week 10 post 1

Week 10 post 1

Inspiring and cultivating happiness in children

Sources: 

https://childmind.org/article/how-to-help-your-child-get-motivated-in-school/n 

https://www.education.gov.gy/web/index.php/parenting-tips/item/2048-10-ways-to-motivate-your-child-to-do-better-in-school 

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_are_the_best_ways_to_prevent_bullying_in_schools 

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_the_arts_matter_for_kids_self_esteem

Motivating kids in school (use my previous knowledge to connect this back to happiness)

1. First chunk of info is from Danielle Cohen

Get involved - As a parent, your presence in the academic life of your child is crucial to her commitment to work. Do homework with her, and let her know that you’re available to answer questions. Get in the habit of asking her about what she learned in school, and generally engage her academically. By demonstrating your interest in your child’s school life, you’re showing her school can be exciting and interesting. 

Teenagers can bristle if they feel you are asking too many questions, so make sure you are sharing the details of your day, too. A conversation is always better than an interrogation.

At the same time give the kids their space so they don't feel suffocated and rebel by not doing work

Use reinforcement - rewarding kid, but using tangible rewards can be a bit of a slippery slope. “Kids respond really well to social reinforcers like praises, hugs, high fives, and those kinds of things,” says Laura Fuhrman, a neuropsychologist at the Child Mind Institute. “Then they start to achieve because it feels good for them.”

use rewarding activities that would have probably occurred either way, but placing them after a set amount of time doing homework. He suggests treats that are easy to provide but that your child will 

enjoy, such as going for ice cream or sharing a candy bar. He also recommends breaking work up in chunks and using small breaks as rewards for getting through each chunk. It doesn't have to be a tangible reinforcement

Reward effort rather than outcome

respect hard work. Praising kids for following through when things get difficult, for making a sustained effort, for trying things they’re not sure they can do successfully, can all help teach them the pleasure of pushing themselves. 

Help them see the big picture

simple reminders of their long-term goals can help push them. It can help many high school seniors who slack off after getting into college to remind them that they could lose their acceptance if their grades drop too much, or they might not be prepared for college courses.

Let them make mistakes

No one can get A’s on every test or perfect scores on every assignment. While kids need encouragement and it’s healthy to push them to try their best, know that setbacks are natural.

Ministry of education, guyana 

10 Ways to Motivate Your Child to Do Better in School

1. Keep a relationship with your kids that is open, respectful and positive. This will allow you to be most influential with them, which is your most important parenting tool. Punishing, preaching, threatening and manipulating will get you nowhere and will be detrimental to your relationship and to their ultimate motivation. 
2. Incorporate the “when you” rule. One of life’s lessons is that we get the goodies after we do the work. When you practice shooting hoops every day, you start making more baskets.
3. Identify a study spot. You may need to sit with your child while she’s doing her work or at least be nearby to help her stay on track. 
4. Break it down. Decide together whether or not it will be helpful to your child for you to help him break down his assignments into small pieces and organize on a calendar what he should get done each day.

What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in Schools?

The greater good science center

BY DIANA DIVECHA | OCTOBER 29, 2019

• All 50 U.S. states require schools to have a bullying prevention policy.
• a slight uptick in all forms of bullying during the last three years. 
• Bullying can look like experienced basketball players systematically intimidating novice players off the court, kids repeatedly stigmatizing immigrant classmates for their cultural differences, or a middle-school girl suddenly being insulted and excluded by her group of friends.    
• with my colleague Marc Brackett from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in a recent paper that reviewed dozens of studies of real-world bullying prevention efforts.
• not all approaches to bullying prevention are equally effective. Most bullying prevention programs focus on raising awareness of the problem and administering consequences.
• programs that rely on punishment and zero tolerance have not been shown to be effective in the U.S.; and they often disproportionately target students of color.
• Programs like peer mediation that place responsibility on the children to work out conflicts can increase bullying. (Adult victims of abuse are never asked to “work it out” with their tormentor, and children have an additional legal right to protections due to their developmental status.)
• Many approaches that educators adopt have not been evaluated through research; instead, educators tend to select programs based on what their colleagues use.

The 2 methods proven to be effective

Building a positive school climate

• School climate can be difficult to define, though possible to measure. It is the “felt sense” of being in a school, which can arise from a greeting, the way a problem is resolved, or how people work together; it is a school’s “heart and soul,” its “quality and character.”
• Schools with a positive climate foster healthy development, while a negative school climate is associated with higher rates of student bullying, aggression, victimization, and feeling unsafe.
•  elements of a positive climate may vary, but may often include norms about feelings and relationships, power and how it is expressed, and media consumption. Social norm engineering is a conscious process that builds a positive culture among student peers and school adults that becomes self-reinforcing. Like a healthy immune system, a positive school climate promotes optimal health and reduces the chances of dysfunction or disease.
• Leadership is key to a positive climate
• Are educators empathic to their students, and do they value children’s feelings?
• are teachers prepared to deal with bullying? Students consistently report that teachers miss most incidents of bullying and fail to help students when asked.
• reforming school climate should involve all stakeholders—students and parents, as well as the administrators and teachers—so a school’s specific issues can be addressed, and the flavor of local cultures retained. School climate assessments can be completed periodically to track the impact of improvements.

Advancing social and emotional learning

• Social and emotional learning (SEL) is well known, and involves teaching skills of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and relationships management.
• Brackett and I are affiliated with the SEL program RULER.
• cost-effective, solid results. Numerous meta-analyses, research reviews, and individual studies of hundreds of thousands of K-12 students show that SEL improves emotional well-being, self-regulation, classroom relationships, and kind and helpful behavior among students. It reduces a range of problems like anxiety, emotional distress, and depression; reduces disruptive behaviors like conflicts, aggression, bullying, anger, and hostile attribution bias; and it improves academic achievement, creativity, and leadership.
• Evidence-based SEL approaches have been shown to deliver cost-effective, solid results. Numerous meta-analyses, research reviews, and individual studies of hundreds of thousands of K-12 students show that SEL improves emotional well-being, self-regulation, classroom relationships, and kind and helpful behavior among students. It reduces a range of problems like anxiety, emotional distress, and depression; reduces disruptive behaviors like conflicts, aggression, bullying, anger, and hostile attribution bias; and it improves academic achievement, creativity, and leadership. 
• A study of 36 first-grade teachers showed that when teachers were more emotionally supportive of students, children were less aggressive and had greater behavioral self-control, compared to the use of behavior management, which did not improve student self-control.
•  One meta-analysis showed that developing emotional competence was protective against becoming a victim of bullying; social competence and academic performance were protective against becoming a bully; and positive peer interactions were protective against becoming a bully-victim (one who has been bullied and bullies others).
•  A series of longitudinal studies showed positive effects into midlife (e.g., fewer divorces, less unemployment) and even cross-generational effects of early SEL. 
• Teachers also benefit from SEL. Those with emotional and social skills training have higher job satisfaction and less burnout, show more positive emotions toward their students, manage their classrooms better, and use more strategies that cultivate creativity, choice, and autonomy in their students. Teachers report that they want more SEL support to cultivate their own emotional and social skills, and to better understand their students’ feelings. But few teacher training programs focus on growing the teachers’ emotion regulation skills

Bullying at different age levels

• SEL approaches should be developmentally wise, since what is salient and possible for children changes at different ages.
• preschoolers are expelled from school at the highest rates of all, but the neurological hardware for their self-control is only just developing. Only then are the connections between the emotion circuitry and the more thinking regions of the prefrontal cortex beginning to be myelinated (insulated for faster connectivity), something that will take until the mid 20s to complete. An SEL program like PATHS or RULER that teaches young children language for feelings, and strategies for thinking before acting, can develop better self-regulation.
• adults confuse normal developmental processes with bullying. For example, children begin to reorganize their friendships midway through elementary school, something that can naturally create hurt feelings and interpersonal conflict. It should not be misconstrued as bullying, though, which involves intentional, repeated aggression within an imbalance of power. Normal development also includes experimenting with power, and these normal dynamics should be guided safely toward developing a healthy sense of agency, rather than a hurtful exertion of power over someone else.
• the onset of puberty marks the beginning of heightened sensitivity to social relationships, an especially important time to cultivate skills for kinder, gentler relationships. Unfortunately, this is the period when bullying spikes the highest. And while some strategies work well for younger children (for example, advising them to “tell a trusted adult”), this option may fail with teens, and the breakpoint seems to be around the eighth grade. Older teens require approaches that are less didactic and leverage their need for autonomy, while affirming their values and search for meaning. 
• The SEL programs and approaches should be individualized to the kids

Schools can’t do this alone

-Adults experience bullying in their workplaces at about the same rate as children in schools, and it’s even found among teachers and in senior living communities. In other words, bullying is not just a childhood problem; it is a pervasive human problem.

- we need a substantial shift in our mindsets about the importance of children and their feelings. Children are more likely to thrive when we nurture their humanity

Why the Arts Matter for Kids’ Self-Esteem

A new study finds that kids who paint, draw, play music, or read more often feel better about themselves.

BY TOM JACOBS | OCTOBER 10, 2019

• Middle school can be tough on an adolescent’s self-esteem. Social comparison often becomes fierce, leading to feelings of unworthiness that can have negative consequences in years to come
• How can a parent help? New research suggests that one great answer is to encourage your kids to participate in the arts—or, better yet, to join them in some creative pursuit.
• The research, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, features 6,209 youngsters from the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort Study. The kids were born in the U.K. around the turn of the century; most data here came from interviews conducted during “Sweep Five,” when they were 11 years old.
• The kids completed an abbreviated version of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, which asks them to list their level of agreement or disagreement with statements such as, “I feel I have a number of good qualities.”
• They were then asked how often they (a) listen to or play music; (b) draw, paint, or make things; and (c) read for enjoyment at home. The youngsters answered using a five-point scale from “never” to “most days”; the researchers focused on differences between those who marked “most days” and the others.
• The researchers then paired each child who frequently participated in the arts with one or more who did so less often or not at all—but who otherwise had a very similar profile. Among other factors, the kids were matched for gender, ethnicity, and their parents’ educational level and employment status.
• “Among the matched sample, children who participated in arts activities most days were significantly more likely to have higher levels of self-esteem than those who participated less often,” the researchers report. This difference was doubled when the “most days” kids were compared with those who participated in the arts less than once a month.
• For reading, as well as for music-making or listening, this boost in self-esteem was limited to kids whose parents were involved in arts activities with them at least once or twice a week. Painting and drawing, however, were associated with higher self-esteem whether the parents were involved or not.
• Mak and Fancourt offer several “broad explanations” for their findings. Creating art can “validate the uniqueness of an individual, which gives rise to a sense of accomplishment and to feelings of self-worth,” they write. Also, “the arts have been shown to support a sense of social identity” and can “encourage goal-directed behavior, and enhance social resilience.
• “it is not necessary for children to be good at arts” to get the benefit of higher self-esteem: “Engagement, not ability, seems to be the key,”