How to Be Human

by Ruby Wax

  Be aware that, from babyhood onwards, when you say something, your kid will not just hear your words but pick up your feelings underneath. If you happen to wince whenever you’re talking about spinach, spiders or your mother-in-law, they’ll also start to wince around those things. If you’re not aware, your feelings about practically everything will be encoded in their brains, and they won’t know why they’ve ended up scared of spiders, hating spinach or thinking Grandma is a bitch. And you don’t just pass on the wincing, you pass on your feelings of inadequacy, distress, dread, rage, shame, and so on. If you’ve passed on some of these attributes, remember it’s never too late to rewind and recode for both of you. Once you’re aware of what you’re passing on, everything changes. Insight is the name of the game.

  For all you parents who are nervous about how smart your kids are, my tip is, rather than forcing them to learn by whispering Mandarin into their ears while they sleep, focus your attention on building your relationship with them so that, when your child feels hurt or stupid, they’ll come to you, knowing you can handle it without flying off the rails. When a child picks up on a parent’s pain, they absorb that pain to keep up the belief that their parents are all-powerful and unbreakable. If the child thinks a parent is flawed, he or she will feel unsafe; pain is preferable to feeling fearful. When they’re very young, they believe they’re the culprit who makes Mommy or Daddy upset. Later, they believe Mommy and Daddy are the culprits who upset everyone.

  The Greatest Things You Can Teach Your Child (Things I Wish I’d Known Before)

  Long-term studies show that a child’s future success can be boosted by teaching them emotional and social skills. These skills are the most important … outside of learning Mandarin.

  Teach your kids to resist instant gratification. If you can teach them to control their impulses, it will benefit them throughout their lives. Research was done on three-year-olds and their progress followed for thirty years. It was found that those who developed self-control had better physical health, were better educated and attained a higher level of achievement. Children without the skills to delay reward were more prone to drug use, had more chance of engaging in criminality and had a lower standard of living.

  Teach your kids to pay attention. If you teach them to focus, they’ll be more able to filter distractions, especially in this age of information, where trillions of bits are incoming each moment. When you pay attention, stress levels lower, and that’s about as good as it gets so far as passing something useful down to your kids goes.

  Teach your kids empathy, to try and imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes; to feel and think how another person does. This nips bigotry in the bud.

  How to Develop Your Child’s Brain (Things I Wish I’d Known Before)

  I like to have physical evidence of what’s happening in the brain to validate any advice I give or take on how to make your kid a better human being. If I can’t see it, I’m not buying it. I’m not going to crack open my child’s brain, but I like to get a rough idea of the interior landscape.

  Link up the left and right sides of the brain. Every human comes equipped with a left and right side of their brain. The left side helps them to organize and make sense of their thoughts; the right allows them to pick up the vibes of a situation; get the bigger picture and what’s going on below the words, deduced through tone, posture, facial expressions and insinuation.

  The left side can make sense and put into words what the right, emotional, side is experiencing. If a child is swamped by emotions, unless someone helps them, they’ll just wade deeper and deeper into self-doubt and chaos. So, when your child is floundering mentally, it’s you who’ll help them find the words and make sense of the feelings. Like a translator for a hurricane.

  To tune into your kid’s right brain, link up with them by using your own right brain, which picks up clues about their feelings through facial expressions, movements and tone of voice (specialities of the right brain). This is called right-to-right attunement. Eighty per cent of all communication is done by these below-the-radar clues, rather than speech.

  This right-to-right attunement is when the parent connects biologically with the child by mirroring emotions back to them, making them feel understood. Then, the parent can redirect the feelings from the child’s right brain to their left (by using their own left brain) to help the child figure out a logical explanation and put their feelings into words. When the right and left brain hook up, the feeling of helplessness and confusion passes and balance returns.

  Link up the older to the newer brain. Your child has a limbic brain (as you do), which is perfect for those quick, fast responses we need to survive. What they don’t have at birth is the more evolved, higher prefrontal cortex. Your job as a parent or caregiver is to help your child grow that part, which isn’t completely developed until they reach their mid-twenties. So not only are you helping to integrate the right with the left side of the brain, you’re also aiming to combine and coordinate the top with the bottom to create a well-balanced brain. All this integration has to be taught by the parent for the child to learn how to make better decisions, gain self-control, hold off from instant gratification and regulate their emotions. You mould your kid’s destiny.

  When the Going Gets Tough (Things I Wish I’d Known Before)

  Your kid will have tantrums, just as sure as they’ll grow toenails. What you might not know is there are two types of tantrums, one an eruption from the higher brain, the other from the lower.

  The higher one is when your kid throws a fit to get their own way, acting out a scene but aware they’re acting. They know exactly how to manipulate you to get what they want. If you give in, you’re making a big mistake. This is the time to send in the troops and set the boundaries by saying you understand the frustration but rules are rules and, if they don’t stop misbehaving, they’ll be locked away in a tower and given a poisoned apple … or you could decide to be less crazy and just tell them to go to their room.

  The lower-brain tantrum needs a completely different approach. If your kid has gone into ‘full hissy’, awash in cortisol, all reason has left the building. Now, all you’re left with is a baby rampaging bull, so either physically move them away from people they might disturb or, if no one’s around, remove yourself. When they’ve calmed down, choose your moment to discuss what happened. Without being demonstrative, ask them to describe the stages that led up to the outburst and what you could do the next time to help. Let them try to figure it out themselves so they become adept at problem solving. If they refuse to discuss it, just inform them in a calm tone of voice that if they disrespect someone or throw things, that behaviour is unacceptable. Stay consistent in your reactions. If you fluctuate, the bull will stampede you.

  Here are a few tips on how to reconnect when your kid’s emotions have gone into hyper-drive.

  Empathize

  The next time your kid is in crisis, say because their turtle died, rather than saying, ‘Pull yourself together, for God’s sake, turtles die,’ you could help them express themselves by mentioning that they look sad, or tell them you can imagine how bad they feel because you had a turtle once too. (Even if you didn’t have a turtle, just say it.)

  Physical contact

  If your kid is hysterical, don’t try to talk sense into them – there is no sense in them. Try to hug them (not hard, even though you may want to strangle them). Even with a light touch, cortisol levels reduce, oxytocin levels increase. If they are in hyper hissy-fitting mode, do not hug them, it will drive them even more crazy.

  Make faces

  Use non-verbal signals such as empathetic facial expressions, a soft tone of voice and listen non-judgementally. But make sure you’re not unconsciously trying to make things better by making a ‘boo hoo’ sad-clown face. They will only hate you for that one.

  Physical distraction

  If the hysteria continues, point out something novel or funny that might make them switch their attention
. You could suggest a piggyback ride to gallop them out of their misery.

  Storytelling

  Later, when the storm has passed, maybe ask your child to tell you a story about what just happened. You can show empathy by interjecting (but not too much) phrases like ‘I wonder how that felt for you …’ Let them fill in the blank how-it-was-for-them. The fear isn’t so overwhelming once they’ve named the pain.

  Draw it

  If they don’t want to talk about it, maybe suggest they draw or paint a picture of how they felt or are feeling. The unconscious has a way of sneaking out when you have a crayon in your hand.

  Let them blow off steam

  To release the fuse, you could suggest jumping jacks, going for a run, playing a ball game, cycling, throwing eggs … You change the emotional state by changing the physical state.

  Lay off

  Sometimes, they need to be alone and really don’t want to talk. Check that out as an option if nothing’s working. The instinct is always to make things better but, sometimes, it’s better to let them figure things out.

  Teachers

  I’d like to put in my two cents about how I think teachers should teach. Children’s brains are like landmines that can go off later in life if they’re put under too much pressure. It starts in school, where they’re forced to achieve even if they have absolutely no interest in a subject. Intelligence at school is determined by whether you have the skills to memorize facts and spew them out during exams. I call it ‘mental vomiting’. And some of the teachers I had, rather than figuring out how to make something compelling by using a little imagination, ended up making me hate the subject they were teaching.

  My Story

  I was fascinated by volcanoes in sixth grade. Mr Viveric, a great-looking teacher with a great personality, told us to create our own volcano. He gave us no instructions on how to build one and set no limits. I spent weeks on it, obsessed, and finally brought in an eight-foot volcano made of papier mâché. I don’t know how I knew how to make what would today be called a bomb, but I did. When I lit the match, my volcano not only erupted but started to burn the ceiling down. I got expelled (again). If I had been rewarded for knowing not only how to build a bomb but also how to defuse it, I’m sure, later in life, I would have been asked to join the Special Forces but, thanks to the narrow-minded educational system, I am now a comedian.

  So much could be taught through games rather than this thing we call ‘homework’. Why can’t teachers make learning about things like volcanoes fun? What’s more fun than volcanoes? If you are forced to write a paper on their geological origins and get an A, you’ll probably lose your mojo. Plato knew all this back in BC. Why can’t we get it into our heads? He said, ‘Study forced on the mind will not abide there … Train your children in their studies not by compulsion but by games.’

  How to Teach Kids

  Games

  Most parents automatically know how to excite their babies, when, for example, they play peekaboo. The baby gets a jolt of an ‘aha!’ moment from the surprise of seeing the mother’s face pop out, so learning something new becomes associated with something thrilling. The excitement of new information comes with a hit of dopamine as a reward. Once you’ve got them motivated, they’ll want to learn more and more to get another hit of that dopamine.

  A note here: I don’t think it’s an addiction when you want to learn more. I don’t know anyone who’s an addict to knowledge and, if they are, they’re helping the world. I say, go ahead, give them as many hits of information as they want. If the teacher or parent gets the cocktail of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and endorphins right, a child will be like a magnet for incoming knowledge.

  Change the environment and method of teaching

  Investigate which learning environments and study methods work best for your child. We aren’t all proficient at learning while we’re sitting stationary. Remember: our forefathers learned about nature, food, weather, architecture and survival by being mobile. We all have a unique way of memorizing and taking in facts. My daughter could memorize facts if she sang them aloud. So I let her sing. Sadly, they didn’t let her sing during her A levels, so she didn’t do so well. Another kid may learn better when they walk around. I do my best work in the shower or in bed.

  I know these individual methods would cause havoc but maybe someone, someday, could think about dividing a classroom between singers and walkers. If it’s too disruptive, at least experiment at home by encouraging your child to find their own methods. This is especially relevant for kids who have learning difficulties. Just help them find the key to unlock their interest and watch what happens.

  Tribal classrooms

  We are at our happiest when we work in tribes; that’s how we thrived and survived. Let’s bring a little of that into the twenty-first century. An effective way to teach kids is to encourage them to work together as a team, and not to pick out the strong from the weak. They’ll work harder and help each other when they know they’re working for the good of the gang. The goal is for the kids who are lagging behind to be taught by the smarter ones.

  Creative thinking

  Schools should give high marks for thinking out of the box. The teacher should ask why the students answered the questions the way they did and, if it’s imaginative and original, give them a high grade. If someone keeps getting disapproval because of a bad grade, they shut down and no longer feel safe to explore other options. If you repeatedly tell someone they’re not doing well, they will underperform. Also, gold stars should be given to young kids for waiting their turn, sharing their toys and demonstrating that all-important emotional intelligence.

  Teach them how to fail

  They are going to fail at some point in their lives, so get them ready. Most of the kids who got the straight A’s in my high school are now out of their minds, probably because they were pushed to the limit at the age of two. I went back to find out what happened to the Prom Queen of my high school – cokehead. I swear to God I didn’t smirk. (Maybe a little.)

  My Story

  When I was in high school, very few teachers knew how to capture my interest. During classes, I was so bored I’d doodle on the walls, using mustard as my medium. If only a teacher had noticed this early talent rather than getting me expelled, I could have been another Jackson Pollock. Sometimes they should focus on what you’re good at rather than what you’re bad at. Once you can pay attention to something, even if it’s looking at bugs on the windowsill, you should be applauded because the ability to pay attention is one of the greatest skills of all, so if you’re rewarded for being able to hold focus, rather than on your results, you should get a gold star.

  ‘Difficult’ kids

  Those who are considered difficult children usually come from chaotic backgrounds; they’re in so much turmoil, they don’t have up-to-scratch social skills or high levels of concentration. The memory doesn’t function well if a person is under stress, so learning is difficult. What looks like bad behaviour on the surface is usually fear and anxiety, along with an inability to regulate emotions. Children learn best when they feel protected and connected. You can compensate for a lack of nurturing in early life by gaining the child’s trust. This cools down their chaotic mind and opens them up to information, because now they feel safe. I said earlier that all of us have a leaning towards negative thinking; if you give five positive statements and one is slightly critical, it’s the critical one that’s remembered. With difficult kids, aim to give them a lot more positive feedback than you might otherwise. Find out which areas they might be creative in and let them teach you.

  A Reality Check

  I want to flag up a few facts. The average unemployment rate after leaving university is about 15 per cent, and as high as 22 per cent in some areas. I think it might be an idea for kids to learn occupational skills that will ensure they get a job later: plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Then go to places like Notting Hill Gate or Hampstead and name their price. Everyone there is
desperate for good tradesmen. I’m sure some time in the near future, plumbers will be the new bankers.

  Another fact: 65 per cent of eight-year-olds will work in jobs that don’t as yet exist, so why hot house them for something that will be redundant? Why are we pushing kids to learn subjects they probably won’t need in their future? The skills of the future will probably be about being creative and thinking out of the box. Those who can do those ‘soft’ skills won’t be replaced by a machine. Imagination may become a valued commodity. ‘Thinkers out of the box’ will go to Harvard or Yale.

  A machine won’t know how to empathize, how to read what another person is thinking. Computers can identify a face but not what’s going on underneath it. Empathy becomes the new literacy. These days, those with people skills are the rising stars because, in this global world, you have to know how other people think and feel.

  Businesses look for leaders with ‘people skills’ because, no matter how intelligent someone is, if they can’t relate to other humans, they’re not going to float and neither is the company they work for. Creating trust should be as highly rated as hitting money targets. Cooperation, curiosity and good communication skills are the ‘it’ girls.

  A Short Note on Teenagers (Things I Wish I’d Known Before)