Required Reading for Geeks & Parents: Science Fair Season Set Me On Fire

At first blush, Judy Dutton's Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, A Robot Named Scorch. . . and What It Takes To Win looks like Spellbound recast with science geeks.  Don't be fooled.  While Science Fair Season explores the lives of a handful of contestants in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, it deftly illustrates artful parenting and success in learning as well.

The high school students' projects are sometimes mind-boggling in scale (like building a reactor for nuclear fusion).  I expected the top achieving high school students to be working on an undergraduate level, but these noteworthy projects more clearly resemble post-graduate research.  Because the students approach their inquiries with fresh perspective, they see possibility and challenge where more conventional researchers might not explore.

While no two contestants' stories are remotely identical, patterns do emerge that speak to science education and parenting young children.  So often the students' stories begin with an early spark of interest in something (horses, electricity, cars, astronomy) which parents encouraged with exploration.  Though the kids' interests didn't usually mirror parental interests, the parents went out of their way to feed their child's curiosity and enthusiasm.  Time after time, parents provide opportunities (like a homebrew chem lab, a borrowed Geiger counter, or time with horses) and find mentors with similar interests.  Granted, not every child is going to become a super-competitor in science by the mere magic of parental support, but these stories clearly illuminate a parent's ability to multiply interest into inquiry and fascination.

Yet the book is not populated with Tiger Moms or Stage Fathers, the burgeoning interests are consistently directed by the kids (and I say kids because this explosion of interest seems most common in early childhood).  These biographies are full of freedom and exploration.

The other looming discussion is that of how students come to love science learning.  Halfway through the book I became painfully aware that, although some "outsiders" come to science interest in junior high or high school, most of the kids with scientific fervor (and the resulting knowledge) fully embraced science long before most schools begin to seriously teach it.  We, as a nation, are missing the critical window where kids fall in love with science.  Thanks to budget cuts and lack of advocacy, science is barely taught when young students are making decisions about what they love.  When schools finally start teaching science in junior high, the approach is often dry and makes the very foundation of existence seem irrelevant and esoteric.

During the space race, science charged into unsuspecting homes through popular media.  While the media marveled and quaked at Sputnik, rocket scientists became the heroes of coal mine town boys like Homer Hickam (NASA engineer and author of Rocket Boys).  This book reminds me that not only are science heroes present today, they're still coming of age (though in increasingly shorter supply).  Our tech role models need to be more than wealthy boys with killer apps (Apple's Steve Jobs, Facebook's Mark Zuckerman).  Kids would be better served to know about Pluto Files atrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and science humanitarian Amy Smith.

In my life as a university academic advisor, the most frustrating academic trajectories were those of students with no real interests. A student sorting through a abundance of passions brimmed with energy, but one without a single definable interest made me want to bang my head against my desk.  I knew then that, should we ever have kids, I wanted them to deeply love some thing that challenged and expanded them.

Science Fair Season left me with a long to-do list.  I want Ranger, Scout, and the Detective to gain exposure to math and science beyond what they'll get in the elementary classroom, and I also want those opportunities to be available for their friends and classmates.  My mom's fifth grade class had this amazing interactive experience put together by an orthopedic surgeon dad; the dad set up hands-on stations where the class could use real orthopedic tools to meet objectives (like screwing a nut on a bolt) through obstacles (inside a bottle) to simulate surgical challenge.  My mom believes that one presentation converted more students to science than any other single event of her long teaching career.  This it the type of early experience I want for my kids and as many other kids as we can involve.

I think the future, not just of our kids' educations, but of the country and the world, may lie in the opportunities we offer our kids in their early years.

Well written and entertaining, Science Fair Season is going to have the broad voyeuristic appeal of subculture documentaries like Word Wars and The Farmer's Wife, but it also has the seeds of one of the most critical educational discourses of our generation.


Hyperion, hardcover $25 MSRP, $15.99 on Amazon.
Read excerpt at author's site.



***Baby Toolkit is a couple geek parents currently so hot about science learning that we might just turn to plasma.  Hyperion supplied us with a free e-book loan of Science Fair Season, but we've now bought three hardcover copies to share with friends and family (the first taste is free...).  As Amazon affiliates, a small portion of purchases made through our Amazon links brings us one step closer to a giant dirigible trip around the planet.

A Pessimist reads Raising Happiness

Even as a small child, I usually worried that things would go wrong. Almost every positive future scenario was met with scrutiny: "What if it rains that day?" "What if the car won't start?"

Even this blog springs from my basic assumption that life demand scrutiny and preparation.

In retrospect, I think I wanted insurance against life's disappointments. Decades later, a tornado taught me that being able to protect a placid life is unrealistic and even actual insurance can leave one disappointed and adrift.

Our son's earliest months paralleled some of my most insecure and anxious times, so his tendency toward panic comes as little surprise. I feel tremendous sadness when I see his disproportionate reactions to disappointment or injury.

Because I believe some of his poor reactions are learned from my example, it isn't hard to believe that (with mindful parenting) better reactions can be taught. But how can I, a pessimist, teach my children skills I never really acquired?

Through a friend's reference to a popular happiness book for adults, I stumbled upon a listing for Christine Carter's Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents.

At the time, the book was in pre-release, so I wrote the publishers (Ballantine Books) to request a review copy. Still feeling a reader's high from NutureShock, I allowed myself to hope that a parenting book could be more than a pile of recycled "conventional wisdom" and unfounded opinion. I especially liked the author's training, scientific interest and work in the field of emotional health (unlike similar parenting self-help authored by pediatricians, religious leaders and other peripheral "experts" on children and families).

I had expectations that the book would read like two other sociologist's texts that the touched on happiness and attitude (Stumbling on Happiness and Outliers). These books focused on the outcomes of attitude more than their development. They are reader-friendly assemblies of contemporary research. I looked for this book to be NurtureShock focusing solely on happiness issues. Which it wasn't.

It was much, much more.

Reading the introduction I took some notes that I keep by my bed and now glance at most mornings. Carter's concept of happiness is much more than the temporal mood I previously associated with the word. Additional facets like positive emotions about the past (gratitude, forgiveness, and appreciation), future emotions (optimism, faith, and confidence), and daily actions (love, kindness, and empathy) expanded my definition. My concept of happiness was binary (present or not present), it had no origins or supporting characteristics. I viewed joy as environmental and capricious (somewhat like the weather) rather than something cultivated by daily actions and patterns of small decisions.

Quoting Indian social worker and activist Baba Amte, Dr. Carter reminds "Happiness is a continuous creative activity." This idea would be my 6-word summary of the book's thesis, yet that is like calling Moby Dick "a book about a whale."

When I started the first chapter, the author's conversational style engaged me. The text exudes confidence and authority. However it didn't include the research citations that I am accustomed to in my favorite social science books. My stomach twisted, and I thought this promising book had degraded into a from-the-hip opinion on parenting. With nary a reference or footnote in sight, I told Jim that the book might be unfounded opinion.

I flipped toward the back expecting only an index, but found over twenty pages of detailed annotations (179 in total) and fifteen pages of bibliography all in a truly tiny print (I suspect they would occupy double the pages if printed in the same font as the text). Throughout the book, Carter is continuously engaging cognitive and behavioral science research, but the editorial approach is to keep that academic engagement from cluttering the basic recommendations.

Raising Happiness, though a book about children, took me on a journey of self-assessment. Like the first chapter "Put on Your Own Oxygen Mask First" suggests, I realized I am no help to my children in developing skills that I do not understand. Much of the book made me consider my own approach to the world rather than the attitudes of my children. I guess most good parenting books could be defined as offering transformation to the reader first, then secondary effects for their children.

Each chapter covers one of Carter's recommendations:

1. Put on Your Own Oxygen Mask First
2. Build A Village
3. Expect Effort and Enjoyment, Not Perfection
4. Choose Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Optimism
5. Raise Their Emotional Intelligence
6. Form Happiness Habits
7. Teach Self-Discipline
8. Enjoy the Present Moment
9. Rig Their Environment for Happiness
10. Eat Dinner Together

While some of the recommendations might sound familiar (to the point of being trite), the book is a surprisingly good instructor on practical incremental steps to enacting difficult change. Chapter Four's subsection Practicing the Skills We Need for Forgiveness, Carter draws on the work of Stanford Forgiveness Project researcher Fred Luskin. She clearly translates Luskin's program into 6 steps to use with kids. As a person who sometimes nurtures grudges, I need the careful guidance of someone who understands how to forgive in a way that is beneficial to all parties.

For example:

Step 4 -Teach kids that they suffer when they demand things that life is not going to give them. They can hope for things, of course, and they can work hard to get what they want. But they cannot force things to happen that are outside of their control. When we expect something outside of our control and it doesn't happen, we feel hurt and wronged. Help kids practice letting go of the desire for things that they have no influence over, and redirect their energies toward things they do have control over.

Working as a college advisor, I regularly saw students dealing with uncontrollable forces. The students most likely to prevail were the ones who focused on the next step rather than ruminating over disappointments.

Jim is currently reading Raising Happiness, and it's really interesting to see him adopting some of the techniques with our kids.  I did the same thing when I was reading the book, but it's really illuminating to see the process as an outsider.  Tantrums have been a major issue with our preschooler.  With so many strong-willed people living in the same family, it's not surprising that our ideas come into conflict.  Jim and I have been frustrated by our inability to quell tantrums through constructive means.   We don't ever submit to the demands and often issued punishments, but the outbursts just didn't stop.  Jim has recently begun acknowledging our child's emotions at the beginning of conflict.  He empathizes with the child's feelings without condoning the emerging behavior.  This usually yields immediate positive results.  In our case, I think our child needs to know that we understand his position even if we don't agree with it.  When we simply addressed the inappropriate behavior without any acknowledgment, he would ratchet up his intensity so that we might hear his side.  He didn't understand that his message simply became noise (irritating noise) when he screamed unintelligibly (and why should he understand that with only a few years of linguistic experience)?  The act of empathizing makes me try to re-evaluate the situation, and it often softens my initial appraisal.  This single simple change in our behavior hasn't completely ended all outbursts, but it has shortened their duration greatly and has improved our overall communications as a family.

So many of the small steps in this book resonated and brought to mind people who I admire for their personal and professional successes. Each individual recommendation matched my experience and observations, but I was previously unable to assemble all those random parts into an organized and interpretable whole.

The book is so rich with ideas and suggestions that it lends itself to rereading at different ages and stages.  What leaps out to me today overshadows future areas of interest.  Once I have engaged the content that resonates with me now, I plan to return to the book to consider additional aspects and approaches.

Raising Happiness is a must read (and currently $16.32 at Amazon.com).  And once you've read it, it will probably turn into a permanent addition to your home reference library.

Carter's excellent blog, Half Full, welcomes readers into an ongoing conversation.

***Baby Toolkit loves to read and rarely finds a parenting book we like so much as Raising Happiness.  We have no financial relationship with Christine Carter nor her publisher Ballantine Books.  We requested and received an advance copy of Raising Happiness ($24). A portion of the purchases made through our Amazon links helps fund Baby Toolkit's ongoing operating costs (thank you!).

Motherhood: The New Generation

Today I found a dirty diaper in the baby's laundry. It had a tidy appearance, wrapped up like a little white present, but it was deep in the laundry basket. My best guess is that it has been residing there, scenting the room with vinegar, for about a week.

With my first child, I would have been on the phone with Jim in seconds to inquire what exactly he was thinking. Now, the phone call would be pure posturing as there's something like a 97% likelihood that I put the odor bomb in the basket. I'm not sure though because my brain is so frequently engaged that there are no system backups. Maybe the phone rang, maybe something boiled over in the kitchen, or maybe Ranger said quietly "uh, mom- there's a problem" and walked in holding the front half of the DVD player. The distractions and interruptions are so common these days that I've started losing track of them.

Now when I find a diaper in the laundry, my lunch from yesterday unopened in the car, or two very different shoes on my feet, philosophical questions fill my mind. How did I get here? What am I doing? Is this chaos my fault?

Memories of my own mother and grandmothers don't offer much solace. They all seemed more present and capable than I feel and my actions suggest.

There have been some big changes in the world since I was a kid though, and they have changed the face of motherhood dramatically.

Let's start with the telephone. It's a handy device, but it demands attention around the clock. Friends, family, and strangers can interrupt kids' naps, family meals, and virtually every shower attempted by mothers in North America. With the advent of cell phones, calls can now also interrupt meaningful conversations, fun outings, and those rare moments when my internal dialog teeters on revelation. A tranquil moment in the afternoon sun with only the pleasant hum of the world around me dissolves into a cry for attention.

And, yes, there are management tools like caller id, forward to voicemail, and taking the phone off the hook, but whenever I employ these methods inevitably I forget to reengage the systems or the next human communication I have starts with "I've been trying to get a hold of you for hours, and [insert real emergency]."

Over a decade ago we canceled call waiting because it is stressful, and I don't know how to handle it gracefully. I consider our home a technological preserve for the busy signal. And isn't it sometimes true that we're busy? When did that become a bad message? I keep hearing about people who no longer use answering machines or voicemail because who wants to arrive home to an audio to-do list? On the other hand, the machine lets me know if I really need to disrupt the nursing baby or if it's just a reminder of the dentist appointment that's already on my calendar.

Beyond the interruptions and monetary costs telephones require maintenance. Cordless phones must be returned to the base but not overcharged. Home phones should be handy but not too easily accessible to tots with a yen to dial Denmark.

Like the cordless phone, my cell phone battery demands the careful nurturing like a Tamagotchi pet (food at exacting measure), but charging is the least of my cell phone headaches. My phone may someday evolve into a sentient lifeform (shortly before I throw out the charger), but it will not need to grow legs. It already skitters around the universe powered by the little feet (and hands) of my family members. This is not to imply that I do not also lose my phone- regularly (like in an amusement park- thank you again, Holiday World staff).

If I make the mistake of setting it to vibrate, magical fairies, magnetic forces, and/or toddler power will be sure to bury it in some unfathomable location. Then I spend the evening walking around the house with the cordless phone listening for the quiet whisper vibration and praying that the battery doesn't die before it is located.

When the battery dies, the search really kicks into high gear as the audio clue phase ends. Now rather than following the digital noise, it has become a needle in a haystack.. or my backpack... or the car... or the toy basket.

I would be ashamed to admit the number of hours in 2009 I have spent looking for that radiation-emitting piece of plastic. When their kids were young, my mom and grandma never spent a single evening crawling around looking for a phone.

Cell phones turn me into a stream of consciousness machine. On a drive, I notice a change in the neighborhood, so I speed-dial Jim, or I call someone for an update on something that really could have waited. Nobody really wants to be tapped into my cerebral cortex, and just because I can call, usually doesn't mean I should.

My kids (even the baby) are drawn to the phone. Ranger sees it as an electronic game (even the calendars and system settings can be "played") and the baby sees it as a chew toy. I don't want to give it to either of them, but in a crisis it's an easy diversion.

Other people's cell phones network us all to the Matrix. Baby's early morning feeding turns into a request for online research help on the relationship between soy products and cancer. I should note here that while I am quite proud of my Google-fu, I am neither a nutritionist nor a medical practitioner, so there's always a lot of background research before I even begin to comprehend the question I am attempting to answer. Jim and I often append "In my PROFESSIONAL medical opinion to any results" in hopes that it will remind the person seeking the information that they called a keyboard monkey rather than an expert. It's easy to become an unpaid helpdesk just by answering the phone.

Our seven digit phone number is the same as that of a toll free mail order prescription company. This company serves only pensioners from a specific declining trade (let's say buggy whip makers), so the calls are occasional. When people misdial the local area code rather than the 800 prefix, our voicemail gets worried calls from elderly people wondering why their meds haven't arrived. The first time it happened, we ignored it. Then the caller left two more messages and sounded sincerely panicked, so Jim called her back. She didn't understand who we were and we seriously freaked her out. A day later, she left another message. I Googled our number and prescription and called the company myself. Sadly, she hadn't left an account number so I banged on the number pad like a monkey at an obelisk until I got a human being. I begged a customer service rep to call her back. They were resistant at first (because I didn't even know the woman), but I kept telling them how increasingly desperate her messages had become, and they decided to make an exception. A few weeks later we got a similar call from an older gentleman. The written instructions for getting through to the Rx call center without an account number are now kept under our phone.

Our lives are more complicated. The house I grew up in had a party line phone and it never rang because someone needed my mom to make an online hotel reservation in the next 20 minutes, give directions, or look up the side effects of a common drug. Nobody went online to research car seats because there were neither online nor car seats. Kids just laid on the back ledge of the giant cars and computers were mostly science fiction dreams.

My grandmother couldn’t even drive until the year I was born. Think how much less people would expect of you (in terms of daily tasks) if you didn’t drive.

We live in a reshaped world and our elders often treat us as if we live in the (slightly) less complicated days of their childhoods.

Thanks to our placement in human history, we’re expected to keep house like Martha (without the benefit of her staff), manage our own household finances and retirements like Warren Buffet, maintain vehicles & households, raise children, and chauffeur to every activity that anyone ever claimed made kids smarter, faster, wiser, happier, more tolerant, and/or better looking. After that, single, "I'm every woman" Oprah tells us not to be schlumpadinkas in sweat pants and prominent mom bloggers publish tutorials on how not to wear mom jeans. [Note: I don't care what your jeans look like, if you have a rock, a toy, and an uneaten portion of sandwich in your pocket, they're mom jeans.]

I guess we should just cure cancer in our spare time.

Recommended Reading: NurtureShock Sent Me to Bed Early

After Po Bronson's amazing 2007 article on praise, his new book on parenting research NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (co-authored with Ashley Merryman) mesmerized me long before I actually saw it in person.

The first chapter on praise (revised from the original New York magazine article) remains strong and fresh after repeat readings. I was poised to devour the book in an all night marathon read.

Enter Chapter 2: The Lost Hour. The research on sleep was so compellingly presented that I whined and shut the book at 1 AM (an hour earlier than my typical bedtime since late adolescence). Mr. Bronson, Ms. Merryman, you accomplished in one evening what my mother, and later, Jim have been trying to do for decades. I'm now in bed at least an hour and a half earlier (often more) each night.

The loss of late-night reading hours slowed my reading down, but the change of pace gave me more time and mental space to absorb the rich content of NurtureShock.

Like the new generation of social science books (Stumbling on Happiness, Outliers, Freakonomics), NurtureShock works to be informative rather than prescriptive. Unlike self-help parenting books which offer specific instructions for a perfect relationship/child/childhood, Bronson and Merryman discuss a huge body of research on child rearing and behavior (the bibliography and notes account for 83 pages).

While I could poorly reiterate the book's contents, I'm sure you'd benefit much more from reading it yourself.

The research on siblings gave me real pause. Things have been pretty rough between Ranger and the Raptor since she started crawling. Her mobility resulted in constant meltdowns and Ranger serving a lot of penal time in his room. NurtureShock summarized research on why siblings fight (or more importantly, get along). It's nothing like the theories I've heard. I called Jim at work after reading the chapter. "This may be what's going on..." Our situation looked rough. The research described our kids far too well as present and perpetual rivals. We talked about why siblings get along and committed to a 180 degree shift in our actions. In two days, Ranger's tantrums (regarding the Raptor) started fading. Two more days and only one tantrum. Things improved greatly as we thought purposefully about Ranger's interactions with the Raptor. We're all happier.

Bronson and Merryman carefully choose research that stands up to repetition and avoid the dangerous one-hit-wonders that grab headlines, but fail under long-term scrutiny. They aren't worrying about genius babies, prodigies, or delinquents nor are they pushing to create a super-achiever culture. They don't weigh on who sleeps where, offer dietary advice, or tell you how to punish your child.

The findings they report question underlying assumptions we have about our children, their character, and their development.

NurtureShock offers complex, but fascinating, perspective. I'm sure the ideas behind each chapter will get ample media coverage for months to come (Newsweek already excerpted the race chapter and NPR profiled the lying research in an interview with Bronson).

I hope it will be read by my family, friends, and community educators.

$14.99 at Amazon. $24.99 recommended price.

Baby Toolkit has no relationship with Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman, or their publishers (12 & Hachette Book Group)- though we'd gladly invite them all over for dinner any time. With two degrees in literature, Adrienne can be considered a professional reader (of fiction), but we have no credentials in child development. We bought the book through Amazon.