, I realized that for him, there was no single favorite memory – just a pastiche of happy experiences that blended together to make up a general feeling I’ll call “Weekend with Nana.” It wasn’t until I asked the “favorite” question that it even occurred to him he should decide which of his experiences with her was the best of all.

This distinction is not exclusive to Leo. All of us benefit greatly when we develop metacognition – or the skill to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings, see ourselves interacting with the environment and people around us, and become familiar with our own preferences and the preferences of others. Recent research even suggests this may be the most important skill of all when it comes to learning how to learn, both in school and in life. Yet the reality is that asking kids to pick favorites isn’t an optimal path toward helping them become more holistically self-aware; it’s an emotional short cut that teaches them to artificially divide their memories into preferred parts.

How might Leo have responded differently if I had asked this question instead: “What made you feel happy this weekend?”

The difference between the two questions is subtle but significant. With one, we’re asking children to rank the world. With the other, we’re inviting them to reflect on it.

Only one of those questions will actually help build the muscle memory of metacognition, and allow for a fuller understanding of the multiplicity of experiences that shape how we think and feel. And that’s not playing favorites.

Vive La France?

Yesterday was one of those days every parent dreads.

My 2.5 year-old son, Leo, had decided to make dinner a histrionic struggle for power. My energy reserves were at historic lows. And my larger visions of effective parenting had lost out to my smaller need to merely give in to Leo’s irrational demands, make it to bedtime – and live to see a new day.

Regularly, as parents, we’re forced to make choices about how we respond to the words and actions of our kids. Ideally, those choices are always guided by a clear frame for determining what our children need to become healthy and happy human beings. But what if we don’t have a clear frame – or, worse still, what if our frame for parenting has us focusing on the wrong recipe for success?

That disturbing thought is the focus of Bringing Up Bébé, a new book by Pamela Druckerman, an American mother living in Paris who couldn’t help but notice the differences between the behavior of her American children and their French counterparts.  “Why was it,” Druckerman writes, “that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had? Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life.”

According to Druckerman, the key was in the way French parents employed a “whole different framework for raising kids.” Unlike in America, most French children are encouraged to learn how to play by themselves. They are instructed to be respectful and to wait their turn; and they are not unfamiliar with a word that has become dreaded in American parenting: “No.”

The point is not that all Americans should raise their children as the French do – though I’m sure Druckerman and her publisher wouldn’t mind if we interpreted it that way. The point is that successful parenting, in any culture, requires a clear frame for understanding which habits of mind and being we want our children to develop, and how we’ll help them do so. And I fear that what we have in America is a familial case of mission creep – one in which our well-intended quest for ever-higher achievement has bred a nation of helicopter parents and a generation of children with plenty of love, and precious few limits.

So how can we cultivate a deeper national clarity around what our children need most to learn and grow? In short, what do we need to know to be better parents?

Ironically, a partial answer to that question may come from an unlikely source – the private sector. In fact, Harvard professor Chris Argyris has been studying human behavior in organizations for years, and his observations in the boardroom may be equally useful for better behavior in the nursery. “Most people define learning too narrowly as mere ‘problem solving,’” Argyris writes in a Harvard Business Review article titled, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.” “But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act.”

Developing the reflective skills and the language to break out of dysfunctional frames takes time, but it’s also quite possible. “Despite the strength of defensive reasoning, people genuinely strive to produce what they intend,” Argyris explains. “They value acting competently. Their self-esteem is intimately tied up with behaving consistently and performing effectively.”

Each of us – whether we’re a parent or a professional – can rely on these universal human tendencies to learn how to think in a new way. “People can be taught how to recognize the reasoning they use when they design and implement their actions,” says Argyris. “They can begin to identify the inconsistencies between their espoused and actual theories of action. They can face up to the fact that they unconsciously design and implement actions that they do not intend. Finally, people can learn how to identify what individuals and groups do to create organizational defenses and how these defenses contribute to an organization’s problems.”

A personal story comes to mind. When I was still a teacher in Brooklyn, I was also the coach of my school’s basketball team. In retrospect, I can see I fell into a pattern of mimicking my own high school coach – a man who yelled and berated his players mercilessly. I hated this leadership style, and yet I unconsciously reenacted it when I became a coach. It was as if I had no other behavioral model to call on, so I repeated the only one I knew, despite my desire to do otherwise.

We do this in parenting as well – unconsciously summoning our own familial ghosts of the nursery and then wondering why we’ve fallen into the same old dysfunctional traps we were determined to escape. Argyris describes this as the difference between our espoused theory of action (“I am a loving, responsible parent”) and our actual theory-in-use (“I let my kids do whatever they want”). “Put simply,” he says, “people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.”

Parents reading this may have already identified some of the ways their theories of action get trumped by their theories-in-use. We may, for example, want our children to be empathetic and polite, and yet if we fail to help them imagine the world through the eyes of another, or if we give in too often to their demands for convenience’s sake, we should stop being surprised when they constantly interrupt us, or, worse still, start to see the world purely through me-colored glasses.

The good news is that once this sort of thinking is exposed and examined, all of us can develop the capacity to “see” our own thinking as it develops. We can stop believing there is a world ‘out there’ that exists apart from us, and start recognizing the ways our actions help bring forth the world we inhabit – a world we can always change and recalibrate.

So let’s start being more mindful of exactly what we think is most essential for our children to learn, know, feel and be able to do – even if some of our answers may run counter to the contemporary currents of American society. And let’s not be afraid, once again, to learn something valuable from our French counterparts:

Vive La Révolution!