How to teach your child about brain plasticity.

(6 min read)

Or listen to the guide for children on this podcast:

Research evidence shows that if you only make one change to the way you interact with your children and their learning, make it to teach them about brain plasticity. I really cannot stress this enough.

It is the neuroscientific support for Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset movement, and supports Angela Duckworth’s theory of Grit, and Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers. The more we plug away at something, the better we get. When school students are taught about brain plasticity, their grades go up. Even if you don’t alter your teaching one bit.

So, what’s the best way to go about doing this?

In my work with children in many different schools, its nearly always the case that their teachers underestimate young children’s ability to understand brain plasticity. Here are some pointers to help you out.

If your child is still a baby, talk to them. Naming the objects they are looking at, or talking through what you’re doing, can facilitate positive epigenetic changes in their brains.

Ten top tips.

1. Firstly, provide a very basic explanation of the parts of the brain (see the article: A Very Brief Tour of the Brain). The cerebrum is the biggest part of your brain. It’s the thinking part. It holds our memories and decides how to do different tasks. It also controls our muscles. The brainstem connects our brain to the spinal cord. It is in charge of things we can’t control like breathing and heartbeat.
2. Our brains have billions of tiny branching cells in them, called neurons. When you were born, the neurons weren’t very well organised or connected. But as you learned new things, they started to reach out and connect with each other, like people holding hands.
3. Each time you learn something new, the neurons in your brain make new connections, and pathways, to help you to remember it. The more you did something, like grab onto a rattle, or start to walk, the stronger these connections became. This made things easier for you to do. When you first started walking, you fell over a lot. But now you hardly fall over – you’re an expert walker!
4. Imagine you’re trying to cross a ravine. The first time, you might climb down one side and then up the other. It would be hard work and it would take you a long time. The second time, you might throw a rope across and pull yourself along, like a sloth. It would still be hard work, but it would be quicker than climbing down and back up again.
   If you kept on having to cross the ravine, you would probably add in another rope, so that you could walk your feet on one and hang off the other with your hands. This would make it much easier.
   Eventually, you might make a strong and thick bridge, with wooden slats to walk on, and two handrails. This would allow you to run across the ravine very quickly and efficiently.
5. This is what your brain does: the more times you do something, the stronger and more effective the neural pathway, or the connection, becomes.
6. Show your children this brilliant video from the BBC documentary The Human Body, where Professor Robert Winston show us just what crossing that ravine with a rope bridge looks like!
7. You are in charge of your brain. No matter how hard something seems at first, the more you keep on trying, the better you will get. Eventually, even if you have to go over and over it again, you’ll get good at it.
8. Mistakes are brilliant, because they are how we learn. If you tripped over a root walking up to the rope bridge and bumped your knee, you’d get up, rub it better and next time you’d remember to go round it. The mistake would have taught you how to get to the rope bridge better – to improve your journey.
9. Remember how hard it was when you first learned to ride a bike? Could you do it straight away? How did you get good? Could you swim straight away? What was it like? What did you have to do to get to where you are now?
10. As you practiced again and again, the neurons in your brain kept on sending messages to each other until eventually a path was formed. As you kept on practicing, this pathway got stronger and messages could travel quicker along it. You found it easier and easier, and got better and better!

The more we plug away at something, the better we get. When children are taught about brain plasticity, their grades go up.

Even if you don’t alter your teaching one bit.