And the real culprit is...overstimulation

Bleary eyed. Heads down on their desks. Yawns.

Why are these kids always so tired?

Everyday, my students walk into class looking exhausted. When I ask them how they're doing, invariably the response I get is, "I'm so tired." And increasingly, kids tell me that they feel anxious, overwhelmed, and stressed.

Parents and teachers tend to assume that the culprit is too much schoolwork. If we assign less homework, the kids will be fine. If we have fewer assessments, the stress will dissipate.

But I don't think that schoolwork is the primary culprit.

The primary culprit for rising levels of exhaustion, anxiety, and stress is overstimulation, something I've written about here. Students today have too much going on in their lives -- and between the floods of emails, digital notifications, pings on their phones, visual images, tweets, back-to-back enrichment activities, social engagements, assignments, deadlines, commitments, sugar binges, sports tournaments, and snapchat -- they're just so overstimulated that their bodies and minds can't actually handle it. (The same is true for many working adults as well, I think. We're just way too overstimulated.)

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that speed is always a good thing. And I'm not sure that "efficiency" and "productivity" (all words that describe machines and the mechanization of society) are the goals that we should be working towards. The fact is, we're not machines, and our job is not to "process" vast quantities of information and "perform" one task after another. If you ask me, human=machine is a destructive metaphor.

We're people. We're human. We're reflective, contemplative, emotional, irrational, and complex. And that's what makes us so interesting and creative.

And the reality is that our bodies and minds haven't yet caught up with the frenzied pace of an overstimulated digital and global world. And while we may think that "working like a machine" is a good thing in this age of machine-like multitasking, efficiency, and speed, the fact of the matter is that we're destroying ourselves by trying to be more machine-like, more overstimulated, more busy than we can actually handle.

So my goal for my own children is to lower the levels of stimulation that they encounter at home.

• They don't need sugary snacks and lots of treats; they need vegetables.

• They don't need social media; they need cuddles and real life, face-to-face conversations with their parents and grandparents.

• They don't need a flood of bite-sized superficial bits of information, they need old-fashioned books, the longer the better.

• They don't need back-to-back enrichment activities, they need time at home to read, daydream, play, and rest.

• They don't need so much breadth -- so much exposure to so many, many different things all at once; they need depth in their lives. Let's do less, much less, but let's do it better.

• They don't need to "work like machines" and "multi-task" and "be efficient." They need to work like humans -- slowly, reflectively, contemplatively, creatively. You know what? They need some time to daydream, imagine, and think. They need to slow down.

And here's the catch. If they have a little more time to get their homework done, slow and sustained academic work may actually help them feel more centred, more focused, and more calm. Like I said, I don't think that it's academic work that's the problem. It's all the other stuff .... the hyper-stimulated world that our kids live in.

Summer Freedom!

Today is the last day of this academic year. As the summer stretches out ahead of me, I feel tremendous excitement and relief.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my job, and I’m a big proponent of hard work, schoolwork, homework, and all kinds of work. But by the end of the academic year, I’m totally and completely worn out. Schools are possibly the most structured and disciplined places on our planet. During the school year, faculty and students alike are governed by schedules, timetables, and syllabi. We think in terms of hour-long blocks that end with a loud bell. Our thoughts are always, necessarily, fragmented. Just as we’re working through a particularly difficult piece of poetry, the bell rings. All of a sudden, students have to march to a Chemistry class and wrestle with the periodic table, while I have to run to another class and teach a totally different text. And then, all year long, students and faculty alike march from one set of assignments to another, from one set of assessments to another, from one reporting period to another. Much as I love school, I do find the degree of structure overwhelming.

So, summer is a welcome break. As I contemplate two months of freedom, I realize how important unstructured time is for all of us: faculty and students alike. While structured learning is very important, a whole different kind of learning takes place in the summer. We can spend a morning immersed in a book, with no bell to interrupt the experience. We can immerse ourselves in a particular project or learning experience without the constraints and demands of school.  We can play! Play with ideas, play with words, play in the sand and play at the beach. We can engage in an activity for the pure pleasure of it, without worrying about external assessments and judgments. We can do what we love, what we want, instead of being forced to do what everyone else (administrators, exam boards, parents, teachers) tell us to do. Oh, the joy of summer!

Unstructured time is, I think, critical for deep thinking and creativity. All people, teachers and students alike, need long stretches of unstructured time to imagine, dream, and think. It is this mental space and time that allows us to be reflective and creative. Additionally, we all need downtime to recharge our batteries. And, very importantly, we all need time outdoors, time to connect with nature and our physical environment. The beauty of the academic year is that we have this time built into every year. Every academic year begins anew in August, with renewed vigor and intensity. And then every academic year winds down in June, giving way to the luxury and freedom of summer.

The Best Multicultural Reading List for Kids in Grades 2 to 6 - MUST READ BOOKS

Here's a list of my own kids' favorite books from all around the world. I believe SO strongly that kids need to see themselves and others reflected in literature, and this list offers kids like mine -- global South Asian kids growing up in Singapore -- a wide range of books that reflect both the familiar and the foreign in wonderful ways. 

BOOK LIST: FICTION

Charlotte’s Web (US)

-       The Folk of the Faraway Tree (England)

-       Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (China)

-       Starry River of the Skies (China)

-       The Mudskipper (Singapore)
-Sherlock Sam series (Singapore)

-       A Single Shard (Korea)

-       Noodle Pie (Vietnam/Australia)

-       Listen, Slowly (Vietnam)

-       Just A Train Ride Away (India)

     Tiger Boy (India)
Thai-riffic (Thailand, Australia)

-       Danger By Moonlight (India, Italy)

-       Flora and Ulysses (US)

-       Number the Stars (Denmark)

-       The Giver (US)

-       Esperanza Rising (Mexico, US)

-       I Lived on Butterfly Hill (Chile)

-       The Garbage King (Ethiopia)

-       Clay Marble (Cambodia)

-       The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.Frankeweiler (US)

-       Oliver Twist (UK)

-       Red Scarf Girl (China)

-       Chinese Cinderella (China)

-       I Am David (Europe)

-       Oranges in No Man’s Land (Lebanon)
-The Ash Mistry Series (India/UK)

Is it possible to raise creative kids in Singapore?

I recently gave a talk about my book to a largely Singaporean audience at the Raffles Town Club. I was speaking to members of DUAL -- the Distinguished University Alumni League, here in Singapore.

The conversation was interesting, but there seemed to be one over-riding concern that parents had: how could they raise creative kids in a system that seemed designed to squash and kill creativity?

My advice -- which I write about in Beyond The Tiger Mom -- is to counterbalance school at home as much as possible.

How can parents do that? Here are three suggestions:

1. TIME IN NATURE
Get kids outside and then give them time to do what they want. Let nature and childhood work their magic. Let kids play!
Given that 90% of Singaporean teens are myopic and that stress levels, particularly during exam time, run dangerously high, we need to let kids recover and rejuvenate by giving them free time out in nature. It will help their eyes (myopia is linked to too little time outdoors), their physical health, their mental health, and it will free them up to be more creative.
Check out chapter 4 in Beyond the Tiger Mom, and Richard Louv's book "Last Child in the Woods" for more info.

2. ENCOURAGE KIDS TO ASK QUESTIONS
As I've written about in previous posts, exams are all about getting the right answer. But to be more creative, our kids don't need to check a box and give an examiner the right answer, they need to come up with good questions. In an exam-oriented educational system, kids become well-trained to anticipate what an examiner is looking for and then give the right answer. But we need to counterbalance that by encouraging our kids to ask the right questions.
Ask your kids, "What questions do you have about ________?"
Model questions yourself: "I often wonder why __________?"
Talk to your kids about the importance of asking questions.
When kids ask questions, engage them in a discussion. Don't shut them down, but instead, focus on getting them to speak up more and ask more questions. Encourage questioning in every way you can.
For young kids, create a wonder wall in your kids bedroom, and have them post questions and "wonderings" that they come up with.

3. ENCOURAGE THE ARTS
The Singapore Local System has four main tested subjects in elementary/junior school: Math, Science, Mother Tongue, and English Language.
What's missing? The Humanities, Literature and the Arts.
While schools may offer these subjects as fringe subjects in the curriculum, parents and educators routinely tell me that "what gets tested gets taught," so most time and energy at school is diverted towards tested (PSLE) subjects.
And when we don't encourage our kids to immerse themselves in literature, the humanities and the arts, we risk creating a very one-dimensional population. We need to give our kids exposure to history, literature, and art so that they can begin to develop empathy, perspective, and creativity. Through these subjects -- particularly the arts -- we offer our kids the ability to imagine and create, to think in different ways.
As parents, we can supplement a local education by offering kids time and space to read, paint, sing, act, and daydream. Encourage the arts. As this wonderful article illustrates, they may not help with exam scores in the short run, but they will pay off in the long run!