Eating all the cookies

by Anne White

There have been a lot of popular habit-themed books written in recent years, and one of them is Tiny Habits, by B. J. Fogg, Here are my takeaways from it: 

If you want to increase your chances of cementing or continuing a habit, you have to make it easier OR give the person a stronger motivation for doing it.

If you want to break one, you have to make the thing more difficult OR change their motivation. 

Fogg doesn't talk about Frog, Toad, and their difficulty in not eating cookies (in Frog and Toad Together), but that story comes close to what he's saying. By putting the box up on a shelf, they did make it more difficult to get at them, but they still had a strong motivation to eat the cookies, so it didn't work very well. Still, changing just one of those factors makes it more likely that you will change the habit, one way or another. 

Another example is something my husband mentioned: that people aren't giving blood as much these days, and the blood-donation places are wondering why. One reason may be that workplaces used to make blood donation super-easy, having clinics on site or giving people time off to go to them. Since people's internal motivation to donate blood can be very low or mixed (they know it's a good thing to do, but it might hurt), that's something that you have to counteract by making it as easy and painless as possible for them to do so. We're not describing a habit here, but it's the same sort of problem where, to see an action happen more often or more regularly, you have to make it easier to people to buy into it. Or harder for them not to.

B. J. Fogg claims that it is NOT necessary to do something for a month or a certain number of times in order for it to become a habit: the factors that really count in forming a habit are things like motivation and ease of doing the action. He offers the example of a young person who is given a smart phone which is immediately glued to them. There are certain habits we can pick up very quickly, but also some that we can drop just as quickly.

Charlotte Mason makes a great deal of the power of habit, and we usually focus on the word "habit" there, but I think we should emphasize the word "power" just as much. And this "power" is something that we can have over ourselves, if we have the right tools. One tool is the power of association, or what we might now call "triggers." The interesting power of recognizing "triggers" is that they can be turned on their heads. To break a habit, you need to purposefully change what that trigger tells you to do. I think it was in Fogg's book that I saw this example:. A woman was going through a bitter divorce, and every time she had to meet with her husband he would say nasty things. She created a cunning plan in which she gave herself little rewards (like watching an episode of her favourite show) based on how many whammies he threw at her. Sounds very odd, but for her it created a new sense of delight rather than resentment; the trigger of an insult gave her something to look forward to, rather than the urge to retaliate. (Disclaimer: this example is not meant to reflect on anyone's marital experience or to minimalize the pain of interpersonal conflict, it's just something that apparently worked for one person.)

Another part of the power of habits is our ability to chain them together--and many of us have seen this as we train children to go through a morning routine, where  they comb their hair, then brush their teeth, then make their bed. One action triggers the next. If we already have one good habit fixed in place, we can more easily load a bonus habit on top of it.

Which is, perhaps, a whole new side of the idea that "education is the science of relations."

What do you think?

Why, they say, we can't read books anymore

by Anne White

Have you read the Christian Science Monitor article about people being so distracted that they can't pay attention long enough to read anything demanding, even if they want to?  It popped up for me on Yahoo a few days ago, and I actually read it.  I do read things.  But then that's what I do.  And on the other end, there are people who really never did read much in the first place, so superimposing the distraction of technology on them isn't going to make a lot of difference.

I'm trying to put myself in the place of someone who used to read,  used to want to read, and who has actually changed that because of "digital distraction."  Is there really such a person?  Maybe, maybe not.  I'm more concerned about how this applies to children, learning or not learning.  If the office workers cited in the article were interrupted about every three minutes and took twenty-three minutes to get back on task-and these were adults--is it any easier for children who are constantly interrupted and distracted?  It sounds as if we're putting ourselves, or being put, into an ADHD experiment..  The question is, why would we want to do that to ourselves, and more so, to our children?

And check out this observation: "I see people of all ages around me abandoning the moment they're in to search for something better."  The author blames this, again, on the intrusion of technology, claiming that a friend found a miraculous cure by abandoning a fancier phone for a flip phone.  Wow, if that was all it took...the funny thing is, I don't even have a flip phone, and I still get distracted.  Not enough not to read, but just trying to keep all the usual balls in the air.  But this friend, apparently, could not bring himself to read books as long as he felt enslaved to his do-everything, don't-abandon-me piece of technology.  (Doesn't that remind you a bit of those Japanese electronic "virtual pet" toys, popular about fifteen years ago, that demanded to be fed and coddled hour on the hour?  Is it possible that those were just training wheels for "SmartBerries" and the rest?)  Well, anyway, there we seem to have our Exhibit A, somebody who would have read, could have read, but who was too busy to stop and seriously look a book in the eye. Well, good for him, at least.

But again, he's an adult. He knows better and he can make his own choices.  What concerns us are the children, our own and those around us.  Are we allowing them a great deal time free of distractions?  We may have to deliberately create that--I don't mean sabotaging the devices, but at least going places where they're not wanted or not allowed, and that can include "unplugged" places and times within our own homes.  If education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, we need to be vigilant about guarding all three.

With young children, we can play with them, with our own gadgets turned off of course.  We can do as Charlotte Mason suggests in "Inconstant Kitty" (Formation of Character), and encourage them to finish the game, play with the same toy a bit longer, go a little slower and more carefully at building something.  We can provide toys with many possibilities.  We can even do as the mama in All-of-a-Kind Family did with chores: she hid buttons (and occasionally pennies) when the little girls were dusting, so that they had to do a very thorough job to find them all.

If we homeschool, we can practice the disciplines, create the habits that do teach them to concentrate, pay attention, observe--and then record observations non-electronically.  If we teach classes or work with groups of children, we can provide books and activities that absorb them, that make them suddenly come up for air and ask for another chapter, more time to keep working or watching something.

Some will say that is not exactly cutting-edge.  But in a world where distraction is the new normal--maybe it is.