The Development of Self-Regulation

Stuart G. Shanker

Distinguished Research Professor Director, Milton & Ethel Harris Research Initiative

Coquitlam Summer Institute, July 5, 2010

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Changing School Trajectories

• There is considerable research showing how difficult it is to change a child’s trajectory from the moment that they enter kindergarten or grade 1

• On the basis of we can predict educational attainment and occupational status

• Why is it so difficult to change trajectories?

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Jensen

•The standard explanation, made famous by Arthur Jensen, is that IQ determines educational potential•Fluid IQ (e.g., processing speed) is determined by our genes and limits educational potential in the same way that hp limits how fast a car can drive•Intensive preschool programs can’t increase a child’s potential; they just squeeze out the last few drops of that potential

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Problems with the IQ Argument

•We have seen successful interventions at the level of the child (Stacey, 2004), the school (Meier, 1995), the community (Tough, 2009), and a nation (Carnoy, 2007)•Methodological/ conceptual flaws in twin IQ studies•Jensen saw IQ as the determining cause of “scholastic achievement”; these are very different phenomena

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The Need for a Developmental Explanation

•To move beyond IQ, we need a developmental explanation for why it so difficult to change children’s educational trajectories•Need to understand whether successes amount to more than maximizing genetic potential•Until we can explain what it is that we are doing wrong, and what it is that we are doing right, biological determinism will lurk in the background as the default hypothesis

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From Neurons to Neighbourhoods

•In 2000, Shonkoff & Phillips set off a seismic shift in how developmental scientists, and especially neuroscientists, look at the reasons why it is so difficult to change a child’s learning trajectory from kindergarten or grade 1 •The shift they instituted was from looking at IQ to seeing self-regulation as the key to a child’s “scholastic achievement”

Auto-immunedisorders

Psycho-pathologies

DevelopmentDisorders

CoronaryHeart

Disease

Obesity

Externalizingproblems

Internalizingproblems

Self-regulation

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Five Levels of Self-Regulation

1. Biology (Temperament)2. Emotion-regulation3. Cognitive: Executive Functions

– Sustained attention– Attention switching– Inhibit impulses– Deal with frustration, delay, distractions

4. Social : Co-regulation5. Self-reflectiveness

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The Teacher-Child Relationship

•Poor self-regulation not only impedes a child’s ability to attend to her lessons but may also undermine the teacher-student relationship •Not surprisingly, teachers respond much more positively to children who are able to stay calmly focused while those who have more difficulty in this regard receive less attention or are treated less sympathetically

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Self-regulation and Educational Trajectories

•The obduracy of trajectories may be largely due to poor self-regulation•A recent study has shown that children from lower SES have poorer development of the systems in the PFC that support self-regulation•So this suggests a deeper reason why we haven’t been able to close the achievement gap, and even, that it has relatively little to do with IQ

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A New Vision of a Child’s Educational Potential

•The ability to learn is in large part determined by: – child’s ability to attend to a lesson– process auditory or visual information – recognize visual, auditory or social patterns– respond to challenges with curiosity and interest– grasp the norms of classroom behavior

•If a child enters school without mastering these core capacities this will significantly impair his ability to rise to the challenges he will be exposed to in school

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Secondary Altriciality

• Early plasticity enables the child’s brain to be highly attuned to the environment in which she is born

• Synaptic growth in the first 2 years is massive• There is huge over-production of synapses that, at

8 months, will start to be ‘pruned’ back• Synaptic pruning is regulated by baby’s emotional

interactions with her caregivers

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Neal Halfon

04-212

SoundVisionSmell

TouchProprioceptionTaste

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The Role of the Primary Caregiver in Early Brain Growth

•The primary caregiver serves as an ‘external brain’, up-regulating and down-regulating the baby•Dyadic experiences are vital for:– Sensory integration– Sensory/motor coordination– Emotion-regulation– Effortful control– Sustained attention

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The Brain-to-Brain Interactive System

•Nature provided us with an exquisitely sensitive interactive system, in which specific types of experiences result in the delivery of specific types of stimuli to systems that come ‘online’ hierarchically•There are three key stages in this process:

–Proximal–Distal–Verbal

•In each of these stages, early brain development is fundamentally dyadic

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Stages of Arousal

Inhibition

1. Asleep

2. Drowsy

3. Hypoalert

4. Calmly focused and Alert

5. Hyperalert

6. Flooded

Activation

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Individual Differences

•The baby has to find interacting with her caregiver pleasurable; for that to happen the caregiver has to understand and respond to her unique physiology•An over-reactive baby who is highly sensitive to various types of stimuli needs to be enticed by more soothing touch and sounds•An under-reactive baby is enticed using more energy and bigger gestures or vocalizations

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A Baby’s Starting-Point

•Newborn starts life with basic capacities: hears fairly well, sees somewhat indistinctly, can move in response to stimuli but can’t control her movements•By 2 or 3 months she can respond to parents by looking up, or to the right and left •How does the baby reach this point of integrating the information coming in from her different senses and responding in a purposeful manner?

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Comforting a Newborn

•This process begins at the moment of birth•The descent down the birth canal and into the world is one fraught with physical and sensory assault•As she cradles her newborn in her arms, the caregiver is instinctively using her body warmth and the beatings of her heart to bring comfort to her child•every infant is different in the kinds of sensations or movements that she finds comforting

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Learning about a Baby’s Reaction to Touch

•Caregiver begins exploring every part of her baby’s body, promoting baby’s physical growth and providing mother with subliminal information about baby’s response to touch •Through trial and error, repeated over and over, the caregiver discovers what kind of touches, or which position or motion, enhance her baby’s ability to focus calmly, and which seem to distress her baby

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Helping the Baby Respond Positively To Touch

•If baby’s body stiffens when she hears motherese, caregiver might lower her pitch and slow down the rhythm, searching for a calming effect•With a baby who is under-reactive to sound, she might do opposite to get her baby’s attention•By gradually modulating her vocalizations the caregiver can maintain her baby’s interest and help him to cope with sounds that initially overloaded him, or attend to sounds that he seemed at first not to notice

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Hearing

•Caregivers can only learn how their baby reacts to sounds in their endless interactions•Caregiver needs to experiment with different cadences, pitches, tempo, etc., in order to ascertain which vocal patterns sustain her baby’s interest and which elicit no response, or even, are aversive

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Developing the Visual System

•The same subtly nuanced interactive process is key in the development of the baby’s visual system•caregiver learns if baby is drawn to or overwhelmed by animated facial expressions, or if he is energized or drained by bright lighting•By modulating the child’s visual experiences she learns how to maintain the child’s interest and slowly enhance his capacity to process visual stimuli

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The Learning Tree

• Far too often, our interventions with children in school are targeted at higher-level skills – the branches of the tree – rather than the roots

• The most effective interventions, especially with children in primary school, but really at all levels, target the roots of the child’s difficulties

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The Root System:Self-Regulation

• Fundamentally important is how the child orients to and processes auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory and olfactory information, and how she modulates her sensory responses – her overall reactivity or excitability, responsivity, and arousability to these various kinds of sensory stimuli

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Child’s Response to Stress

• Another critical biological factor is the child’s soothability: how easily or intensely she becomes fearful, anxious, angry, excited

• how she responds to new situations (e.g., approach versus withdrawal, adaptability)

• whether she actively seeks out new stimulation• distractibility and attention-span persistence

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Motor Planning

• Of utmost importance for the development of self-regulation is the child’s motor planning and sequencing abilities and the child’s sense of her body in space

• Many self-regulatory problems – chronically hypo- or hyper-reactive – can be traced back to early deficits in motor control and sensory-motor integration

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The Tree Trunk

• The better the child can stay calmly focused and alert, the better her development of :

• Effortful Control• Emotion-Regulation• Executive Functioning • Pattern Recognition• Symbolic and Language skills • Logical and Reflective thinking • Empathy and Theory of Mind

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Working on the Trunk

• Children having trouble staying calmly focused and alert typically have a problem in one of these domains

• The child’s ability to self-regulate in all these domains grows throughout schooling

• For that to happen, the child must continue to undergo experiences designed to nurture her ability to self-regulate in all these domains

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The Overarching Importance of Emotional Development

• The neural systems involved in emotion-regulation grow throughout the school years, as will the emotional challenges that child has to deal with

• Her learning experiences must be such that they are not only directed at the material covered in the curriculum but also geared towards creating a trunk that will be strong enough to withstand the emotional buffeting that the child will be exposed to as an adolescent and young adult

• This critical aspect of self-regulation must not be neglected

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The Boughs and Branches

• The boughs of the tree relate to the child’s mastery of the basic skills of reading, oral and written expression, math and science skills, music and art, and no less vital, health and hygiene

• Growing out of the boughs are the branches that represent the different domains of learning spelled out in detail in the curriculum, subject by subject

• As the child rises through the grades, the branches become increasingly intricate and articulated

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Using the Model

Typically, a teacher will look at: •how well the child functions emotionally, socially, and

intellectually •how well she can focus and attend•interact emotionally with those around her•do simple sequencing and problem-solving•Her creativity• whether she can answer “why” questions logically

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Look at the root system

• For example, the 10 year-old who is delayed in reading may have difficulties with sequencing and comprehending subtleties of sounds and words, making it hard for her to connect the sounds to the visual image when she is reading

• This makes her a slow, halting reader, in order to slow down the information inflow

• Her anxiety trying to read exacerbates the problem

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Building a Strong Foundation

• If we just work on the branches alone, then we’re trying to build a house without a strong foundation

• If we can strengthen the roots and the trunk we then really build foundations for strong branches

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How Many Children Are we Talking About?

•This argument doesn’t just apply to the child with ASD, ADHD, or CD•What about the child who is withdrawn and retreats into a fantasy world? Or who is frightened by new ideas? Or who refuses to mix with other children? Or who is easily frustrated and inconsolable if he makes a mistake? Or who gets lost in math problems, or can’t string together more than one or two ideas? Or who doesn’t appear to have any interests at all or isn’t curious about anything?

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The Real Source of Bell Curve Distributions

•The picture I am trying to paint here is that of a typical classroom•It is a picture that every primary teacher will immediately resonate with, which brings home the reality of the enormous task we have asked our primary school teachers to perform•Each of the traits described here, and many more, are a downstream consequence of much more basic processes

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A Holistic Approach to Strong S-R

•SR develops throughout childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood as challenges to which child is exposed increase•Programs with greatest long-term physical and psychological benefit are those that promote SR•The more developed the child’s SR, the more receptive and able they are to adopting healthy behaviors

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Back to Basics

•We’re just starting to understand what enhances and what constricts development of SR•The most important early experiences are the child’s interactions with her caregivers•The most effective activities for children growing up are the simplest: e.g., sports, nature, arts, social interest groups

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Living in Challenging Times

•See evidence of the possible negative effects of excessive tv and video games on development of SR •These activities also inhibit family and peer interactions•Growing number of families with both parents working, single parent-families with working parent

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The Ongoing Development of Self-Regulation

•S-R continues to grow throughout the lifespan, as we adapt to new challenges•Parents and teachers need to continue to develop SR to deal with the added stresses of parenting and teaching•Just as with the interactions that promote SR in children, the most successful parenting and teaching programs and are those that value the individuals involved

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Reading

•Diamond, A et. al (2008) Preschool program improves cognitive control Science November 30th•Fogel, A, King, B & Shanker, S (2007) Human Development in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP)•Greenspan, S & N Greenspan (2010) The Learning Tree (Perseus)•Greenspan, S & Shanker, S (2004) The First Idea (Perseus)•McCain, M, JF Mustard & SG Shanker (2007) Early Years Study II: Putting Science into Action.•Shanker, S (2010) Self-Regulation: Calm, Alert and Learning, Education Canada, 50:3•Shanker, S (2010) Enhancing the potential in children. H. Denise (ed), Early Child Development and Policy