Bringing up the children. can we just shift from praise for achievement, effort,To, a learning reaction...It helps.... 01-010

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point.

It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory.
Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable.

But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.

It seems the growth mindset has run amok. Kids are being offered empty praise for just trying. Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.

Teachers say they have a “growth mindset” because not to have one would be silly. But then they fail to teach in such a way that kids can actually develop growth mindset muscles. “It was never just effort in the abstract,” Dweck tells Quartz. “Some educators are using it as a consolation play, saying things like ‘I tell all my kids to try hard’ or ‘you can do anything if you try’.”
“That’s nagging, not a growth mindset,” she says.

The key to instilling a growth mindset is teaching kids that their brains are like muscles that can be strengthened through hard work and persistence. So rather than saying “Not everybody is a good at math. Just do your best,” a teacher or parent should say “When you learn how to do a new math problem, it grows your brain.” Or instead of saying “Maybe math is not one of your strengths,” a better approach is adding “yet” to the end of the sentence: “Maybe math is not one of your strengths yet.”

The exciting part of Dweck’s mindset research is that it shows intelligence is malleable and anyone can change their mindset. She did: growing up, she was seated by IQ in her classroom (at the front) and spent most of her time trying to look smart.

“I was very invested in being smart and thought to be smart was more important than accomplishing anything in life,” she says. But her research made her realize she could take some risks and push herself to reach her potential, or she could spend all her time trying to look smart.

She and other researchers are discovering new things about mindsets. Adults with growth mindsets don’t just innately pass those on to their kids, or students, she says, something they had assumed they would. She’s also noticed that people may have a growth mindset, but a trigger that transports them to a fixed-mindset mode. For example, criticism may make a person defensive and shut down how he or she approaches learning. It turns out all of us have a bit of both mindsets, and harnessing the growth one takes work.

Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.

In a follow-up, the kids who had more early process praise—relative to person praise—sought more challenges and did better in school. “The more they had a growth mindset in 2nd grade the better they did in 4th grade and the relationship was significant,” Dweck wrote in an email. “It’s powerful.”
Dweck was alerted to things going awry when a colleague in Australia reported seeing the growth mindset being misunderstood and poorly implemented. “When she put a label on it, I saw it everywhere,” Dweck recalls.

But it didn’t deflate her (how could it, with a growth mindset?). It energized her:

I know how powerful it can be when implemented and understood correctly. Education can be very faddish but this is not a fad. It’s a basic scientific finding, I want it to be part of what we know and what we use.

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Children who sleep more get better grades 12-31

Children who sleep more get better grades.

Sleep plays a fundamental role in the way we learn. Emerging evidence makes a compelling case for the importance of sleep for language learning, memory, executive function, problem solving and behaviour during childhood.

A new study that my colleagues and I have worked on illustrated how an optimal quantity of sleep leads to more effective learning in terms of knowledge acquisition and memory consolidation. Poor quality of sleep – caused by lots of waking up during the night – has also been reported to be a strong predictor of lower academic performance, reduced capacity for attention, poor executive function and challenging behaviours during the day.

Many adolescents are sleep-deprived as they gain less sleep than the average recommended level – around nine hours for this group. But due to school commitments, teenagers are required to wake up early at a set time even if they have not achieved the optimal number of hours sleep.

Along with these early start times, teenagers also experience pubertal phase delay – meaning pubertal teenagers will sleep even less due to biological factors. Combined with late night activities, this can have a significant negative effect on the quality of sleep and therefore their behaviour during the day.
Insufficient and poor quality of sleep appear to be pervasive during adolescence. These can have various consequences such as an excessive daytime sleepiness, poor diet and in turn impairments in cognitive control, risk-taking behaviour, diminished control of attention and behaviour, as well as poor emotional control.

More sleep versus better sleep

In a recent study involving 48 students between 16 and 19-years-old recruited through an independent sixth form college in central London, my colleagues and I at the Lifespan Learning and Sleep Laboratory at UCL examined the link between sleep, academic performance and environmental factors.

Our results showed that the majority of the teenagers achieved just over seven hours of sleep, with an average bedtime at 11.37pm. Our study showed that a longer amount of sleep and earlier bedtimes – measures of sleep quantity – were most strongly correlated with better academic results obtained by the students on a number of tests taken at school. In contrast, measures that were indicative of sleep quality were mostly linked with students’ performances on verbal reasoning tests and on grade point averages on tests at school.

So it appears from our results that "longer sleep" is more closely related to academic performance, while "good night sleep" is more closely related to overall cognitive processing.

Why teens are getting less and less sleep

Our study also confirms findings from previous research showing that teenagers are getting at least two to three hours less sleep than is needed for their optimal brain development and a healthy lifestyle.

There are several modern lifestyle factors that have shown to impact on sleep. We found that consumption of energy drinks and coffee, and social media use half an hour before habitual bedtime were strongly associated with poorer sleep.

Our study has also shown that the negative impact of poor sleep on academic functioning is not always matched by a realisation of this fact by students themselves, therefore they may have little motivation to alter bad sleep habits. Unlike for adults, adolescence is a crucial time because of continual changes in the brain – so sleep is particularly important for a teenager’s health.

Conditions that can impact sleep

There is an added complexity to the sleep patterns of children with developmental disorders, despite the fact that they are more likely to suffer from sleep problems. So far, we have examined sleep, and cognitive and behavioural functioning in children with Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome and ADHD. All our studies show that sleep has a very important impact on cognitive and daytime functioning of children with these conditions.

When we examined levels of sleep biomarkers – melatonin and cortisol – in children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, it revealed that they had elevated levels of cortisol and dampened levels of melatonin. High cortisol and low melatonin levels before bedtime were strongly linked with delayed sleep onset – taking around 50 minutes in comparison to the typical 20 minutes to fall asleep.
Since cortisol is often described as a stress hormone, high levels of this hormone before bedtime may potentially cause sleep problems including difficulty in relaxing and falling asleep. This is an important result to consider before a child is prescribed a melatonin supplement – which might not be necessary to help solve their actual sleep problem.

The effects of the sleep disturbances extend beyond the individual. Parents of children with developmental disorders often experience heightened levels of stress and sleep problems because they are kept awake by their children.

All this shows how crucial it is for teenagers to get the right amount of sleep – otherwise it could have long-term impacts on their health and on their grades.

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HOW TO LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR YOUR CHILD’S VOCABULARY GROWTH 02-15

A CONVERSATION WITH MEREDITH ROWE ABOUT 

HOW TO LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR YOUR CHILD’S VOCABULARY GROWTH

To help your baby develop a large vocabulary — to give her the tools she’ll need to read, comprehend, and make sense of the world — it’s not just talk that’s important. It’s conversation.

To be sure, parental talk of any kind is a good thing; the number of words that a child hears in infancy and toddlerhood is strongly predictive of future vocabulary growth. (Educators and policymakers have tuned in, launching initiatives that encourage parents to spend more time talking with their babies.)

But for Associate Professor Meredith Rowe, an educational psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the amount of words a child hears is just one factor, and not the most significant, in predicting future vocabulary growth.

In an important 2012 paper [PDF] and in follow-up research [PDF] published just this year, Rowe found that diversity of words is more predictive of future language skills, especially as a baby grows through toddlerhood. And it’s not just using a wide assortment of words that’s important — it’s using complex words, interactive words, and words to tell stories, explain, and imagine.

We asked Rowe to share some takeaways.

It seems pretty well established that the quantity of parental words influences children’s rate of vocabulary growth. What was your interest in moving the conversation beyond quantity to look at quality?

We’ve known for a while that the quantity of input matters. I think the shift to a focus on quality rather than quantity was a natural next step in the field. Many researchers, including myself, got to a point where we wanted to know more about themechanisms underlying language learning. Knowing that quantity of input matters is a start, but knowing more about which types of input are most useful at different ages is more informative about how children grow their vocabularies. And I think pitting the quantity and quality against each other is an important step in the conversation, and what I was trying to accomplish in that 2012 paper in Child Development. It is much easier to send a message about quantity, but if we know that quality trumps quantity, statistically, then perhaps we can really try and change the message to be more about having high-quality conversations with children rather than just “talking a lot.”

Tell us about the kinds of “quality” talk you say you’re most interested in — the use of rare words and decontextualized words.

I’m actually interested in a really wide range of what we call input quality measures, and I think one of the biggest challenges for the field is to pinpoint the specific features of input that are most beneficial for children’s language learning at different points in early childhood. Some of my work has focused on the importance of non-verbal input, specifically pointing a lot and at a lot of different things while you talk with your young children (ages 9 through 18 months).

Then, some of the work I’ve done looking at input to toddlers and preschoolers has built off of [Professor]Catherine Snow’s previous research with the Home School Study of Language and Literacy Development to show that using rare or sophisticated vocabulary words and using talk that is abstract or beyond the here and now is very helpful at these ages.

Can you give us an example of the “rare” and the “abstract”?

Often these things go hand-in-hand. So a parent might have a conversation with a three-year-old about their recent trip to the children’s museum, and they might reminisce about how much fun they had putting balls through a chute and trying to line them up at the right angle so that it worked properly. This could lead to a discussion about gravity or many other related topics. [Ed: Italics signify rare words, within the context of a “beyond-the-here-and-now” conversation.]

In that 2012 paper and in the paper that just came out in Developmental Psychology, we found that this type of decontextualized talk about the non-present predicted not only vocabulary but also children’s syntax and narrative development. And this particular type of talk with children in the toddler/preschool age range was more predictive of child language outcomes than the quantity of talk or other types of talk, and it wiped out the effect of quantity in the statistical models.

You looked at parental input in a diverse group of 50 caregiver-child pairs, assessing data collected when the child was 18 months, 30 months, and 42 months of age. Did you find wide variance? 

Parents varied widely in the quantity and quality of words they spoke to their children. For example, in a 90-minute interaction, the number of words that parents spoke to their children at 18 months ranged from 360 to over 9,200. Similarly, at 30 months, some parents did not produce any narrative utterances, whereas others produced over 250.

What factors add to the variance?

Primary caregiver education is positively related to both quantity and quality measures. On average, more highly educated parents use more words and more diverse vocabulary at each child age than less educated parents.

But there were some areas where we did not see average social class differences in input. For example, with that beneficial narrative talk about the trip to the museum, the more educated parents did not use it more, on average, than the less educated parents.

I think this is important. Different parents communicate with their children in different ways. Our goal is to inform parents and caregivers of the types of input that are most beneficial for young children’s language development. If parents are already communicating in these helpful ways, then it will be easier for them to continue to do so.

As you look at the body of work you’ve done so far, what are the broad takeaways for parents and early educators?

In a broad sense, our findings show that parents can scaffold their children’s vocabulary growth at different points in their development by providing them with exposure to different types of communication. The results suggest that beyond the quantity of their talk, parents should focus on the quality:

• With infants, pointing and labeling a variety of objects
• With toddlers, asking challenging questions and incorporating a diverse and sophisticated vocabulary
• With toddlers and preschool children, having conversations about past or future events.

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A great way to recall Nostalgic memories

Having lived and relived those awesome moments with my children, those of my brothers and sisters and grand children. These image presents an opportunity to relive those glorious and heart warming moments once again.

Do these images kindle or rekindle some nostalgic moments and take you down the memory lane???

Thanks  Grant Snider & Huff Post

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Parental controls Neural drivers identified in research on mice 05-17

Parental controls

Neural drivers identified in research on mice

It could be that the key to being a better parent is all in your head, Harvard researchers say.

In a study in mice, Catherine Dulac, the Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a Howard Hughes investigator, has pinpointed galanin neurons in the brain’s medial preoptic area (MPOA) that appear to regulate parental behavior. If similar neurons are at work in humans, it could offer clues to the treatment of conditions such as postpartum depression. The study is described in a May 15 paper published in Nature.

“If you look across different animal species, there are some species in which the father contributes to caring for the young — sometimes the work is divided equally, sometimes the father does most of the work — and there are species in which the father does nothing,” Dulac said. “The essential question is: Where is that variability coming from? We may be tempted to say that the mom has the neurons required to engage in parental behavior, and dads don’t — this paper shows that’s wrong.”

It’s long been known, Dulac said, that mice have highly stereotypical reactions to offspring. Among sexually experienced mice, both males and females build nests and groom and huddle with pups. Virgin females exhibit the same maternal behavior, while virgin males typically attack and kill pups.

Using genetic tools, graduate student Herbert Wu and other researchers in Dulac’s lab were able to activate galanin neurons in virgin males, and the results were startling.

Rather than attacking pups, the males immediately began to groom them. Other tests that killed the neurons resulted in parents that ignored the pups altogether or virgin females that behaved like males, attacking the pups.

Dulac and colleagues began exploring the roots of parenting behavior after making a surprising observation in the lab. Female mice lacking a functioning vomeronasal organ — which contains olfactory neurons responsible for certain innate behavior — suddenly behaved almost exactly like male mice.

“We came to the conclusion that what the VNO was doing in the female was repressing male-like behavior,” Dulac said. “If there is a repression of that behavior in females … we wondered if there might be a parallel system — if there are neurons in males that might drive female-like behavior, which normally are repressed.”

While the discovery of galanin neurons in the medial preoptic area suggests the answer is yes, it also raised other questions — particularly why the neurons would be present in males if they aren’t used.

What researchers found, Dulac said, is that those neurons, in fact, are used, but only after the male has mated, and they don’t become fully active until three weeks — the exact gestation period of mice pups — after mating occurs.

“The dad won’t kill the pups after three weeks, because they may very well be his own offspring,” Dulac said. “Even if you remove males immediately after mating and segregate them from females, it’s very striking — half of them will behave paternally after three weeks. Simply mating seems to trigger some sort of clock, and that leads to paternal behavior.”

Though it’s not yet clear whether similar neural pathways exist in humans, researchers say galanin neurons are concentrated in a brain region responsible for many innate behaviors, such as feeding and sleep, and that other neurons in the region have been shown to be conserved from mice across many mammal species, including humans.

“I would be extremely surprised if these neurons did not exist in humans,” Dulac said. “What does that mean? It says that mothers can do it, and fathers can do it. What is really interesting, I think, is you now have an instinctive behavior — and a very important social behavior — and we have access to how it’s being regulated.”

Understanding how parental behavior is regulated, Dulac said, opens the door to a greater understanding of how that behavior can break down.

“It is known that postpartum depression has a very close association with stress levels, particularly among first-time mothers,” Dulac said. “One interesting hypothesis is that these galanin neurons in the MPOA have stress hormone receptors that can inhibit their function. These are the type of questions we can now address directly, because we know which neurons are controlling parental behavior.”

Areas that demand further study, Dulac said, include understanding how galanin neurons are connected to brain centers involved in motivation, stress, and reward; how — and whether — genes associated with the neurons are expressed differently in males and females; and what is happening in male brains in the three weeks after mating.

“Parental behavior is many things,” Dulac said. “It’s grooming, it’s building a nest, it’s protecting the pups — the male is able to do all of those. What this says is that in the male brain, they have the neurons to be paternal, but somehow those neurons are repressed. But we can now say, yes, dads can do it.”

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How to give your kids everything but a sense of entitlement 01-13

How to give your kids everything but a sense of entitlement

Kids who understand gratitude have better grades and are less likely to get depressed. This was the conclusion of a recent story in the Wall Street Journal that struck a chord with both my husband and me.

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Both of us hail from immigrant families who arrived to the US in the 1970s. Both of us grew up poor. When I was a kid, everything we owned was either a hand-me-down or picked up from the curb. My husband and I share stories of being shaped as latch-key kids with no toys and high-water jeans.

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I hesitated starting a toy-review blog because I knew my kids would be testing and playing with most of the toys. New toys. Lots of them. I feared too many toys would make them ungrateful or, as others might say, “spoiled.” The idea of spoiling kids is incongruous to the parent I want to be. And yet, I still give them toys because I love them (the toys and the kids) so much.

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So parents like me face this dilemma: We want to give our children everything we didn’t have. But we don’t want them to forget where they came from either. The truth is, though, that I learned gratitude because it was forced on me: My parents simply didn’t have material things to give me so I learned to be thankful for the little we had. So by giving my kids what I never had—toys, snow boots, fashionable jeans—would they be destined to become ungrateful?

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The question has consumed me for much of the last year, and so, the Wall Street Journal article was timely. It encourages families to make their children do chores and express thanks for their meals and other gestures. But I have young kids and those tactics felt too abstract.

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And so, I turned to the best tools I have to make my kids understand: toys. Kids do not know how big or little your paycheck is. Kids do not understand what income tax or health insurance deductibles are either. However, they do know how much a Nintendo DS game cartridge costs. They know how much a Wii costs. Or a slice of pizza or a bottle of Gatorade. This is their vocabulary—their understanding of values in our material world. We can work with that. And to get our kids to understand the meaning of gratitude, we must.

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If kids cut the veggies, they will eat them

The two areas I wanted to most impart gratitude: food and play. With food, my kids were horribly picky and wasteful. It was getting out of hand and so I sought help from Susan Roberts, a pediatric occupational therapist and author of My Kid Eats Everything. She told me kids eat horrible diets today because they are just being “fed.”

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“It is such a passive process now,” she says. In the past, until about the mid-20th century, kids joined families in the kitchen, helping to prepare food, setting the table, clearing the table, and washing the dishes. Among the, as Roberts terms them, “multi-causal factors that have contributed to the decline in children being involved in meal preparation and clean up” are: changes in agriculture making it easier for restaurants to sell food cheaply, the increase in convenience stores, and more women at work. 

“People eat out much more often,” she said, so kids are not eating what’s available, they are ordering what they want. Roberts actually tells families that even if they go out to restaurants, the parents should still order the food for the child. “We have to put the parents back in charge of food. Right now, it’s the children who are in charge so of course, they’re going to eat gummy bears and goldfish crackers.” Long ago, Roberts reminds, children even caught their family’s food.

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Two products that helped me involve my kids in cooking: doodle by Stitch aprons and Curious Chef knives. These are not play kitchen toys.  The doodle (the brand is lowercase) aprons are $24 adjustable aprons made to fit children. Children can write on them, wash them, and then re-use them. Meanwhile, the knife ($3.99) by Curious Chef is also a great tool. Made of nylon, you can literally clench the blade and not get hurt—but it still can cut cheese, meat, celery, etc.

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For my eldest son, a 9-year-old, we laid out a mission: to grill our July 4th barbecue cheeseburgers. As we began our very first step—buying food–I suddenly understood how this could work. In the butcher shop, my son asked me where the “round circle” hamburgers were. He had no idea what ground beef really looked like or how it was made. I was ashamed. And then I showed him.

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At home, he donned his personalized apron and got to work, cracking eggs and kneading the meat with his bare hands. I thought he would be grossed out but he was beaming with pride. He formed and grilled the patties, sliced the tomatoes, and babysat his burgers, feeling scared occasionally from the heat on the grill. I don’t think I have ever seen my son eat a burger so fast in his life. He watched all of us eat ours, too. He was so grateful, he even washed the dishes.

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Lego lessons on money

Teaching my children to be grateful for their toys was very challenging because they just have so many.  So I decided to challenge them with the one they love the most: Legos.

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I had noticed that my children were expecting me to buy them one set after another. They are often gorgeous and elaborate, ranging from remote- controlled passenger trains to majestic models of famous buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Eiffel Tower. This year, Lego launched a Disney Princess line with a set that resembles Cinderella’s castle at Disney theme parks. 

Even the smallest details of a set, like wine goblets, roast chickens, antennae, almost always connect with a signature, satisfactory Lego snap. Kids like mine are infatuated with those details and, thus, with Lego overall. The problematic part I noticed was that when my kids tried to make something using solely their own creativity, they became quickly dissatisfied with their attempt and then they would start asking me to buy them more sets.

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My first instinct was to swear off Lego, but I have always resolved to be fair and honest with my kids. To pretend to not be able to afford certain things is not a good lesson either and hardly will teach them gratitude. I decided to make them more grateful for their current collection and get them to see them as a strategic investment.

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As with our our July 4th cheeseburgers, I brought my children in on the buying process. I decided to physically bring them to an actual brick-and-mortar Lego store and teach them how to shop smart. Now that I shop for everything online, I forget what kind of impact shopping with the kids can have. Kids can never grow up to be good consumers unless I teach them how to recognize value and quality and there is no better medium for teaching kids this than with the subject in which they have the most expertise: toys.

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Once at the Lego store, we headed to the Pick A Brick Wall. They watched other children dumping handfuls of bricks into containers that customers could buy for a fixed price ($7.99 for the small and $14.99 for the large).  My kids were about to do the same but I asked them to be more mindful about what they wanted to make and how many bricks they could actually fit into the container. This was incredibly difficult for them.

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Just like a kid in a candy store, the Pick A Brick Wall can be overwhelming. You can easily get greedy and forget why you are there, that is, to get a lot of bricks and to get the ones you really want. The space within the container is finite and so was our time. I gave the kids two options: get the small container and not be questioned about its contents or the bigger container but only if they followed my lesson on being resourceful. 

I would pay for only one option. They chose the latter. So to gain the most value for our money, I asked them to snap a row of same-color bricks together and then carefully place them into the container. It was a time-consuming process, best done sitting on the floor of the store.

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Once they started, though, it was so obvious to my children that they could put a lot more bricks and pieces in with this method. The store employees smiled and said that they have never seen anyone do that before. Passerby parents asked their kids to do the same; none of them would. My kids started to become embarrassed but I reminded them of that other option—a smaller container and fewer Legos.

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After all that hard work of stacking as many as 270 (1×4) bricks into that one container, they poured in their favorite pieces into the many gaps between the stacks. These were tiny translucent studs that they use as “treasures” when they play. Since then, my kids have become more enthusiastic about building and take better care of the bricks they own.

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Now, they always go to their favorite bricks first, the ones they worked so hard to get. At least for their beloved Lego bricks, they certainly are grateful.  I also constantly remind them that the minute they stop showing gratitude for their toys is the minute I start packing them up to send away to relatives or for donation. Or sometimes, while they are off at school, I will just pack up the toys and games that haven’t been touched and, months later, mysteriously bring them out again.

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As parents, despite wanting to give our kids everything, one of the greatest gifts we can give is to literally give less, to force decision-making and awareness among all their choices. We need to have more faith in them and let them be challenged. It’s not easy to watch your kids struggle—but in the end, it does breed gratitude.  And there is no question that these lessons are most effective if you start early and consistently through every child’s primary occupation: play.

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How I made sure all 12 of my kids could pay for college themselves 01-13

How I made sure all 12 of my kids could pay for college themselves

My wife and I had 12 children over the course of 15 1/2 years. Today, our oldest is 37 and our youngest is 22.  I have always had a very prosperous job and enough money to give my kids almost anything. But my wife and I decided not to.

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I will share with you the things that we did, but first let me tell you the results: All 12 of my children have college degrees (or are in school), and we as parents did not pay for it. Most have graduate degrees. Those who are married have wonderful spouses with the same ethics and college degrees, too. We have 18 grandchildren who are learning the same things that our kids learned—self respect, gratitude, and a desire to give back to society.

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We raised our family in Utah, Florida, and California; my wife and I now live in Colorado. In March, we will have been married 40 years. I attribute the love between us as a part of our success with the children. They see a stable home life with a commitment that does not have compromises.

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Here’s what we did right (we got plenty wrong, too, but that’s another list):

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Chores

• Kids had to perform chores from age 3. A 3-year-old does not clean toilets very well but by the time he is 4, it’s a reasonably good job.
• They got allowances based on how they did the chores for the week.
• We had the children wash their own clothes by the time they turned 8. We assigned them a wash day.
• When they started reading, they had to make dinner by reading a recipe. They also had to learn to double a recipe.
• The boys and girls had to learn to sew.

Study time

Education was very important in our family.

• We had study time from 6 to 8pm every week day. No television, computer, games, or other activities until the two hours were up. If they had no homework, then they read books. For those too young to be in school, we had someone read books to them. After the two hours, they could do whatever they wanted as long as they were in by curfew.
• All the kids were required to take every Advanced Placement class there was. We did not let entrance scores be an impediment. We went to the school and demanded our kids be let in. Then we, as parents, spent the time to ensure they had the understanding to pass the class. After the first child, the school learned that we kept our promise that the kids could handle the AP classes.
• If children would come home and say that a teacher hated them or was not fair, our response was that you need to find a way to get along. You need find a way to learn the material because in real life, you may have a boss that does not like you. We would not enable children to “blame” the teacher for not learning, but place the responsibility for learning the material back on the child. Of course, we were alongside them for two hours of study a day, for them to ask for help anytime.

Picky eaters not allowed

• We all ate dinner and breakfast together. Breakfast was at 5:15am and then the children had to do chores before school. Dinner was at 5:30pm.
• More broadly, food was interesting. We wanted a balanced diet, but hated it when we were young and parents made us eat all our food. Sometimes we were full and just did not want to eat anymore. Our rule was to give the kids the food they hated most first (usually vegetables) and then they got the next type of food. They did not have to eat it and could leave the table. If later they complained they were hungry, we would get out that food they did not want to eat, warm it up in the microwave, and provide it to them. Again, they did not have to eat it. But they got no other food until the next meal unless they ate it.
• We did not have snacks between meals. We always had the four food groups (meat, dairy, grain, fruits and vegetables) and nearly always had desert of some kind. To this day, our kids are not afraid to try different foods, and have no allergies to foods. They try all kinds of new foods and eat only until they are full. Not one of our kids is even a little bit heavy. They are thin, athletic, and very healthy. With 12 kids, you would think that at least one would have some food allergies or food special needs. (I am not a doctor.)

Extracurriculars

• All kids had to play some kind of sport. They got to choose, but choosing none was not an option. We started them in grade school. We did not care if it was swimming, football, baseball, fencing, tennis, etc. and did not care if they chose to change sports. But they had to play something.
• All kids had to be in some kind of club: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, history, drama, etc.
• They were required to provide community service. We would volunteer within our community and at church. For Eagle Scout projects, we would have the entire family help. Once we collected old clothes and took them to Mexico and passed them out. The kids saw what life was like for many families and how their collections made them so happy and made a difference.

Independence

• When the kids turned 16, we bought each a car. The first one learned what that meant. As the tow truck pulled a once “new” car into the driveway, my oldest proclaimed: “Dad, it is a wreck!” I said, “Yes, but a 1965 Mustang fastback wreck. Here are the repair manuals. Tools are in the garage. I will pay for every part, but will not pay for LABOR.”
•  Eleven months later, the car had a rebuilt engine, rebuilt transmission, newly upholstered interior, a new suspension system, and a new coat of paint. My daughter (yes, it was my daughter) had one of the hottest cars at high school. And her pride that she built it was beyond imaginable. (As a side note, none of my kids ever got a ticket for speeding, even though no car had less than 450 horsepower.)
• We as parents allowed kids to make mistakes. Five years before the 16th birthday and their “new” car gift, they had to help out with our family cars. Once I asked my son, Samuel, to change the oil and asked if he needed help or instruction. “No, Dad, I can do it.” An hour later, he came in and said, “Dad, does it take 18 quarts of oil to change the oil?”
•   I asked where did he put 18 quarts of oil when normally only five were needed. His response: “That big screw on top at the front of the engine.”  I said “You mean the radiator?” Well, he did not get into trouble for filling the radiator with oil. He had to drain it, we bought a radiator flush, put in new radiator fluid, and then he had to change the real oil. 
• We did not ground him or give him any punishment for doing it “wrong.” We let the lesson be the teaching tool. Our children are not afraid to try something new.  They were trained that if they do something wrong they will get not get punished. It often cost us more money, but we were raising kids, not saving money.
• The kids each got their own computer, but had to build it. I bought the processor, memory, power supply, case, keyboard, hard drive, motherboard, and mouse. They had to put it together and load the software on. This started when they were 12.
• We let the children make their own choices, but limited. For example, do you want to go to bed now or clean your room? Rarely, did we give directives that were one way, unless it dealt with living the agreed-upon family rules. This let the child feel that she had some control over life.

In it together

• We required the children to help each other. When a fifth grader is required to read 30 minutes a day, and a first grader is required to be read to 30 minutes a day, have one sit next to the other and read. Those in high school calculus tutored those in algebra or grade-school math.
• We assigned an older child to a younger child to teach them and help them accomplish their weekly chores.
• We let the children be a part of making the family rules. For example, the kids wanted the rule that no toys were allowed in the family room. The toys had to stay either in the bedroom or playroom. In addition to their chores, they had to all clean their bedroom every day (or just keep it clean in the first place). These were rules that the children wanted. We gave them a chance each month to amend or create new rules. Mom and Dad had veto power of course.
• We tried to be always consistent. If they had to study two hours every night, we did not make an exception to it. Curfew was 10pm during school nights and midnight on non-school nights. There were no exceptions to the rules.

Vacation policy

• We would take family vacations every summer for two or three weeks. We could afford a hotel, or cruise, but did not choose those options. We went camping and backpacking. If it rained, then we would figure out how to backpack in the rain and survive. We would set up a base camp at a site with five or six tents, and I would take all kids age 6 or older on a three- to five-day backpack trip. 
• My wife would stay with the little ones. Remember, for 15 years, she was either pregnant or just had a baby. My kids and I hiked across the Grand Canyon, to the top of Mount Whitney, across the Continental Divide, across Yosemite.
• We would send kids via airplane to relatives in Europe or across the US for two or three weeks at a time. We started this when they were in kindergarten. It would take special treatment for the airlines to take a 5-year-old alone on the plane and required people on the other end to have special documentation.
•  We only sent the kids if they wanted to go. However, with the younger ones seeing the older ones travel, they wanted to go. The kids learned from an early age that we, as parents, were always there for them, but would let them grow their own wings and fly.

Money and materialism

• Even though we have sufficient money, we have not helped the children buy homes, pay for education, pay for weddings (yes, we do not pay for weddings either). We have provided extensive information on how to do it or how to buy rental units and use equity to grow wealth. We do not “give” things to our children but we give them information and teach them “how” to do things. We have helped them with contacts in corporations, but they have to do the interviews and “earn” the jobs.
• We give birthday and Christmas presents to the kids. We would play Santa Claus but as they got older, and would ask about it, we would not lie.  We would say it is a game we play and it is fun. We did and do have lists for items that each child would like for presents. Then everyone can see what they want. With the internet, it is easy to send such lists around to the children and grandchildren. Still, homemade gifts are often the favorite of all.

The real world

• We loved the children regardless of what they did. But would not prevent consequences of any of their actions. We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions.

We were and are not our kids’ best friends.  We were their parents.

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