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

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-immune

disorders

Psycho-

pathologies

Development

Disorders

Coronary

Heart

Disease

Obesity

Externalizing

problems

Internalizing

problems

Self-

regulation

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Five Levels of

Self-Regulation

1. Biology (Temperament)

2. Emotion-regulation

3. Cognitive: Executive Functions

– Sustained attention

– Attention switching

– Inhibit impulses

– Deal with frustration, delay, distractions

4. Social : Co-regulation

5. 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

Sound

Vision

Smell

Touch

Proprioception

Taste

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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

Stages of Arousal

Inhibition

1. Asleep

2. Drowsy

3. Hypoalert

4. Calmly focused and Alert

5. Hyperalert

6. Flooded

Activation16

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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

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

integration27

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 28

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

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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 articulated31

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 logically32

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