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Kia Ora Friends - Our Warmest Greetings
We all want our children to be successful. of course there are many definitions of what it means to be successful, and many ways of measuring success.
Something we all seek is some form of financial security, and so one definition of success would be financial security for our children.
To follow is an interesting article on the number one predictor of financial success from a 40-year-long New Zealand study. I think it has some important and relevant guidance for us as parents and educators.
Scientists Tracked 1,000 Kids for 40 Years. This Was the Number One Predictor of Financial Success:
If you wanted to figure out what really matters for raising happy, successful kids, you’d need to randomly select a bunch of babies from a broad spectrum of backgrounds. Then you’d need to follow them for decades. Only after measuring a multitude of factors about their personalities, families, schools, and neighbourhoods could you tease out what mattered and what didn’t.
That sounds like a tall ask. But thanks to a team of dedicated psychologists who have been following and intimately recording the lives of more than 1,000 kids from the New Zealand town of Dunedin since 1972, we actually have such a study.
The scientists now have more than 40 years of data. What has it all revealed about how to raise well-adjusted, financially successful kids?
What 40 years of data says about raising successful kids
More than 1,000 scientific papers worth of insight, actually, as this deep-dive article from Science into the history of “one of the more comprehensive and probing investigations of human development ever conducted” makes clear.
Analyses of the Dunedin data have found that most troublemakers grow out of juvenile delinquency, that mental health problems are more common than previously believed, and that early puberty is particularly stressful for girls.
It’s a grab bag of fascinating results, but which is the most useful for parents hoping to give their kids the best shot at a good life? Perhaps the incredible importance of building kids’ emotional intelligence for later-in-life success.
The best predictor of kids’ success? Emotional intelligence
Parents often stress about their kids’ academic performance, work ethic, and behaviour toward others. Those things are clearly important. However, according to the Dunedin study, none of them is the best predictor of whether a particular child will grow up to lead a satisfying, financially stable life. Neither is the wealth, education, or socioeconomic status of the parents.
What seems to matter most is whether kids understand their emotions and manage their reactions to them constructively.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman, often referred to as the godfather of emotional intelligence for his role in popularizing the concept, summed up the Dunedin findings in a recent keynote: “What they found was that in their 30s, the strongest predictor of financial success was cognitive control, stronger than IQ and stronger than the wealth of the family they grew up in. So how well you do in your life depends on your levels of cognitive control.”
EQ is a skill, not a trait.
You may have heard of the famous (if much debated) marshmallow test that asks kids to resist eating a tasty marshmallow for a few minutes to get two marshmallows later on. This is the kind of emotional intelligence Goleman and the Dunedin researchers are talking about.
It’s the ability to understand and, if necessary, override your feelings and impulses. There’s an incredible amount of science to show it impacts not just how successful kids are later in life, but how we all do in life.
Which might make you worry if you suspect your kid wouldn’t be able to resist gobbling that marshmallow. But there’s good news from Dunedin for parents. Not only did the study show just how important EQ is for kids’ later success, but it also showed that this kind of EQ isn’t just an inborn trait. It can be cultivated.
“The research indicated that self-control is not only a personal trait but can also be influenced by external factors such as parenting, education, and early intervention programs. Children who receive support and guidance in developing self-control skills tend to fare better as adults. This underscores the importance of fostering these abilities from a young age,” explains pediatrician Harry Goldstein
How to cultivate your child’s EQ
There’s plenty of advice out there on how parents can support the development of their kid’s EQ. Tips include helping your child talk through their emotions and empathising with them, modelling curiosity and humility, and even exposing them to art and literature as a way to think through the complexities of being human.
Read up on fostering emotional intelligence by following the links above for more information, but the essential takeaway for parents from the Dunedin study is just how valuable EQ is for kids.
Emotional intelligence isn’t just about being nice or even-keeled. It’s a fundamental skill that greatly impacts how well kids do emotionally and financially. This means parents should probably pay as much attention to it as they do to report cards and manners.
We work hard at Western Heights to support children to be self-managing, self motivating, self-moderating leaders of their own learning.
Our structured approach to Play-Based-Learning involves developing our children's self-regulation skills before focusing on formal, stand-alone literacy and numeracy learning.
Foundational skills often serve as prerequisites for more complex skills. When these foundational skills become automatic, children can seamlessly transition to higher-level skills and concepts in specific subject areas such as reading, writing and maths.
The research for this is clear: children need to understand and recognise their emotions before they can be in control of them. They need practice developing resilience as they learn to manage and channel their emotions and responses. They need patience, love, nurture, encouragement and challenge as they work through this process.
By getting this foundation in place, we can then build on it and accelerate learning so that by the time our children leave us as year six graduates, they are at the expected standard or above.
As always - if you have questions or concerns about anything school-related - email me at macash@mac.com, and I will get back to you asap.
My very best regards to you all,
Ash Maindonald
Principal.
