Self-Awareness

The evening my daughter Sophie sat at the kitchen table in our Portland, Oregon home, staring at a pile of flashcards with the blank expression of someone who has been doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, I realized we had a learning problem that had nothing to do with intelligence or effort. She was ten years old, and she had been making and reviewing flashcards for her science vocabulary test for three days. She had written each term on one side and the definition on the other. She had reviewed the stack five times. And she could not remember more than half the terms. "I do not understand," she said, and the frustration in her voice was the frustration of someone who was working hard and getting nowhere. I sat down next to her and asked her to show me how she studied. She picked up a card, read the term, flipped it, read the definition, and set it aside. Then she picked up the next card and did the same thing. It was a passive, visual, repetitive process that engaged almost none of the cognitive mechanisms that actually create lasting memory. "What if," I said, "instead of reading the cards, you drew the terms? Or acted them out? Or made up a story that connected them all?" She looked at me with the skepticism of someone who had been sold learning tricks before. "That sounds silly," she said. "So does not remembering," I replied. ...

The morning my son Ethan sat at the kitchen table in our suburban Denver home, gripping his cereal spoon so hard his knuckles were white, and said "My stomach hurts and I cannot breathe right," I initially thought he was sick. He was nine years old, and his breathing was shallow and rapid, his eyes were wide, and his body was vibrating with a tension that seemed disproportionate to a Tuesday morning. It took me twenty minutes of gentle questioning to discover that he was not sick at all. He was experiencing his first recognizable panic response to the combination of a spelling test, a disagreement with his best friend at recess the day before, and a soccer game that afternoon that he felt unprepared for. Each of these stressors was manageable on its own. Together, they had created a cumulative load that his nine-year-old nervous system did not know how to process. I sat next to him, put my hand on his back, and walked him through the breathing exercise we had practiced but had never needed in a real situation. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for six. Repeat. It took ten cycles before his breathing slowed. It took twenty before his shoulders dropped. And in that moment, watching my son learn that his body could generate feelings that were intense, frightening, and temporary, I realized that we had been managing his stress for him rather than teaching him to manage it himself. ...

Last Saturday, my nine-year-old son Leo was in the middle of an epic building project with his Legos when he suddenly pushed the pieces away, put his head on the table, and said, "My body feels like a phone at one percent." I didn't need to tell him what to do. He walked to his room, dimmed the lights, lay on his bed with a book for twenty minutes, and came back to the table refreshed and ready to finish his creation. Two years ago, that same child would have melted into a screaming tantrum, unable to identify why he felt terrible or what he needed. The difference was that he had learned to read his own energy signals and respond to them appropriately. ...