Post No.: 0674
Furrywisepuppy says:
Even when adults understand what will be good for them, they can still repeatedly do many things that they know will result in negative consequences for them despite their better judgement – such as knowing that’s it’s healthier to eat less junk food yet still eating too much junk food, or knowing that one should get up and walk more yet still spending too much time sitting down.
The ‘executive function’ elicits the metaphor of the brain as an organisation with many departments, and the executive – just like a company executive – oversees and coordinates the many processes of this organisation e.g. to plan, select and focus on tasks, flexibly switch between tasks, and suppress unwanted impulses, in order to adopt behaviours that should lead to desirable outcomes and avoid behaviours that would lead to undesirable ones. Many ideas knock on the executive’s door and it’s the job of the executive to adopt the good ideas and reject the bad ones.
The cluster of abilities that make up the executive function involve attentional control, one’s working and short-term memory, inhibitory/self-control, cognitive flexibility or the switching between different ideas or tasks, general thinking and reasoning, and problem-solving and planning. The different components of the executive function (or EF) take time to develop, and develop at different rates.
Differences in executive function are correlated with differences in important life outcomes, like health, income and crime. A higher executive function is related to increased cooperation in class, a better focus on tasks, fewer problems with behavioural issues at school, better academic achievement and better health and financial outcomes later in life, on average.
Being able to exhibit patience and delay gratification is crucial for achieving a myriad of long-term goals in life because many big goals require, perhaps years of, hard work before one can reap the fruits of one’s labours. Sometimes we won’t even know exactly how long it might take to reach a goal, but if we’re persistent then we’ll eventually get there. Reports of impulsivity, aggression, hyperactivity and a lack of persistence on tasks are correlated with smoking habits, dropping out of high school and teenage pregnancies in adolescents; and substance abuse, poor physical health, low income, low savings and high rates of criminal conviction in adults. However, socio-economic factors also have a major influence upon these. So taken together, the results in this area of research are currently untidy – but we can say that deprived children who also experience difficulties in paying attention, controlling their impulses, planning and flexibly switching between tasks may be predicted to exhibit these very same problems many decades later, with stark consequences for their health, educational achievement, wealth and well-being.
Some children will grow up to remain more impulsive than others, but it’s fair to say that all young children start out as impulsive! So a child’s bad behaviour could be much less to do with their internal moral compass and more to do with their basic struggle to control their behaviours. They likely already know and understand the moral lessons (hence they don’t have a problem with listening or learning) but just have a difficulty in following them. You often hear children say, “I didn’t mean to do that.” Understanding the executive function, its typical development schedule, and how it can sometimes be impaired, is crucial for properly interpreting a child’s actions so that we can better help them with their struggle to act according to their will. (In other words, it’s often not their inability to listen to instructions that’s the problem but their impulsiveness at their age.)
Young children seem to understand the word ‘want’ much earlier than ‘think’ or ‘no’. Young children also take time to learn the difference between actions that produce unintended negative consequences and actions that have intentionally negative consequences (both are deemed equal by young children). This milestone is important for our moral reasoning e.g. understanding the difference between manslaughter and first-degree murder, even though the end result is the same.
Children can often appear to act quite violently, disrespectfully and mean towards others, and it often feels like they’re unable to learn despite many interventions. Children understand quite early on in life that violent, angry and selfish people aren’t as nice to be around with as peaceful, friendly and kind people, so again the problem isn’t necessarily purely about what they know or believe is right or good for them but about acting in accordance to their own beliefs and moral compass.
Adults often behave in ways they later regret too – they often act on impulse and are unable to control their inhibitions at times. But children have a better excuse as to why they’re like this more of the time because their prefrontal cortices, in particular, take time to develop and to connect with other parts of their brains, which affects both their ability to formulate a less impulsive behavioural plan and executing it. This region of the brain is thus pertinent when it comes to one’s executive function.
At any time, numerous thoughts, emotions or desires arise in our minds, but unless our prefrontal cortex is depressed – which it can be for adults too via the effects of alcohol or other specific drugs for instance – we can suppress or control this flow to guide our attention back onto the task we really want to focus on in the moment, and our white matter enforces these plans and decisions by sending out signals for action and suppressing impulses that are contrary to them. (Grey matter connects nearby cells with nearby cells in the brain’s structure, whilst white matter connects entire regions of the brain with other regions of the brain, and both are slower to develop in the prefrontal cortex than in other areas of the brain. White matter in the prefrontal cortex continues to develop well into adolescence.)
Therefore it’s often a case of parents expecting too much from their own children according to their developmental age. This doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t continue trying to teach and reinforce moral lessons to their children, but it’d also help to do things like being mindful of their environment to remove any temptations or distractions, or to indeed accept them as they are until they’re more developed and mature. Woof!
Parents can sometimes forget how they were when they were young too, when they judge their children’s behaviours. Despite all adults logically having long firsthand experiences of themselves being kids and then adolescents – most adults somehow frequently fail to properly empathise with the minds of kids and adolescents and have unreasonable expectations as parents e.g. feeling exasperated at the short attention span of a child after giving them a lengthy task or the rebelliousness of an adolescent after they’ve been spoken down to! This highlights that even previously living through something ourselves firsthand isn’t always enough to give us the empathy to understand another person, or even ourselves at times e.g. how one thought one knew what true love was when one was a teenager, when one was really primarily driven by the effects of puberty and lust.
It’s as if everyone needs to directly learn such knowledge, or to have something explicitly pointed out to them first, before they will understand it because personal experience isn’t always sufficient to teach us what we ought to know.
This all extends on the conclusion set forth by Fluffystealthkitten in Post No.: 0586 about how it’s not only children who need to learn in order to grow but parents who need to learn in order to be more empathic, and less stressed-out, as parents. You have a kid, then they act like a kid, then you’re disappointed(!) But they’re children, not little adults.
Woof. Some kind of reaction towards witnessing misbehaviour in children is natural, but if you can explain why many adult people feel so exasperated when a young child (or a pet animal like a dog or cat) doesn’t behave like an adult person is expected to behave, then please feel free to by replying to the tweet linked to the Twitter comment button below!
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