Why Kids Need Positive Relationships with Adults

Adult-child bonding achieves results. "Skin," the live action short film that won an Academy Award last month, featured a father proudly training his son to master a gun and hate black people. Through a plot twist and a bit of Hollywood magic, the father's skin turns black. His son shoots and kills him.

     Research by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child also found a lack of adult-child bonding in abusive environments and those with uncaring adults leads to kids with no motivation to learn, to explore, or to try new things. In a negative situation, kids can become fixated on fear, avoiding punishment, and the immediate danger of failure.

     When children lack positive experiences with adults, they are apt to resist pressure to do things in a particular way, such as form cursive letters according to a prescribed method. Even guiding some children through mindfulness by requiring them to close eyes, sit up straight, and conform to other unnecessary procedures can undermine the positive benefits of mindfulness.

     Teachers need to realize not all kids come into a room with a background of adult-child relationships that make them ready to answer an adult's question, volunteer an opinion, or ask for more information. A teacher needs to find ways to help students succeed, to feel a task is not impossible. It helps to lead into discussions with phrases like "I notice" and "I wonder." In other words, teachers need to give the impression all ideas are welcome and all subjects are worth exploring.

     My mother was a math teacher who always tried to figure out what students were doing when they arrived at the wrong answer. She learned there were lots of things you could do with a column of numbers. "That's interesting," she would say, "I never thought of that." No matter how "crazy" a student's manipulation of numbers was, she'd caution other students not to laugh before they listened to and understood a classmate's reasoning.

     Not every student is going to be good or poor at the same subject. Unless all kids begin to develop positive face-to-face interactions with adults, they may shut down and stop learning before they hit their strides. This goes for gifted and talented kids also. When an eight-year-old British boy, with Egyptian parents, perfect pitch, a knack for coding, and a sense of humor, told an international education conference, "(G)etting a few spelling words or facts wrong is not the end of the world," teachers needed to avoid taking offense. He also felt free to suggest learning to type on a keyboard saved trees and was more important in the digital age than learning cursive.

   

   

Students Motivated by Learning Scientists Struggled to Find Success

Solutions to the world's problems haven't come to famous scientists without a struggle. A study at Columbia University and the University of Washington should give students, especially young women, courage to apply themselves to the task of becoming a scientist. The study found that reading about the failures of famous scientists motivated students not only to pursue studies in science and math but also to improve their performances in all academic studies.

     Artist Teresita Fernandez, a recipient of a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, goes so far as to suggest something unique and valuable can come from failure. She relates the Japanese idea of kintsugi, "to patch with gold," a practice of using gold to repair a broken bowl. That way the new bowl resembles nothing but itself. Failures unique to an individual can lead to something valuable, if that person keeps pressing forward.

So, what are some of the books that can motivate students to keep pressing forward?

• Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark and April Chu

Although Ms. Lovelace had to overcome temporary blindness from measles, this daughter of Lord Byron wrote the first computer program after she met Charles Babbage and understood how his first mechanical computer worked.

• Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle and Julie Paschkis

In the 17th century, Maria Merian had to work in secret to show butterflies weren't evil creatures that sprang out of mud.

• Primates by Jim Ottoviani and Maris Wicks

To make discoveries about primates, students suffered through many hardships living and working in the African bush with Richard Leakey.

• Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio

Livio describes scientists who made colossal mistakes before making progress.

Just last summer, when my granddaughter was an intern in a zoology lab, she learned that every day she had to overcome the spiders that wove new webs overnight in the cages of the birds she was studying.