A MIND OF THEIR OWN

What is a mind anyway?

Let’s do some quick stage setting, align on some definitions, then get to it.
The Brain is the organ in the skull. It’s a structure of tissues and cells. It helps to regulate the nervous system and process sensory information. Some folks think the word brain came from the old German word “bregen” which came from the word “brei” which meant “mush, paste; porridge”. Yeah, sounds about right.

The Mind encompasses all learned skills and all cognitive capabilities such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, judgment, language, and memory – all of our thinking systems – both fast and slow.

A useful analogy is the brain being like hardware and the mind being like software. Just like hardware/software in a computer – the mind is the ability level of the software you are running on your hardware.

What does it mean to give someone a mind of their own and how does one support that?

Over the last 40+ years, Edward Deci and colleagues – experts in motivation, human development, and well-being – have intensively investigated the “needs of the human mind”. This body of work, called Self-Determination Theory, is the leading theory of human motivation [Deci explains via YouTube, 8min 2sec]. It anchors on three key areas: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

Self-determination theory (SDT), at the core, considers how motivation is affected by the relationship between an instructor and a learner. It anchors on the importance of individual decision and choice – the importance of having a mind of one’s own – as a basic human need. If you’ve ever heard advice that it’s helpful to “give kids a choice” – well, this is the science behind it.

Competence represents our sense of being able to do things well. For Dads it might be something we do well at work or as a hobby. For a developing child it’s as simple as learning to do basic things themselves. Competence reflects a lot of our inner world, our perception of our abilities, having the skills or “tools” to navigate various situations in life. Everyone develops a range of competencies in the course of life, from making food, to doing finances, rocking a hobby, to mastery of craft.

Relatedness represents a sense of feeling important to others. It can also be tied to feelings of affiliation, acceptance, warmth, and being cared for. Relatedness is our overall feelings (known or unknown) of connectedness and belonging within a group, organization, or with others. Lack of relatedness can even drive less useful behaviors such as overcontrol and constrain of others (kids too) due to a personal need to want others to see you as important and value you!

Autonomy represents a sense of having some freedom of control over our choices. It’s sometimes called agency, or independence. It’s believing there is freedom in the ability to choose one’s own course of action – even if this control is perceived. More on that shortly.

– Competence reflects aspects of our inner world.
– Relatedness captures relations with the outer world.
– Autonomy covers how we explore and build both.

These principles appear to apply to almost all humans at all ages, all contexts, and especially in “instructor/learner” situations – from teacher/student to managers/employees to coaches/athletes and parent/child.

Here are some ways to build skills to support these in kids as they develop:

Give Them Choice

Going back to “if you’ve ever heard that it can be helpful to give a child choices” it’s because choices support autonomy. Focus on a choice between two things whenever you can. Keep it simple – “this cup or that cup”, “this book or that book”, “you can do it, or I can do it for you”.

Choice gives kids a sense of control, even if the outcome is rigged as in “do you want peas or carrots” instead of forcing vegetables. For a parent, this is how you make decisions with them vs opposed to them.

Language is another way in which autonomy and choice can be supported – specifically through “conditional language” (see FD41). Conditional language, such as “I propose…”, “We could…”, “You might…”, lends to flexible thinking vs “ You must…”, “You should…”, “The only way is…”. This creates more informational cues in the brain vs rigid instruction. This style of communication is what world class coaches use with athletes. It has been regularly shown to improve skill acquisition and motor learning performance in sport as well as have a more positive impact on mood, emotions, and self-efficacy.

It’s useful to get in the practice of this over the coming months, as their ability to communicate their desire for choice will ramp up significantly around 18 months.

NOTE: Giving others a choice showcases respect for the children’s own ideas, feelings, and initiatives. It’s a powerful concept that can be scary to some. You don’t have to give choices ALL THE TIME and giving choices is not, by any means, letting them run the house. Learning that healthy boundaries exist and learning why some things are okay and others are not and in what context gives them the ability to start to learn to make good decisions (choices) as they grow and learn those things (competence). Give choice, have limits and boundaries, explain why.

Let Them Build Competence

You may feel the urge to grab the block and put it in the correct hole, but we know that kids lose motivation when parents step in too often. When young children try things, and parents step in, the child over time may start to believe that they are not capable of that thing and so their motivation to persist lessens. Confidence comes from competence and competence comes from practice and experience. Practice and experience grow as we learn that failure is part of learning.

Besides Dad’ing being an exercise in extreme patience, three ways to help yourself from stepping in too much is to 1) try to understand the child’s perspective, 2) put your energy into building a supportive environment around them for where they are in development, and 3) checking your expectations of what you think the goal of that task is for things you want to step in on – as there is usually an alternative way to approach it.

Relatedness Building

Kids build relations with self, others, and groups through feeling valued, warm, and secure, and trusting that they’re connected to and loved by the people around them. Humans are social creatures, and our relatedness in the early years is mostly built through play with others and through positive feelings in our connections to others.

Early only, as kids explore, they check in on their connections to those they find secure and have built trust in. You may have noticed your child looking to you to see if something is appropriate or safe. This “social referencing” is a process where babies use the facial expressions or emotional displays of an adult to help inform their behaviors toward environments, objects, people, and situations. This “learning through trust” is a major part of how they learn to understand the world around them and how to react. This is behind the advice of “not bringing too much attention to minor falls”. When a child has a minor fall or bump and the adult panics in the situation, the social reference is that this means the child should panic too. Bringing calm, warmth, and offering security to these moments helps the child feel connected while helping them learn to gauge their responses.

Taking everything together… You may have noticed that all of this comes together in the skill of “Dad as a Coach”. Being warm, supportive, and encouraging (relatedness), letting the child lead play (autonomy), while building the environment to keep a child in the zone of proximal development, or the zone of optimal challenge of not too easy, not too hard (competence). When we have support and flexibility – we build a mind of our own in how we approach solving problems and navigate learning. This will come easy to some and be a challenge for others, but again, I highly recommend making an effort toward building these patterns in yourself and in support of your child.

Why care about competence, relatedness, and autonomy – they relate to motivation, right? Turns out that motivation heavily influences one’s self-esteem and self-worth… and self-esteem tends to be associated with persistence and success in a broad range of achievement and health-related behaviors.

The theories of self-worth and self-esteem have changed a lot in the last 20+ years. It’s that sweet spot of change where many new Dads might have some older beliefs that they may not even realize they have! And most of these come from the surprising history of PRAISE.

Here’s the short history (full story -> [Article, 20min]):
Praise is a funny thing, specifically in the United States. In the 1960 and 1970’s, “happiness” seemed to be on a decline as the nation was going through numerous changes. Beginning in the ’60s, parenting “experts” began telling parents to direct their energy toward nurturing something they called “self-esteem” – that the best way to save a nation in distress was to build its people up using the (misguided) science of praise. Through the 1990s the assumption was that confidence and esteem were best built by unconditional praise.

It flooded into school systems and corporate America. The way to fix the happiness crisis was to turn up the love and unconditional praise to 11 and rip the knob off. The Self-Esteem Craze boomed. But over the course of this well intentioned experiment came a surprise to those who bought into the beautiful story… the happiness issue wasn’t getting any better, kids were pursuing less, resilience was on the decline. This speaks to a larger problem when shaky science is adopted widely as a fix all, but I digress.

It took until the late 1990’s, early 2000’s before science got a firmer grasp on the issue. Basically – generic flattery and shallow compliments of a person’s every little step forward was causing more harm than good. It turns out that praising people for their traits vs giving specific, genuine praise and feedback was creating beliefs that success (and self worth) is the result of an underlying fixed trait and therefore not something that can change – you have it or you don’t. You may have heard of Growth vs Fixed mindsets (see FD16), which uses the most recent science to recommend building habits of genuine praise and feedback about a specific aspect, action, the hard work, or the aspects they had control of vs “you are so smart – good job”.

Since roughly 2006, it’s been widely agreed that over time generic praise can promote helpless behaviors whereas non-generic praise induces persistence/mastery behaviors. What I have found most fascinating is that the research suggests that children only need a small amount of non-generic praise to boost their self-esteem. Well timed, heartfelt praise is powerful. On the flip side, it appears that it only takes a small amount of generic praise to stir up the opposite effect. But as a quick note: genuine encouragement and enthusiasm in support of an action or in achievement of a goal (that first time they did that thing and you were stoked!) – this is not generic praise, so celebrate the wins! While the nuance of praise is plenty[Article, 6min], try to resist gushing praise about qualities – it undermines esteem, and can damper motivation. Too much praise may also increase kids’ dependence on us, and the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, and our decisions about what’s good and bad – the harder it is for them to understand right and wrong on their own. And to put the final nail in the coffin, certain kinds of praise might guide how a child SHOULD feel about something vs letting them experience their own feelings in the things they do. All of this undermines competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

This section has tidbits from around the web that are typically on Dads minds.

Book: The Gardener and The Carpenter

One of the leaders in this area is psychologist and philosophy professor, Dr Alison Gopnik. She is a pioneer in the space and has a series of wonderful, science based books on the topic. My personal recommendation would be “The Gardener and The Carpenter”, which looks at the state of modern parenting from the lens of the “carpenters” – who think that his or her child can be molded – if you do all right things, then you can shape your child into a particular kind of adult (outcome focused); or through the lens of the “gardeners” – who are less concerned about controlling who the child will become and instead provide a protected space to explore (journey focused) and have rich experiences that will ultimately track toward less fixed outcomes. Similar to what we found in elite athletics, the idea of supporting the journey has some compelling benefits over various outcome focused approaches. But again, it all depends on the context.