Hyperparenting is not encouraged. Parents should not be overly concerned about their child's intelligence and push their children to excel. This just adds to the child's stress and extinguishes their curiosity, even stunting higher-level thinking.
Parents should instead attempt to spend more time having face-to-face interaction with their children. Children should also be allowed to play and explore, and their efforts, not IQ, should be praised.
This is the gist of what developmental molecular biologist and author John Medina has to say.
He is the author of Brain Rules for Baby and a host of other books on brain rules.
According to Medina, hyperparenting is on the increase globally.
“It is natural for parents to want the best for their children. Given that the information age is upon us, which reveals the importance of technology in driving wealth, education is the critical component for any country’s future economic success. That panics a lot of parents. As the economy increasingly becomes global, and competitive, I believe we will see an increase in hyperparenting,” he says via email.
Parents often wonder what they should do. On one hand, there are experts who say the child should be encouraged but not pushed. On the other hand, the tiger mother in all Malaysians says push your child to excel because you know they can do better and to discourage the child from becoming a quitter.
What does Medina say about this?
“It depends on how safe the child feels when the parents are pushing. Too much pressure can actually be counterproductive.
“It is important for parents to remember that the brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving. If the survival issues in a child’s brain are met, their brain is happy to do calculus. But if it feels overly threatened or pressured, it has a very different set of goals it wants to achieve – none of which involve calculus.
“I believe in strict discipline regarding learning. But if that discipline is consistently deployed in an atmosphere of unrelenting stress, the one thing the child will want to do is get away from it as soon as possible. They learn not to love learning, but to fear punishment, which drives them further from their books, not closer. That, of course, is the last thing a parent wants to have happen, which is why I used the word counterproductive,” he explains.
The problem then lies in how to encourage a love of learning when our school environment is based so much on rote learning.
Medina advocates having a combination of memorisation and improvisation.
“At the cognitive neuroscience level, human learning is understood as an interaction between two intellectual abilities, and I recommend a healthy balance between two them. The first is the ability to create a memorised database. Children need to memorise things, and the ability to do this is called crystallised intelligence. But the second is the ability to improvise off that database. Children need to improvise off of their database almost as soon as they have learned it.
“This talent we often call fluid intelligence. It is like a competent jazz musician. They learn music theory, then learn to improvise off of what they know. Any school system that only emphasises memorisation only gets half of the balance right. They are in danger of creating robots, and won’t win any Nobel prizes.
“Any education system that only emphasises improvisation also only gets half the balance right. They are in danger of creating people who can only play air guitar. They won’t get any Nobels either,” he says.
Brain Rules for Baby is Medina's attempt to show parents how to get kids to mobilise whatever intelligence they were given at birth. The research literature is very clear that the way to not accomplish this goal is to hyperparent them, he explains.
While a lot of what Medina says in his book is not new, he firmly believes that his books offers something to parents.
He explains:
“The reason is accessibility. A great deal of the research cited in the books has been sitting around gathering dust in obscure research journals. Even if it were widely available, unless you are a neuroscientist, a great deal of that text is unreadable. Yet what it has to say is profound, to parents, to businesses to educators.
“People interested in learning should pick up the book for two reasons: 1) It is based on these peer-reviewed findings; and 2) It is written in a style that is accessible to people who are not professional brain scientists.”
In his book, Medina says that parents also need to spend more time with their children, interact with and engage them as well as watch TV with them so that they can discuss issues/points in the programmes.
He writes that parents also need to exhibit a loving relationship with each other; dads need to share in the workload, chores and parenting.
“Work/life balance is hard in any culture, but ultimately it comes down to how much of a priority you want your children to be in your life. If you are not willing to make them the highest priority, I suggest to couples that they not have children. Children are the future of every culture, and this responsibility is just too great to be left to people who would rather work all day than be good mums and dads,” he says.
How about divorced families, then?
“It is true that one of the greatest predictors of a child’s academic success is the emotional stability of the home. But it is not divorce that does all the damage, nor is it the amount of arguing and fighting. What does the damage is a child’s lack of exposure to reconciling behaviour.
“Parents will often fight in front of their children, but will 'make up' in private. That imbalance is toxic, whether or not the couple is divorced, because the child only sees the fighting, never the tools for reconciliation. The best advice would be for couples, if they choose to fight in front of their kids, to also make up in front of their kids,” he says.
Medina has a lifelong fascination with how the mind reacts to and organises information. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. He is an affiliate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University.
His research speciality is the genetics of psychiatric disorders, most of it spent as a private consultant to pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
He says that understanding how the brain works typically is the first step in understanding what happens when things go wrong – whether one is talking about bigotry or criminal intent.
What is his final advice for parents in terms of smart vs happy children?
“Happy. The brain has the best access to its many talents when it feels safe, secure and happy. If you make sure a kid is happy, you have the best shot at ensuring their access to whatever intelligence their DNA allows. You can show this empirically. Unhappy kids are much more susceptible to anxiety and depressive disorders. As a result, they don’t get as good grades as happy children,” he says.
John Medina will be in Kuala Lumpur this month. He is presenting a four-hour seminar on Brain Rules for Parents & Educators - How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child From 0-5 Years. The seminar will be conducted on May 22 from 9am-1pm at the Putra World Trade Centre. For more information, go to www.brainrulesasia.com.
Limited time offer:
Just RM5 per month.
