Karate Kid

There is a boy I really hope would never forget me. Our encounter was brief but had things just been a little different, we both would have ended up seriously hurting each other.

It happened in the gym last week as I was preparing to do my sit-ups. The second I lifted my body, I brushed against another body in mid-air. I found myself closing my eyes and letting out a sound. The next thing I know, I was looking to my right at a very healthy boy who was about eight years old, in a karate outfit. I looked around me and there were other boys in their karate outfits who had frozen in their spots in shock. Before I could say anything, the little boy started in a voice you could never snap at “so sorry, so sorry, so sorry…” He was saying it in a tone that pleaded. He also did not leave his spot. Only then did I realize that he actually jumped over me.

As soon as I realized this, I said, “Ok, ok, but tell me first what made you do it?” I was far more curious than upset. And he said again with an expression that melted my heart: “So sorry, so sorry, I really thought I could jump!” I tried to be the mature adult and tried not to laugh. In my head I was doing many things, including commending the parent/s of this kid who taught him never to flee the scene of the crime until he has apologized and crossing my tally of how children, especially boys, think they simply could “jump” hurdles, including middle-aged women trying to do sit-ups. That boy was not able to calculate the consequence of his “jump” and it could have cost him his head and me, my ribs.

We commonly think that the ability to foresee consequences of our actions is present in all humans, just in different strengths in children and adults. But some researchers have found out that this ability is not simply “weak” in children but may still be absent as far as the brain is concerned. The study is entitled “Pupillometric and behavioral markers of a developmental shift in the temporal dynamics of cognitive control” by Christopher H. Chathama, Michael J. Frank, and Yuko Munakata in the early March 27 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

They did this by studying the reactions of the pupils of the eyes of two groups of kids: eight-year-olds and 3.5-year-olds. How pupils in our eyes grow larger and how long they stay large are good indicators of the mental effort being exerted by these kids. In order to see what happens to the pupils of these groups of kids, they tried three ways. Two involved popping a “probe” and “cues” to elicit a reaction and another is to introduce a “delay” which could test if the kids are waiting to see what happens next. The study found that eight-year-olds enlarged their pupils more and for a longer time than the younger group during “delay” which, according to the researchers, indicated that they were exerting more effort in trying to make sense of what could happen. In contrast, the group for 3.5-year-olds exhibited larger pupils when “probed” which demonstrated that these younger ones were more interested in coping with the moment, than what could happen next as a consequence.

The researchers involved in this study think that these findings may be useful in raising kids so that we do not simply treat them as pre-adults that simply need experience to get better at calculating a picture of the future, based on the present. They think that we should find out more about the processes in children’s development that enable a shift from simply being reactive to being pro-active. Could a kind of training that we could give our kids be too early or too late in terms of helping them make the shift? Could damage to certain areas of the brain make this shift so much more difficult for kids, if not improbable? These questions could help us get to know children as children.

Remember the Marshmallow test I mentioned in a column two weeks ago about four-year old kids being given a marshmallow and being promised another marshmallow if they waited for 20 minutes before they ate it? Those who waited were the ones who turned out to be “better” in terms of being well-adjusted in psychological and academic measures, later in college. I think that this mental peek into the reward that awaits those who passed the Marshmallow test has also something to do with the current study. I think if kids intentionally wait for something, delaying instant reward, it says so much more than simply not gulping the first marshmallow. I think it also speaks of the shift that the child has started to do in terms of being only in the moment or have a mental foot on the future.

I also think it would be a good study in the future to extend this to the gender differences in the same age group of children. More than a decade ago, a famous study called Why Do Boys Engage in More Risk Taking Than Girls? The Role of Attributions, Beliefs, and Risk Appraisals that appeared in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology by Barbara A. Morrongiello and Heather Rennie of the University of Guelph, found out, among other things, that little boys take more risks than girls of the same age, attributing failure to “bad luck.” The researchers did this with interviews and showing the subjects drawings of children engaged in “risky” play. Little girls in the study highly identified with the wary expressions of children in the drawings and assigned “risk” to those activities a lot more than the boys did.

There is a song I heard that has a line that goes “If I could, I would try to shield your innocence from time.” It sounds like a line that parents would constantly sing to their very young children as they raise them. But children grow up and this is a world full of risks and the sooner kids learn how to make decisions by weighing them, the more likely it is that they would have a good footing for tomorrow. And if children fail to make their little jumps, their parents are there to catch them. And sometimes this applies to even middle-aged kids. As Bill Cosby said, “Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to go back home.”

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