Panicking when you see your child idle? Stanford research found that saturated learning is mostly useless work

 Parents sometimes can't get used to their children being completely idle. Believing that "hard work leads to success", some American parents also want their children to learn as much as possible, and even let their children "saturate" learning. However, let children learn to "rotate" and really achieve good results? The results of a Stanford University study tell a different story.

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Text丨Luna ed.丨Lulu

Not long ago, a blogger shared the story of a mother and son he met on the high-speed train:

At first, the mother softly instructed the child to write homework, and if she wrote it wrong, she asked the child if it was good to write it again; If the child changes the right, she will immediately encourage "yes, that's it".

The child said that he was tired, and the mother also rested together. She will talk to her child about why the high-speed rail is so fast, introduce to the child how the bridge was built, and see other passengers taking their luggage and test how the child speaks English...

This mother really tried hard, but also really hard, and in the two and a half hours of the author's ride, she didn't stop for a minute at all. I am afraid that if the child does one less question and thinks less about one question, he will be left behind by other children.

In fact, this is not only the case for Chinese parents, but also for many parents in the United States. Worried about the future work and unsatisfactory income of children, the quality of life and happiness will regress, so that no one dares to "step on the brakes".

"I believe that a good education can give children better jobs, and I believe that hard work always guarantees upward mobility. This has kept the United States obsessed with material success for nearly a century and has worked tirelessly to achieve it. ”

This is the scene described by Derek Thompson, a contributing author for The Atlantic, in his article "Workism Makes Americans Miserable," and it is also a reflection of parents today.

Derek Thompson, contributing writer for The Atlantic

The "workism" in the title also directly points to the source of a series of anxieties - work is indeed important as a guarantee of income and livelihood. But when this attention is overdone, work is regarded as the core of personal identity and life goals, it is regarded as the only standard to measure the success or failure of children, and the work thinking looks at all people and things, the dedication to work changes.

Under the idea of workism, in order to ensure the future work and income of children, parents treat their children's education like a job, feeling that the more they learn, the better, as long as they learn, there must be positive feedback, and they do not hesitate to let their children learn saturated.

But the continuous exhaustion also tells another fact - burying one's head in the busy does not necessarily reap the corresponding rewards, and a study at Stanford University has found that continuous busyness beyond the limit will eventually be fruitless.

When education becomes a stepping stone to high-paying jobs,

Middle-class parents educate and work together

Workism, a word that sounds a little unfamiliar, has infiltrated daily life and is deeply tied to children's education. Take the research of American scholars, middle-class families and elites are in a deep worry.

The American philosopher Matthew Stewart observed that the upper middle class in the United States today has some common characteristics: they believe that through talent, study, and work, they can achieve better social status, measured by education and material well-being.

Even though they are wealthy, they still value having a good job and are willing to work long hours, and the education of their children is the top priority in family life.

This year, the Pew Research Center, a polling agency, released a survey on the current state of parental education in the United States. When it comes to children getting college degrees, the more high-income and knowledgeable families value it.

51% of high-income parents, 35% of middle-income parents, and 46% of low-income parents said this was important for their children.

51% of parents with a graduate degree, 43% of parents with a bachelor's degree, and 40% of parents with a high school degree or below attach great importance to it.

*(U.S. high-income households with annual incomes above $131,500, middle-income households with incomes ranging from $43,800 to $131,500, and low-income households earning less than $43,800)

In terms of ethnicity, a whopping 70 percent of Asian-American parents said a college degree was very important to their children, the highest percentage of any ethnic group, compared with the lowest percentage of white parents who thought the same way, at 29 percent.

However, 88 per cent of parents regardless of ethnicity agree that their children will achieve financial independence and find a satisfying job.

But wealthy, knowledgeable middle-class parents are also in constant crisis — and success seems less and less likely. To increase the probability of success for children, it is even more necessary to strive for favorable opportunities for children, optimize education and maximize value.

According to Derek Thompson, author of "Workism Makes Americans Miserable," long working hours has become an important way for elites, especially those with a college education, to compete for status and income.

Busy work is the belief of elites as social beings, while saturated education is the belief of their parenthood. A full work schedule has become a guarantee and symbol of a rich life, and in education, only by making the best use of their children's time can parents feel safe for their children's future.

A children's channel has done a survey, although parents feel that their children should enjoy some pure happy time, but more than 1/3 of parents hope that the TV programs that children watch during the break are also educational, and they can learn something after watching it.

Hilary Levey Friedman, a professor at Brown University, visited nearly 100 middle-class families and found that in order to make children become "well-rounded" people, interest training in music and sports has become standard. In order to prevent accidents that prevent children from continuing to learn, as long as the child has enough time, two of each category are selected to cultivate.

Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "As a father, I can't reconcile with myself without paying for SAT cram classes. If I let them go out after school instead of participating in high-quality internships and other extracurricular activities, I'm a bad parent. ”

Robert Fran, a professor of economics at Cornell University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "For today's wealthy, there is no such thing as 'leisure,' work is their game." ”

As for children, parents are convinced that "time is like water in a sponge, there is always a squeeze", and many children live according to the schedule from an early age.

Continuous busyness ≠ efficiency

False beliefs keep parents and children busy

Adam Waytz, an associate professor of social psychology at Northwestern University, once heard an anecdote about a man who had recently immigrated to the United States and quickly assumed that the word "busy" meant "good." Because every time he greets someone "How are you?" People always replied, "I'm busy." ”

While the story is a bit hilarious, the reality is. Studies conducted in the United States, France, and South Korea have found that people who put in more effort, even if their efforts do not lead to more and better output, are still considered to be of better moral character, more willing to give, more honest, and more trustworthy.

Parents carefully select the various classes and experiences arranged by the stitches and see how their children react to keeping up with their schedules.

But can busyness really come to better efficiency?

John Pencavel, a professor of economics at Stanford, found in research that a person who works more than 50 hours a week will have a sharp decline in productivity per hour; People who work 70 hours a week do the same amount of work as people who work 55 hours a week.

Will that have a different effect on children? Unfortunately, the answer to many studies is "no."

Let's start with the learning aspect.

Worried that the amount of homework practice in school is not enough, many parents think of adding extra meals to their children and arranging additional practice questions, thinking that more practice and familiarity can make their children learn better.

But researchers at the University of South Florida and the University of California, San Diego, have found that overlearning works well in the short term, but is largely useless in the long run.

The experiment is conducted in the form of a vocabulary card test. The first group of participants went through a total of 5 rounds, and none of the participants were able to do a word well in one round; The second group was the "overlearning group" in which participants took 10 rounds, each with at least 3 rounds of perfect scores.

A week later, in the second experiment, the overlearning group still led the way. But four weeks later, the results of the two groups were no different.

In just four weeks, the advantage of overlearning has diminished so much. Since then, a number of different studies have yielded similar results, and the researchers believe that if the goal is long-term memory, then overlearning may not be a good strategy.

At this time, some parents may think, let the child learn something different, change the brain, can avoid the negative effects of excessive learning?

Then we have to talk about how the brain learns. One particularly important area of the brain is the prefrontal cortex, which has three functions closely related to learning — helping to maintain attention and motivation, helping to control impulses and ignore distractions, allowing people to make and execute plans.

But the ability of the prefrontal cortex is not infinite, and when it is overworked, those three important functions cannot be performed. This is why when children are tired, even if their parents press them to their seats, they have difficulty concentrating and lose their temper.

And extracurricular activities that seem to be relatively brain-free, but also pay attention to a too much.

This year, researchers at The Ohio State University found that students who participated in one school sports activity and another non-sports extracurricular activity were more likely to attend highly selective colleges than those pursued. The emphasis is on the latter sentence, but participating in two or more extracurricular activities of any type is no advantage over participating in just one.

Simply put, it's great to let your child play soccer outside of class, but at the same time let your child play basketball and swim, it doesn't produce double or triple benefits.

Researchers believe that there are two possible reasons, one is that it is now very energy-consuming to get a certain advantage from an extracurricular activity, and the energy required to participate in two or three is exponentially increased. Second, excessive energy is spent on activities, and children cannot take care of their studies, and academics are the hard power to apply for university.

As early as "Unequal Childhood", some teachers reported that children's schedules are too full, and they often take leave due to activities or too tired to take care of their studies. For example, if a child goes to compete elsewhere on the weekend, it will affect the learning of the new week because of going to bed late. "One child took three days off this year, each for a week, and his mother was worried about his math scores! I said, hey, just let him come to school every day. ”

I believe that many people understand the truth, but they always feel unfair in their hearts. As the saying goes, money thrown into the water can still be heard. Shouldn't parents get positive feedback on their children's learning by doing their best, sometimes even "overdrawn" their own efforts?

In fact, social psychology has long used one word to explain this phenomenon - to try to defend.

Effort to defend: The more you work on something, the more you feel that the effort is valuable, even if the thing itself is of little value. People will always rationalize the efforts they have made.

These truths are not to deny the efforts of parents, but to hope that parents can jump out of this closed-loop logic and receive the laws of education that are not enough.

Learn to rest to make busyness more efficient

To free yourself and your children from this ineffective busyness, you need to make some changes in the way you think about problems.

In the enterprise, if employees are rewarded for being busy and ignore whether there is a work result, then it is easy for employees to be busy for the sake of busyness rather than focusing on efficiency. The same problem is also worth thinking about in the education of children:

Do we really value the psychological comfort of our children's learning, or just the psychological comfort of seeing them busy?

If there is an answer to this question, then the next few steps are easy to take.

First, stay busy.

As the main planner of their children's education, parents should first prioritize the huge and complex pending matters.

American emergency department physician Darria Long once shared on TED how she manages her busyness. The first and most important step is to prioritize everything, and the classification of hospital emergency care also applies to various situations in life.

Red events – things that are immediately life-threatening if not addressed.

Yellow events – things that are serious, but not immediately life-threatening.

Green events – secondary, things that can be dealt with later.

Black events - worst-case scenario, powerlessness, something that must be abandoned.

Darria Long had a very busy day: a leaky house, a one-year-old baby in the emergency room, a four-year-old waiting for her to organize a school fundraiser, and a book manuscript on her computer that needed to be delivered immediately.

After a little thought, she prioritized things: prioritizing one-year-olds in the emergency room; Then go home and plug the leak, dry the floor while rushing to the manuscript; And the school fundraising activities, she really did not have the energy to deal with, so she could only give up.

Studies have shown that if people treat everything the same and react as a red event, then the stress level of the person will be twice that of normal people. This makes people feel more stressed, and the brain is more likely to make irrational decisions because of irritability and anger.

William Doherty, a professor of family studies at the University of Minnesota, mentioned in the New York Times that many parents are convinced that their children have "hidden talents" and that if they cannot develop and nurture them as much as possible, they will fail their children. And the reports of the parent circle and the media around them also make parents always under the pressure of the aura of other cow babies.

There are some things in education that must not be done, let alone must be done now. William Doherty said: "Even if parents do not let their children learn to dance at the age of 6, it does not necessarily deprive them of the possibility of becoming dancers in the future. ”

When we see our children idle, the idea of "wasting time" may pop up right away, but we can also stop and think, "Is it necessary for children to seamlessly transition into new learning just after writing their homework?" "The child has a class that has been a little backward recently, is it necessary to find a teacher to make up for it immediately, will there be other reasons?" ......

Secondly, science rests.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a visiting scholar at Stanford and Oxford universities, even argues that busyness is not a means to achievement, but an obstacle to it.

There will be no scientific rest, blind and persistent busyness will only end up being inefficient or even ineffective.

In his book Science Break, he recounts a study of violin students at a Berlin conservatory, uncovering the reason for the gap between excellent students and ordinary students: in fact, these conservatories do not practice more time than ordinary students, but they do two things particularly well.

One is that their deliberate practice is more efficient. Deliberate practice is not fun in itself, but during the 4 hours of deliberate practice each day, the students of the Conservatory do not simply repeat or play randomly, they are highly focused on a targeted movement and wholeheartedly practice a technique.

The second is that they are more likely to rest. Conservatory students also face the contradiction that deliberate practice requires great effort, and the amount of energy that can support deliberate practice every day is limited, so they carefully arrange the time for practice and rest. Compared with ordinary students, they practice more frequently, but each practice time is less, each practice 80~90 minutes, will rest for at least half an hour.

The researchers at the time concluded that daily deliberate practice does not mean that students have to devote as much time as they have, but how much energy and brain power they can use to practice at all. After all, in addition to practice, they also have to attend classes, do homework, and participate in various activities.

In order to better help children rest scientifically, in fact, you may wish to design the schedule upside down, first consider the things that must be met, such as sleeping, homework, free relaxation time, and then arrange additional extracurricular activities and supplementary learning.

There is no shame in resting. On the contrary, studies have shown that reasonable arrangement of deliberate practice and rest not only makes children's practice efficient, but also allows them to make the most of rest time. Because they will understand that time is precious, and rational use can maximize the value of time.

Lyn Fry, a famous British child psychologist, said: "Knowing how to use some things to make themselves happy and fill their free time is a very important ability, if parents help their children fill their free time, then children will never learn this on their own." ”

Bibliography:

(Swipe up and down)

1. "A mother and son I met on the high-speed train made me reflect for two and a half hours..."

2.Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

3.Is ‘Workism’ Dooming Civilization? Notes on the New Pew Parents Study.

4.The problem with America’s semi-rich

5.Duke, Baruch, or Bust: Parents Debate

6.If Pricey Private Schools Are Still Worth It

7.Beware a Culture of BusynessAn ER doctor on triaging your "crazy busy" life

8.Family Happiness and the Overbooked Child

9.No need to load up on extracurricular activities, study finds

10.Back To School: Cramming Doesn't Work In The Long TermThe Science of Study Breaks

11. "Scientific Rest: An Efficient Rest Method for Rapid Recovery of Energy"

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