Positive Parenting

I think this has some relevance to our parenting discussion. I found this in ScienceDaily.

Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab used fMRI research to study three groups of children: those aged  8-9, children of 11-12, and adults aged between 18-25 years.

Their conclusion is that  Eight-year-olds learn primarily from appreciation, and the learning centres in the brain do not listen to our negative training. They just don't see why we are yelling at them.  But twelve year olds can process negative feedbacks, and  use it to learn from their mistakes.  Adults do the same, but more efficiently. 

Crone says, "From the literature, it appears that young children respond better to reward than to punishment... The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well.  Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible". Young brains have not learned to do this.

What developmental psychologists have been drumming into our unlistening and unwilling ears, has now been underlined by scanning the  workings of the actual brain itself. It is better to appreciate, to reward. To punish, yell at, beat and curse the child is idiotic, and useless.

This does not mean that you are allowed to hit your wife on the lip, just to teach her to watch her tongue. According to the researchers,  the basal ganglia, just outside the cerebral cortex, responds strongly to appreciation. It remains active in every one of us, whatever the age: so you better give her a kiss.

The beast could well be a beauty.