Book Review: Mind in the Making

Advice for teaching your young child.

Mind in the Making is a book about how to teach toddlers through school-aged children executive functions—working memory, focus, cognitive flexibility, inhibiting your initial response, and metacognition—and other skills which build on executive functions, like perspective taking, communication, rationality, and self-directed learning.

Ellen Galinsky, the author, is the former president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and a researcher at the Families and Work Institute, a think tank focusing on, well, families and work. Her book seemed well-researched to me, didn’t inaccurately represent any studies I know of, quoted eminent scientists, and didn’t have any red flags of poor reasoning. However, I did not specifically fact-check any studies, so this post should be taken with a grain of salt.

I recommend checking out the book: it’s full of fascinating information about early childhood development. But if you just want the advice, here it is:

One: self-care. It is difficult to be a good parent, teacher, or caregiver if you’re stressed out and you have no slack. Taking time for yourself will help you be there for your children.

Two: basic childcare. Children are at their best for learning when they are well-rested, have regular meals of healthful foods, have lots of time to play outside and get their energy out, and know they are loved by at least one reliable adult. If you aren’t meeting your child’s basic needs, more complex nurturing isn’t going to help much.

Three: modeling behavior. Children learn through imitation. If you want your children to be critical thinkers, think critically through situations in front of them. If you want your children to empathize with others, empathize with them. If you want your children to know how to manage stress, manage your stress well in front of them. If you want your children to be able to name their feelings, talk to them about your feelings (in an age-appropriate manner, of course).

Particular behaviors to model: Always give your child accurate information, even about sensitive subjects. If you don’t know, look it up instead of making it up. Encourage them to ask other people you know about their interests.

Four: passions. Encourage your children to follow their passions. It’s easier to focus on things that you intrinsically care about, and developing those focus skills will help your child focus on things they don’t care about in the future. Children who follow their passions are more likely to be curious and think critically about what they’re learning, because they explore their the subject in more depth. Children also tend to be braver if they really care about achieving something.

Even young children can be supported in following their passions: maybe you can sit for a bit and play on your phone while they watch ants crawling across the sidewalk. For older children, support their interests in superheroes, space, dinosaurs, Minecraft, Disney princesses…

Connect your children’s passions to things that they’re learning in school or to other information that they encounter, to increase their interest in those subjects and encourage the skill of making connections.

Five: planning. Planning is a skill, and even quite young children can begin to develop it. A four-year-old can, with support, plan to play in the blocks corner, then with the dress-up clothes. At school or home, ask the child to create plans, follow through on the plans, and then discuss what they accomplished. You may want to ask them to write down their plans, so they can check for themselves what they’re supposed to do next. Preliterate children can draw their plans or put stickers in order.

Six: pretend play. Pretend play is perhaps the single most important thing for your child to be doing between the ages of two and ten. We evolved to do pretend play because it develops key executive-function and social skills. Pretend play develops working memory, because the child has to remember everything that’s going on in their play. It develops cognitive flexibility, because the child has to adapt to changing circumstances and pretend that items are what they aren’t. It develops perspective-taking, because children have to understand other people’s point of view to pretend to be them.

Children will play pretend on their own. You just have to make sure they have the opportunity: consider limiting screen time and adult-planned activities.

Seven: reading. Have an environment rich in books and text, and read to your children regularly. Choose books related to the child’s interests or to emotional struggles that they’re going through. When you read familiar books to children, ask them to repeat the refrains, like “not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!”

When you read a book to a child, or when the child reads a book on their own, have conversations about what happened in the book, why it happened, how it connects to the kid's life, and what they think is going to happen next. Ask them what the author wanted to communicate, whether the author succeeded at that, and whether the author affected their feelings. Encourage them to ask you questions about the book.

Encourage children to write letters to their favorite authors.

Preliterate children should play word games:

• I Spy

• Thinking of rhyming words

• Tongue twisters

• Trying to think of words that start with a particular sound

• Adding sounds or taking away sounds from words (“cat without a c is?” “at!” “thread without a th is?” “red!”)

• Looking for particular words (e.g. “Cheerios” when shopping)

Eight: writing. Talk to children about their interests. Tell stories about your own life to children, and ask children to tell stories about their lives. For example, if you go on a trip to a museum, ask them to tell the story of their trip to an adult who didn’t go.

Take dictation from prewriters so that they can tell stories.

Encourage older children to write stories or nonfiction. Then, edit it and underline misspellings and grammar errors (taking care to overlook enough mistakes that the page doesn’t look like someone bled on it). Have the child rewrite the story with fixed grammar, and put all the misspelled words into a unique “dictionary.” Encourage the child to reread their own writing and think about what some other person (their grandma, their best friend, their teacher) would think about it and why.

Give all children access to non-writing means of communication: dance, music, drawing, sculpture, making videos, photography…

Nine: television. Television is not bad for children, as long as it’s meaningful, age-appropriate, and educational, and doesn’t depict antisocial behaviors that the child might imitate.

Encourage critical viewing skills, especially of advertisements. Ask what an advertisement is trying to sell, what techniques the advertisers are using, why they use those techniques, whether the ads worked, and whether the ad is accurate. When watching TV programs, talk about what happened in the story, why the story was presented the way it is (e.g. lighting, set design), whether the program is accurate, and how programs are shaped by external forces.

Ten: games that build skills. Children learn best through play. Fortunately, there are lots of games that develop various executive functions and skills that build on them:

• Guessing games

• Puzzles

• Stroop-effect games

• I Spy

• Red Light/Green Light

• Simon Says

• Simon Says Do The Opposite (you have to do the opposite of what Simon says, such as standing up when Simon says “sit”)

• Musical chairs

• Having the child walk with a bell and try as hard as they can not to make a sound

• Games where the rules change (the book didn’t recommend Fluxx but I will)

• Board games that involve counting spaces

• Hide-and-seek

• Scavenger hunts

Children as young as two can be given sorting games. Four-year-olds and older can have more complex sorting games: “first put the blue items in the blue bucket and the red items in the red bucket, then the blue items in the red bucket and the red items in the blue bucket”; “sort these things one way, then sort them another way.” Khan Academy Kids has sorting games, alongside other educational literacy and math games.

You may have heard that computer games are bad for children. They actually aren’t, as long as you choose games that involve cognitive flexibility (changing what you do in response to different situations), working memory, attention, and inhibitory control (not doing the thing you immediately want to do on impulse)—which many games do.

Eleven: other play. Children should be given open-ended toys that can be used multiple ways, such as balls, blocks, and figures that represent people and animals. If you participate in your child’s play, don’t tell them what to do. Ask questions (“is this figure the queen or the princess?”) and describe the children’s experiences (“the queen must be so angry!”).

Twelve: other learning. When you want your child to learn something, talk about it with lots of detail. Ask them open-ended questions. Be genuinely interested in what they have to say. Give more information and feedback on their thought processes. Ask children to explain what they’re learning: it makes implicit learning explicit, causes them to articulate the principles behind what they’re learning, and makes them feel motivated and focused.

Give your child multiple experiences with the information (for example, a book about science, an experiment, and a museum visit). When possible, have a child directly experience something instead of just being told. Introduce new and puzzling information: children are most interested in something when it’s new, it conflicts with their expectations of how the world works, or they have two contradictory understandings of it.

When possible, give them information they’re genuinely interested in, not meaningless bullshit the adults want them to know.

Thirteen: perspective-taking. Over the course of a day, think about opportunities to teach children to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Ask them how other people you interact with are feeling or what they’re thinking at a particular moment; if you’re able, ask the people what they were thinking or feeling to check if your child’s guess was right. If a child breaks a rule, point out the negative effects of their behavior on others. Ask what characters in books, movies, and TV shows are thinking and feeling, and what their goals and motivations are in a particular scene.

Thirteen: evaluating information. If your child has received false information, ask “how can you find out if this information is true?” Teach them what sources are reliable and what sources are less reliable. Talk about confounding variables: is there more than one thing that could explain a correlation they’ve observed?

Fourteen: problem-solving. Guide and support your child in learning to solve problems and conflicts on their own. Here’s one good problem-solving method:

1. What is the problem?

2. What is the goal?

3. What are some different ways that we could solve the problem?

4. Which of these solutions would work?

5. Which solution should we pick?

6. How can we tell if it’s working?

At first, your child will need a lot of adult support and guidance, but as they get older they should be able to work through the process on their own.

Fifteen: stress. We think of stress as bad, but normal childhood stress—meeting new people, facing a fear, getting vaccines—is good for children. Stress is bad if it’s severe (the death of a loved one, a serious illness) or prolonged (a child is bullied at school for years). Even severe or prolonged stress isn’t necessarily harmful for children if they have warm, loving, trusting relationships with at least one adult who can support them.

Act frightened about situations you’d like your child to be frightened of (sticking a fork in the light socket) and calm about situations you’d like your child to be calm about (like vaccines). Don’t stop your child from exploring the world, as long as it’s safe; helicopter parents tend to create scared children.

Give your child as much control as possible over the stressful situation, without allowing them to leave it. Allow them to generate their own strategies to cope, perhaps using the problem-solving method discussed above.

Sixteen: mistakes. Have high yet reasonable expectations. Your expectations should be adjusted for who the child is. You can’t expect your quiet, artistic, uncoordinated child to become an athlete; your extroverted and energetic child to sit quietly for eight hours; or your child who is behind grade level in math to suddenly be in the top of the class. Expect your child to reach their personal best, not the thing you’d ideally like them to be.

Treat mistakes as part of learning. Don’t scold or punish children for genuine mistakes. Instead, praise or reward them for finding something that they can improve on.

Don’t try to solve academic or intellectual problems for them. Instead, promote their curiosity by allowing them to work on the problems for themselves.

Don’t praise achievement. Praise effort (how hard the child tried) and strategies (good ways that they approached a problem). Your child can’t change their natural abilities, so praising them for their natural abilities is pointless. Your child can change how much effort they put into something and whether they employed good problem-solving strategies, so the praise will help them achieve better. If you’re doing this, you need to actually track which things your child put effort into. Praising your child for their hard work on an assignment they did in five minutes in the car on the way to school is bullshit and kids can see right through it.

Mind In The Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. By Ellen Galinsky. Published 2010. 382 pages. $12.