Illusion of choice

Human nature wants to feel in control. Lack of control creates stress and anxiety. Letting go of control is hard. Especially when you are three years old.

So we create acceptable choices and let Fleur make them. It seems to make it easier. It reduces the resistance as she gets a say, which is what she mainly wants. The options are acceptable, so we get what we want.

As she obtains more experience, I am sure crafting the options will get harder. She occasionally wants things we are not wanting her to have and redirect to acceptable things. She will get better at coming back to them. Or fighting harder for them.

I think of it like Ego Depletion. When you are 3, you have very little willpower. In fact, I am impressed at the moments where willpower manifests. They very much are easy to observe during well rested mornings after breakfast. Lacking those, the frameworks I deploy make it easier to run through the tasks to get out the door. Less pushback. Less frustration.

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Book: Brain Rules for Baby

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I loved the Brain Rules book. The original discussed why the brain works the way it does (including the studies) and gave specific activities one can do to boost the efficacy. An example: the brain is a major consumer of oxygen, so scientists have found that intense exercise improves function by getting more oxygenated blood to the brain.

I need to re-read it as it has been a decade. I recently got the baby one.

Some quotes:

Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about.

This is 1,000% true.

As a scientist, I was very aware that watching a baby’s brain develop feels as if you have a front row seat to a biological Big Bang. The brain starts out as a single cell in the womb, quiet as a secret. Within a few weeks, it is pumping out nerve cells at an astonishing rate of 8,000 per second. Within a few months, it is on it’s way to becoming the world’s finest thinking machine.

Some notes I took.

1. Perception begins at weeks for most senses. And memory persists after birth, but stimulation too early is harmful and later not going to make a genius.
2. Everything is a balancing act. During pregnancy especially weight, nutrition, stress, exercise.
3. Chronic or acute stress passes those hormones through the placenta and children seeing it stunt brain growth observing it. Husbands need to keep their wife not stressed. Happy is the ideal, but at least not stressed. This can be 8 IQ points.
4. Exercise can reduce pushing time and reduce the time baby is without oxygen and reduce stunted brain development.
5. Kinds of intelligence:
   1. Record information, aka crystallized intelligence.
   2. Improvisation
   3. Desire to explore
   4. Self-control
   5. Creativity
   6. Verbal communication
   7. Decoding nonverbal communication
6. Ingredients for happy kids:
   1. a demanding but warm parenting style ( responsiveness & demandingness)
   2. comfort with your own emotions
   3. tracking your child’s emotions (don’t ignore & don’t helicopter)
   4. verbalizing emotions (describe emotions)
   5. running toward emotions (emotions are reflexive; behavior is a choice; be consistent with rules on behavior; turn intense feelings into teachable moments)
   6. two tons of empathy
7. Behavior modification basic principles.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. The thing I liked the most about the original was he named a rule and went on about why it is important and the research justifying it. This book lacked that simplistic and novel model, which put me off.

 

 

Study: Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response

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This caught my eye because I’ve read about the growth mindset often over the past several years. And, I feel that how I responded to stress in my professional life is responsible for my achievements.

Study 1: I found the use of the invention of a Work Performance Scale adapted from a Role-Based Performance Scale interesting. I’d like to compare the two. But, offhand, it is self-reporting, which I dislike for the tendency of the taker to say what they think is wanted not what they think. (And even if they put they think, our view of ourselves is skewed from inner dialogue biases and justifications.) They decided the data shows that stress mindset is a distinct variable among others already determined for stress. They probably overly generalize to health and well-being when their measure was just on work performance.

This additional variable thing seems to trigger warning bells about confirmation bias in my head. It strongly confirms my existing worldview in that I’ve seen people who take on challenges head-on and others who squander the opportunity.

I just skimmed the rest from here. Study 2 appears to try to determine if it works similar to growth-fixed mindsets. Study 3 appears to look at positive and negative feedback with stress mindsets.

Crum, AJ and Salovey, P and Achor, S. “Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013, Vol. 104, No. 4, 716 –733. DOI: 10.1037/a0031201