Cultivating Your Child’s Capacity to Thrive

Charles Debelak
This series of blogs is taken from articles by Charles Debelak in the Birchwood School of Hawken's Clipboard during the 2016-17 school year. The purpose of Mr. Debelak's Clipboard articles is to provide parents with information about sound educational principles and child development issues gleaned from history, contemporary research, and Mr. Debelak's 40+ years educating, coaching, and counseling children, young adults, and parents

I have a famous adage posted in my classroom that reads, “Watch your thoughts because they will become your words. Watch your words because they will become your actions. Watch your actions for they will become your habits. Watch your habits for they will become your character.”

I think this is a concise summary of what it takes to teach children to thrive. We cultivate a child’s capacity to thrive if we cultivate habits of thriving through the cycle of teaching and training: thoughts form words, words lead to actions, actions become habits, and habits shape character.

I am not discounting the impact that genetics and environment might have on the development of character. Habit formation does not tell the whole story. But my purpose in addressing the role of habits in character formation is to highlight the deliberate action that parents and educators can take to influence that development. Although we cannot control or manipulate all the variables that merge to create character, there is much we can do to shape habits.

I find support for how habits are formed from findings of the past 50 years in the field of brain research. It is generally accepted that the brain is like a muscle. It can grow. It can be shaped depending upon environmental stimuli. Marian Diamond, professor at UC Berkeley and head of the Diamond Lab, summarizes brain research during the last half of the 20th century, “The emerging message is clear: The brain, with its complex architecture and limitless potential, is a highly plastic, constantly changing entity that is powerfully shaped by our experiences in childhood and throughout life. Our collective actions [toward children] are a powerful shaper of both function and anatomy. What’s left for the wise parent or teacher, hoping to promote their children’s healthiest mental development, is to pick the right experience at the right time” (Magic Trees of the Mind, pg. 2-3).

Summarizing the portrait of brain development gathered from PET scans, Diamond comments, “More than any other organ, the brain can be shaped by stimulation and use, by disease and trauma, by dull routine and disuse into a center of thought, sensation, and regulation most appropriate for a given individual’s life. The dendrites, the magic trees of cerebral cortex, retain their ability to grow and branch, and it is this lifetime growing potential that enables us to continue learning and adapting. However, childhood is a particularly crucial time for the brain because of the neural sculpting that goes on; for many of our abilities, tendencies, talents, and reactions, those that get “hardwired” in childhood become the collective mental platform upon which we stand and grow for the rest of our lives.” (pg. 56-57).

Diamond breaks down complicated neuroscience to make practical its implications for parents and educators, “... input from the environment helps shape the human brain ... [We should ask ourselves] what kinds of environments are we creating for children, and how will these affect their developing minds?” (pg. 64).

In our conversation about thriving, we can borrow Diamond’s questions, “What kinds of environments, what kinds of instruction, what kinds of experiences can we create for our children to affect their developing minds whereby thriving becomes their habit, a part of their character, a way of life.” Brain research lends confidence to our efforts. The cycle of habit formation – teaching and training – is effective in the development of thriving children. Even accounting for the genetic and environmental variations, our efforts toward this goal have value.
 
 
From Dec 2016/Jan 2017 Birchwood Clipboard
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An independent, coeducational, college preparatory day school, toddler through grade 12

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Birchwood School of Hawken, 4400 West 140th Street, Cleveland, OH 44135 
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