The Goals That Kids Develop Depend On The Talk They Hear

Learning is an end in itself, and errors are par for the course.11 With performance goals, kids focus on getting answers right and avoiding mistakes. Often, they pit themselves against one another, in a competition to see who can finish fastest or be the best. The goals that kids develop depend on the talk they hear. The responses their teachers encourage and the subtle messages they send play a part, as do the comments from their parents and friends. And this classroom talk, I soon found, mattered. Kids who felt their classrooms emphasized mastery got better grades, did better on standardized tests, and cared more about learning than kids whose classrooms emphasized performance.12 In fact, the more kids felt their classrooms focused on performance, the worse their academic scores. When they felt they had to get the right answers, they did less well. Many kids at the start of middle school, I reasoned, pay lots of attention to how others view them. If they’re worried about not being good enough, a performance climate could make those fears worse. When children viewed their teachers as more supportive, they did better on standardized tests.

The Circle Game

Their teachers’ support, it seems, trickled down to how they felt about themselves. I came away from that research with new questions and a sense of awe. We often assume learning is about academics and feelings aren’t as important. But the way kids felt about their classrooms linked strongly to how engaged they were and how well they learned. Learning was about far more than the curriculum. With that idea in mind, I began studying preschoolers, whose brains are still more plastic, and shifted my lens to the adults in their lives. If this everyday talk mattered so much, how could we enhance it? How would kids benefit? The way we talk to kids, I reasoned, matters especially in times of high stress. But how did talk change in stressful circumstances? I recognized, in this work, how deeply factors such as poverty affect children’s abilities to learn, develop, and thrive. Parents and teachers are in no way responsible for this cycle of poverty.19,20 But what about parents? Kids are in school, surprisingly, on average less than 15 percent of their waking hours.21 The talk they hear and engage in at home sets the foundation for the rest of their lives. How did family climate, built on conversation, affect them, as much or even more than their school climates did? While still in grad school, I started working as an oral and written language specialist, as part of an interdisciplinary team at a Boston hospital.

Into The Heart

As a group of psychologists, neuropsychologists, math specialists, and others, we diagnose children with language and learning disorders and make recommendations to their parents, teachers, and schools. In our clinic, a child rotates among specialists for the better part of a day. Afterward, we spend an hour or more discussing each child’s case as group. The years of this work have given me insight into how complex a child’s journey of learning and development can be, and how important it is to see him or her from all sides. I began to view the process of understanding children as detective work. That detective work starts early on, with reading a child’s file. Then, from the moment we meet, I observe everything I can about the ways he or she speaks and interacts. This isn’t idle chatter, but a key part of seeing how she interacts with a stranger. Later on, noticing one area of strength or challenge raises questions in my mind about what other areas might be relatively weak or strong. As I find the answers to some questions, new questions rise up. Hearing from my colleagues gives me new insight. Occasionally, it upends my understanding.

It Isn't Gonna Be Easy

For example, a neurologist may show that a child has attentional difficulties that affect his ability to listen or participate. As I go, I keep my mind open, listen carefully, and try to let my picture of a child evolve. Those lessons are important ones for us as parents. As I’ve come to see, it’s not only important to know a child’s strengths and challenges, in order to help him or her thrive. These aren’t always the same as the sore spots we see. It’s not because a child believes she’s terrible in math that his teacher thinks so too, or because she feels she has no friends that she truly doesn’t. But her feelings about her strengths and weaknesses matter more than her grades or scores. They affect how she behaves at home and in class, how she relates to others, and how she feels about herself. Those feelings, rather than any one test grade, are what will make or break her over the long term. For example, I remember Michael, a child I worked with, who thought he was a poor reader. In part as a result, he didn’t want to read out loud in class and told me he wasn’t a kid who reads. It turned out that he was reading right at grade level. Understanding that situation helped Michael reframe his sense of himself. He might not be a superstar reader, but he could read just fine, and shouldn’t need to feel stressed about keeping up with the rest of the class. He can start to realize, for example, why he might be having negative thoughts. He can learn to reframe thoughts that are keeping him from trying new things. He can learn to make sense of where he’s been, in terms of his own successes and challenges, and where he’d like to go. All this, over time, can change his learning and relationships with others, and even his life trajectory. And all this change starts with the smallest moments. This experience was invaluable, but it also raised more questions. What specific conversational moves let us provide that help? How could our talk be a gateway of learning and connection? Which strategies could enrich our interactions and engage both ourselves and our kids? Inspired by those questions, I started paying more attention to the talk between parents and their children, everywhere I went. At times, I heard that talk going swimmingly.