by Guy Claxton
Empathy is the capacity of seeing the world from someone else’s perspective. For a parent, learning to listen to your child with empathy is one of the hardest things to do. It is all too easy either to jump in and give advice or to cut short a child’s distressed explanation because we want to reassure him or her. Much of what empathic listeners do is non-verbal. Short noises like ‘uh-huh’, ‘mmm’, ‘ahh’, with small nods of the head and an absolute focus on what the speaker is saying are important. A useful technique widely used in counselling is to try to paraphrase what you think you have heard and offer it back to your child: “So, it sounds like you’re pretty unhappy about …”, “I’m wondering if you might be feeling …” or “It sounds like you are thinking about …” With some careful listening you can keep narrowing the focus of your paraphrasing until you are pretty confident you have caught the nub of what they are saying. There are various games and activities that you can use to develop your child’s empathy. Examples include pinning names of famous characters on the back of a child with them having to guess who it is, games like What’s My Line? and role play between different real and imaginary people.
You can’t teach kindness. That’s a bold statement, but we believe it to be true in the sense that there is no simple training activity you can employ. Rather, it requires careful choice of language to select adjectives that are more generous than they are critical (“She must be going through a really tough time” rather than “Isn’t Aunty Helen being really cranky?”). As well as modelling it also invites us to correct our children by offering kinder versions of critical statements they may make, as well as looking for examples from your family or in the news of kind behaviour on which you can provide a commentary. And, of course, actions speak louder than words. The way you treat your partner/spouse, as well as your wider family and friends, will be a strong influence on your children. Some homes give reward systems, for example for chores. It is also possible to use the same system for acts of kindness.
Being convivial does not mean that you can never criticise others. On the contrary, as we have suggested, feedback is one of the most effective means by which we learn and grow. Rather, it’s a question of how you give and receive critical comments. In terms of giving it is helpful to find positive things to notice first, to focus on one or two specific things and to be sure that you suggest a way of doing things differently. When it comes to suggesting different courses of action a phrase we like is: “You might like to …” In terms of receiving feedback the most important gift you can give your child is not to act defensively. By means of both body language and words, show them how important it is just to listen and learn. That’s not to say that all feedback is accurate! You can help your child accept what she hears but also have the inner confidence to be critical of her actions in a different way from the feedback giver. Giving and receiving feedback has to be practised so that individuals find the words and body language which are most suited to them and therefore have the ring of authenticity.
A good book to read is Raising Caring, Capable Kids with Habits of Mind by Lauren Carner and Angela Ladavaia-Cox.3
Communication
Being communicative is very important. So much unhappiness stems from accidental misunderstandings or careless explanations. Top of many parents’ worry list is a perception that either their children can’t communicate with them or they can’t get through to their children. Teenagers have got a bad name (with some justification!) for the grunts and mumbling which they may offer their parents in response to questions. Sometimes this is partly the result of what parents do – for example, the parent who pounces on their child freshly home from school to demand what they did at school (a sure turn-off, sadly). Sometimes it is a deliberate tactic of children to keep their parents in blissful ignorance of their misdemeanours. “Yeah, whatever” is a current favourite push-back, but by the time you read this there will be new variants! It turns out that being able to communicate well with your children, especially during adolescence, is a strong influence on their performance at school.
At the most personal level, being able to name and talk about feelings is fundamentally important. There is no short cut to finding opportunities for your child to experience and then give a name to the full range of feelings. Without this they cannot express themselves effectively. In the early years the Roger Hargreaves characters are wonderful (Mr Happy, Mr Grumpy, etc.). Then you can speculate on what others might be feeling in stories, in the news and in your own family. Always you are trying to create a climate in which children feel able to express their feelings and be listened to as they do so. A harder and equally important lesson for children is the realisation that no one can make them feel something. Even if they are angry or sad, they have choices. They can lash out or be quiet or plan to do something different. Once children can recognise and name their feelings they are well on the way to recognising their own trigger points and ‘sore spots’, which tend to cause them to react in ways which are less helpful, and start to find better ways of dealing with them.
Communication is not a context-free zone! It involves learning how to offer opinions. Some children seem to find this easy (for them, not always offering their opinion is the challenge). Most children have opinions but do not always know how or when to share them. Around the kitchen table is the perfect location for children to practise. Or it can be done as a game: for example, playing Just a Minute (or Just a Half Minute if 60 seconds seems too long at first). At some point your child will be asked to prepare a speech or presentation at school, and it will be all the harder for them if they haven’t practised already in the safety of the home.
While the kitchen, bedroom, classroom and playground may be the main early environments for children, there are many other situations in which they will need to learn to match their language to their audience. This can easily be rehearsed, simulated and practised at home using role play and games. At the simplest level, when your child has a tricky situation (e.g. feeling they have been unfairly treated by a teacher or by a friend) you can get them to rehearse with you different ways in which they might have a conversation. You can show them how, through their choice of different forms of words, they may get very different responses. You can have lots of fun with this!
A really practically helpful book is Stick Up for Yourself by Gershen Kaufman.4
Creativity
Being creative is one of the ways in which your child will be able to distinguish himself or herself from their peers. It involves having good ideas, dealing with uncertainty and being able to make links between apparently unconnected things. A number of well-respected thinkers about education believe that creativity is being squeezed out of some schools because of an obsession with tests and exams (and we are inclined to agree).
Having a good idea when you need one is central to creativity, but it is not much taught in schools. All too often children are asked to write a story or paint a picture without the process of creativity itself being explored. We know, for example, that human beings are not good at having ideas if they are under stress. (Evolutionarily we are programmed to fight or flight, and not to debate or mull when we are under attack.) So children need to be given lots of practice time to have new ideas when they are feeling most relaxed – after a game, after listening to music, when they are being cuddled by us. We can also give them various tools and let them experiment. Into this category come brainstorming, using a mind map, making a list, closing your eyes and picturing and so on. Some children like to keep an ideas book/folder/file, either hard copy or on a tablet. The big barrier with creativity for most children/people is the fear of making mistakes or getting it wrong, and you will want to do all you can to help them learn how to ‘park’ this side of their brain sometimes.
Uncertainty is an inevitable part of life, and it demands creativity. If everything were straightforward and predictable, with no ifs and buts, then we would not need to be creative and think differently. Creativity isn’t just for fil
ling up idle time by painting a picture! Being able to manage uncertainty creatively calls for resilience as well. It requires us to explore and tolerate feelings of, for example, confusion or inadequacy. Hopefully we will get set many problems at school to which there is no easy answer. We will have to wrestle with degrees of likelihood. Games of chance and risk are good ways of trying out these kinds of issues at home. Or you might like to take a tricky item of news for an older child and explore possible courses of action. These kinds of activities can be grouped together under the banner of ‘What if’ – what would you do if you found yourself in a position where …?
Making connections and seeing patterns is an important part of being creative. Every time we use a metaphor we link one thing with another. Creative people have made great discoveries through the process of seeing connections where others have not. For example, someone thought to stitch together the invention of steam engines, the development of steel and the growing need for travel between the north and south of the UK, and generate the seed of an idea that became the railways. Mind maps are a good way of seeing connections, as are many other graphic depictions of ideas such as concept maps. Free association games can encourage connected thinking. The game of Crazy Connections (where you try and connect two highly unlikely items together) can be fun over a meal.
An excellent resource is The Bright Stuff by C. J. Simister or you could try one of ours, The Creative Thinking Plan (aimed more at adults but with ideas that are transferable).5
Commitment
Commitment to learning is essential if your children are going to find their passion in life. For children to find their passion – the things that really turn them on – parents and grandparents need to give them every opportunity to try things out. If you went to university, the metaphor you might like to have here is of home life as an extended freshers’ fair, or think of a farmers’ market. We need to create lots of opportunities for tasters. Some children find their passion easily. A special teacher ignites their interest. A talented family member takes them to the ice rink and they decide to learn ice hockey. But for most of us it is a slower, more uncertain process. The trick here is to gradually narrow the frame and set mutually agreed goals with your children about how long they might stick at something before they decide it’s not for them. It’s a difficult thing to judge. Bill, for example, knows that if he had not been forced through the early painful days of practising the French horn he would not have ended up enjoying playing it. A really simple thing to do with young children on wet holiday or weekend days is to refuse to answer their complaints that they are bored and equip them with a supply of cardboard boxes, scissors, sticky tape and their imagination, and see what happens.
Home life is full of opportunities for children to learn taking responsibility. Keeping pets is a good example of this. So too are the many chores that you can share out. A child can be shopper, cook, gardener, map-reader, budget-holder, event-planner and so forth. Sometimes the trick is just to make it sound a bit grown-up (rather than a childish task) to enlist their imaginative engagement.
Sticking with difficulty – being persistent – is eminently learnable and coachable too. The Building Learning Power approach has a simple idea, the ‘stuck poster’, for teachers to develop with children in their classrooms. Children pool ideas as to what they can do when they are stuck and don’t know how to proceed, and they make a personal or class poster of these ideas as an aide-memoire. Art Costa and Bena Kallick’s Habits of Mind programme6 has a similar idea – the persistence toolbox. Either of these readily adapt themselves to the home. Think of homework time when your child is stuck and create a family version of this which your child could stick on the wall in their bedroom or maybe you could add it to the fridge door in the kitchen.
Craftsmanship
Sometimes we hear that being craftsmanlike is going out of fashion. In a 24/7 throwaway society it is all too easy to condone the slapdash. Being craftsmanlike requires us to show pride, learn from our mistakes, work on practising the hard bits and make something the best it can be.
Most of us are naturally proud of something when we know we have done a good job. Unfortunately, in some schools, it has become uncool to show pride in your achievements. This is a terrible thing and we have to fix it. First base is to be clear that showing pride is a feature of your child’s earliest memories. One ready way of recognising pride might be to create a family motto that somehow says, in a sentence, what your family is good at. Or you could go one stage further and create your own coat of arms (much fun as a family holiday activity!). Or how about creating an actual or virtual gallery of all the accomplished people in your family? Just the process of identifying who is good at what, or which of your ancestors was famous for something, can be very stimulating and enlightening.
We can all learn from our mistakes. Indeed, it is particularly helpful if this is regularly demonstrated by the whole family. Without suggesting for a moment that your conversations should be strewn with disasters and near-misses, it is really helpful when adults show that they too make mistakes; that making mistakes is normal and that the important thing is to bounce back and have a better go. Some children are fearful of blotting their page and of having to cross things out. A useful activity for a family is to look at a play, a painting, a building or an invention for which there are many prototypes or drafts and explore them together. That way it is crystal clear that making mistakes is another way of saying ‘work in progress’ and that most really good work goes through many versions. One person’s version is another’s mistake. Another fun thing to do as a family is to have a ‘mistake of the week’ award when different family members share gaffes or errors. Encourage them to say what they might do differently next time!
Practising and working on the hard bits is an essential feature of craftsmanship. If you are really going to be great at what you do, you have to be willing to do the grunt work as well as have fun. As an adult, stop and think about how you practise something that really matters to you – for example, if you have to give a speech at a wedding. Things that good practisers find useful include:
● Speeding it up.
● Slowing it down.
● Chunking a big task into lots of small ones.
● Doing it against the clock.
● Doing it blindfold.
● Doing it with notes.
● Doing it without notes.
● Getting feedback.
● Recording/filming and watching what you did.
● Doing the difficult things again and again.
Whether it is sport or music or irregular verbs or organising a school bag the night before, children need to practise, and you can help them by being a good role model and creating lots of opportunities for them.
If you want inspiration on craftmanship, google ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ and marvel at how small children can be turned into little crafts people and draw better and better butterflies.7 Children know only too well that mastery is born of effort, patience and a tolerance for frustration. It is only in school that you are told that you are ‘gifted and talented’ if you get things right, quickly, first time, always.
By trying things out in your own home it is much easier to appreciate the reality of what we have been discussing. Preparing children to face a lifetime of tricky stuff is, of course, tricky. But it is perfectly possible – you may remember the letter from Teresa, the mum who had been helped by her daughter’s school to find ways of overcoming her little girl’s fear of making mistakes. With a few tweaks to family life, and some persistence, you can see your children change and grow in their seven Cs.
1 Bill has written a couple of these – see Bill Lucas and Stephen Briers, Happy Families: How to Make One, How to Keep One (Harlow: BBC Active, 2006); Bill Lucas and Alistair Smith, Help Your Child to Succeed: The Essential Guide for Parents, 2nd rev. edn (London: Network Continuum Education, 2009).
2 Michael Rosen, Good Ideas: How To Be Your Child’s (and
Your Own) Best Teacher (London: John Murray, 2014).
3 Lauren Carner and Angela Ladavaia-Cox, Raising Caring, Capable Kids with Habits of Mind (Mechanicsburg, PA: Institute for Habits of Mind, 2012).
4 Gershen Kaufman, Stick Up for Yourself: Every Kid’s Guide to Personal Power and Self-Esteem (Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing, 1999).
5 C. J. Simister, The Bright Stuff: Playful Ways to Nurture Your Child’s Extraordinary Mind (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009); Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas, The Creative Thinking Plan: How to Generate Ideas and Solve Problems in Your Work and Life (London: BBC Books, 2004).
6 See www.habitsofmind.co.uk/.
7 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZo2PIhnmNY.
Chapter 7
A call to action
The principal goal of education in schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept everything they are offered.
Jean Piaget
Why do schools do what they do? If the case we are making for a different kind of school is so compelling, how come many more schools are not going down this route? The answer is that, although there is much rhetoric in England to the effect that schools have been given greater freedom, in reality, they have not.
In the following chart we have tried to give you a pictorial view of some of the forces which we believe influence what children in the UK learn today at school. We have identified how we view each of the seven different forces (parents/families, prominent and ordinary individuals, employers, charities, professional bodies, government) and their alignment with the arguments we have made in the book so far.
