Stanford Report Online



Stanford Report, October 17, 2001
Best-seller, co-authored by Stipek, helps parents encourage children's learning

BY MEREDITH ALEXANDER

When Deborah Stipek's daughter, Meredith, a high-schooler, has to take a test, Stipek gives her more than a passing "good luck" as she rushes off to class. The dean of the School of Education wakes up a little bit earlier to make Meredith a favorite breakfast: French toast with peaches.

"It says, 'I'm in this with you and it's important to me,'" Stipek says.

This is just one kind of expression of support that parents can use to promote their children's enthusiasm for learning, according to Stipek's new book, Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning (Henry Holt & Co., 2001).

Stipek and co-author Kathy Seal, a journalist, drew on Stipek's research on motivation as well as both women's experience raising their own children to write the book, which has reached the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. The result is an engaging combination of ideas tested by education scholars, anecdotes of child-rearing from the authors and their friends, and practical advice to parents.

The book reflects an attitude Stipek has carried throughout her career: Research ought to be able to serve and help real people. She knows it's not easy -- and not always respected among academics -- to apply research to average lives, but it's the impetus for much of her work.

"It's a challenge taking some pretty dry research and asking, What does this mean for a real kid who's having trouble with algebra?" Stipek explains. "But it's fun."

Initially, the book's publisher thought it odd that Stipek wanted to include endnotes citing research papers. But she pointed out that the book is more than just "a practical guide to ensuring your child's success in school," as its jacket announces; it's also a direct result of her scholarship.

"Unlike most 'pop' books, it's really based on research," Stipek says.

The way she and her readers really connect is through the common experience of raising children, Stipek explains. In Motivated Minds, she and Seal combined their two sets of children into one and wrote as if they had one big family. The use of the first-person narrative makes the book's text often read like friendly advice from one parent to another.

"Our experiences with our children and with friends' children helped us think about everyday challenges and issues, and how to talk to parents about them," says Stipek. "It would have been much harder if we didn't have children."

Stipek has raised Meredith as a single mom for the past 10 years, after she and her husband divorced. Her daughter, now 16, provided some of the key examples that Stipek and Seal highlight in their book.

For instance, Stipek recalls with frustration the time she bought a new piano for her daughter and paid for music lessons. "All along, I was pushing her," Stipek remembers.

One day Meredith turned to her and exclaimed that she didn't like piano and didn't want to take lessons. Stipek allowed her to stop, and just two years later, the girl reversed her decision and went back to the instrument with genuine interest.

"The main parental mistake is trying to control too much from the outside," Stipek says. When a child doesn't see the point of exerting effort on homework or piano lessons, "the most natural response is to try to come down and set limits. ... Oddly, and in some counterintuitive way, it's probably the worst thing to do," Stipek says.

So instead of becoming rule-enforcers, parents should focus on improving their relationships with their kids and giving them a sense of autonomy -- of choices -- within a framework of structure.

Relationship-building can be hard when parents insist on using guilt or rewards to motivate children to learn. Instead, they should remind children that they are on their side, and they should inquire about the reasons for the shortcoming. Sometimes through conversation, children can reveal the root of the problem: a too-heavy workload, a misunderstood math concept, or a class that moves so slowly that he or she has lost interest.

Stipek and Seal applaud parents who can learn to rein in their controlling impulses and let kids find their own path. The parents of a fourth-grader named Vanessa, in one example, stopped hovering over her as she halfheartedly did homework and set basic ground rules: If they didn't nag, Vanessa would start her work by 7 p.m. and get grades of C and above. Remarkably, the new program worked: Without constant complaining from her parents, Vanessa took her classwork as her own responsibility.

Although the book's wisdom seems to have worked in the case of Stipek's daughter -- Meredith is an accomplished student and a prolific writer -- Stipek's advice goes against the grain of much of what American parents believe about how to help their children be competitive, successful learners. Many think that they should monitor their children's activities and accomplishments, and fill their days with soccer, ballet and music lessons, and their evenings with more and more homework. But that's not necessarily what's going to help kids love to learn -- which, in the long run, will be a better predictor of their chances of getting into competitive universities such as Stanford.

"As a mother of a high-achieving daughter, I see that the pressure children are under is not good, not healthy," Stipek says. "The anxiety of parents is very high."

But strangely, it's that anxiety that could be holding their children back -- a point that Stipek's book drives home again and again. "The more you work, the less they do -- that's the irony," Stipek says.

Instead of pressuring kids to achieve, Stipek says, a better strategy is to show how much you enjoy learning yourself. She thinks that saying something as simple as "I read a great article on growing tomatoes today" could pique a child's interest in gardening, and what's more, shows that the family values gaining new knowledge.

"People don't think that they are promoting learning by having a conversation," Stipek explains. "But they are promoting values."