Don’t forget!

The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention

Reading Time: 12 minutes

We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against it. Find out how to use it here.

“Every perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”

— Gerald Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge

The most important metaskill you can learn is how to learn. Learning allows you to adapt. As Darwin hinted, it’s not the strongest who survives. It’s the one who easily adapts to a changing environment. Learning how to learn is a part of a “work smarter, not harder” approach to life—one that probabilistically helps you avoid becoming irrelevant. Your time is precious, and you don’t want to waste it on something which will just be forgotten.

During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours at a time memorizing facts, equations, the names of the elements, French verbs, dates of key historical events. We found ourselves frantically cramming the night before a test. We probably read through our notes over and over, a gallon of coffee in hand, in the hope that the information would somehow lodge in our brains. Once the test was over, we doubtless forgot everything straight away.¹

Even outside of formal education, we have to learn large amounts of new information on a regular basis: foreign languages, technical terms, sale scripts, speeches, the names of coworkers. Learning through rote memorization is tedious and—more important—ineffective. If we want to remember something, we need to work with our brains, not against them. To do that, we need to understand cognitive constraints and find intelligent ways to get around them or use them to our advantage.

This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.

It works for words, numbers, images, and skills. It works for anyone of any age, from babies to elderly people. It works for animals, even species as simple as sea slugs. The effect cuts across disciplines and can be used to learn anything from artistic styles to mathematical equations.

Spaced repetition might not have the immediacy of cramming or the adrenaline rush of a manic all-nighter. But the information we learn from it can last a lifetime and tends to be effectively retained. In some ways, the spacing effect is a cognitive limitation, yet a useful one—if we are aware of it.

In Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language and Never Forget It, Gabriel Wyner writes:

Spaced repetition…[is] extraordinarily efficient. In a four-month period, practising for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flashcards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. These flashcards can teach you an alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation. And they can do it without becoming tedious because they’re always challenging enough to remain interesting and fun.

In Mindhacker, Ron and Marty Hale-Evans explore further:

Our memory is simultaneously magnificent and pathetic. It is capable of incredible feats, yet it never works quite like we wish it would. Ideally, we would be able to remember everything instantly, but we are not computers. We hack our memory with tools like memory palaces, but such techniques required effort and dedication. Most of us give up, and outsource our memory to smartphones, cloud enabled computers, or plain old pen and paper. There is a compromise…a learning technique called spaced repetition which efficiently organizes information or memorization and retention can be used to achieve near perfect recall.

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

The Discovery of The Spacing Effect

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), a German psychologist and pioneer of quantitative memory research, first identified the spacing effect. After earning his PhD in Germany, he traveled to London. Like so many people, he found his life forever changed by a book.

The work in question was Elements of Psychophysics by the pioneering experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner. Inspired by this book, Ebbinghaus began the research into memory that would consume his career and impact all of us.

Ebbinghaus took up his new field of study with the unbridled zest of a newcomer. He didn’t believe strongly in the prevailing understanding of memory at the time. In his wish to avoid getting bogged down in theory, he made everything about experimentation. As researcher and the sole subject of his experiments, he faced an uphill battle.

His most important findings were in the areas of forgetting and learning curves. These are graphical representations of the process of learning and forgetting. The forgetting curve shows how a memory of new information decays in the brain,² with the fastest drop occurring after 20 minutes and the curve leveling off after a day.

There is a way to slow down the process of forgetting. We need only to recall or revisit the information after we originally come across it. Going over the information later, at intervals, helps us remember a greater percentage of the material. Persistence will allow us to recall with 100% accuracy all that we want to remember.

The learning curve is the inverse. It illustrates the rate at which we learn new information.

When we use spaced repetition, the forgetting curve changes:

Frequency matters. Under normal conditions, frequent repetitions aid memory. We know this intuitively. Just try to memorize this article on a single repetition. However much attention, focus, or individual ability you have, it won’t work.

Memory mastery comes from repeated exposure to the material. Ebbinghaus observes, “Left to itself every mental content gradually loses its capacity for being revived, or at least suffers loss in this regard under the influence of time.” Cramming is not an effective memorization strategy. Lacking the robustness developed in later sessions, crammed facts soon vanish. Even something as important and frequently used as language can decay if not put into use.

There are other ways to improve memory. Intensity of emotion matters, as does the intensity of attention. Ebbinghaus notes in his definitive work on the subject, Memory and Forgetting:

Very great is the dependence of retention and reproduction upon the intensity of the attention and interest which were attached to the mental states the first time they were present. The burnt child shuns the fire, and the dog which has been beaten runs from the whip, after a single vivid experience. People in whom we are interested we may see daily and yet not be able to recall the colour of their hair or of their eyes…Our information comes almost exclusively from the observation of extreme and especially striking cases.

Ebbinghaus also uncovered something extraordinary: even when we appear to have forgotten information, a certain quantity is stored in our subconscious minds. He referred to these memories as savings. While they cannot be consciously retrieved, they speed up the process of relearning the same information later on.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness. At best only isolated fragments return. Suppose that the poem is again learned by heart. It then becomes evident that, although to all appearances totally forgotten, it still in a certain sense exists and in a way to be effective. The second learning requires noticeably less time or a noticeably smaller number of repetitions than the first. It also requires less time or repetitions than would now be necessary to learn a similar poem of the same length.

As the first researcher to undertake serious experimentation on memory and why we forget, Ebbinghaus transformed psychology as a new branch of science. His impact has been compared to that of Aristotle. Ongoing research into the spacing effect continues to support Ebbinghaus’s findings.

“There is no such thing as memorizing. We can think, we can repeat, we can recall and we can imagine, but we aren’t built to memorize. Rather our brains are designed to think and automatically hold onto what’s important. While running away from our friendly neighborhood tiger, we don’t think “You need to remember this! Tigers are bad! Don’t forget! They’re bad!” We simply run away, and our brain remembers for us.”

— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language and Never Forget It

How the Spacing Effect Works

Let’s take a quick refresher on what we know about how memory in works, because it’s not what we think.

Memories are not located in any one part of the brain. Memories are formed in a process which involves the entire brain. If you think about your favorite book, different parts of your brain will have encoded the look of it, the storyline, the emotions it made you feel, the smell of the pages, and so on. Memories are constructed from disparate components which create a logical whole. As you think about that book, a web of neural patterns pieces together a previously encoded image. Our brains are not like computers – we can’t just ‘tell’ ourselves to remember something.

In Mastery, Robert Greene explains:

In the end, an entire network of neurons is developed to remember this single task, which accounts for the fact we can still ride a bicycle years after we first learned how to do so. If we were to take a look at the frontal cortex of those who have mastered something through repetition, it would be remarkable still and inactive as they performed the skill. All their brain activity is occurring in areas that are lower down and required much less conscious control…People who do not practice and learn new skills can never gain a proper sense of proportion or self-criticism. They think they can achieve anything without effort and have little contact with reality. Trying something over and over again grounds you in reality, making you deeply aware of your inadequacies and of what you can accomplish with more work and effort.

No definitive answer has been found to explain how the spacing effect works. However, a number of factors are believed to help:

Forgetting and learning are, in a counterintuitive twist, linked. When we review close to the point of nearly forgetting, our brains reinforce the memory as well as add new details. This is one reason practice papers and teaching other people are the most effective ways for students to revise—they highlight what has been forgotten.

Retrieving memories changes the way they are later encoded. In essence, the harder something is to remember now, the better we will recall it in the future. The more we strain, which is painful mental labor, the easier it will be in the future. There is no learning without pain. Recall is more important than recognition. This explains why practice tests are a better way to learn than opening your text and re-reading your highlights.

Our brains assign greater importance to repeated information. This makes sense; information we encounter on a regular basis does tend to be more important than that which we only come across once. Disregarding any forms of mental impairment, we don’t have trouble recalling the information we need on a daily basis. Our PIN, our own telephone number, the directions to work, and names of coworkers, for example. We might once have struggled to remember them, but after accessing those sorts of information hundreds or thousands of time, recall becomes effortless.

Some researchers also believe that semantic priming is a factor. This refers to the associations we form between words which make them easier to recall. So, the sentence ‘the doctor and the nurse walked through the hospital’ is easier to remember than ‘the doctor and the artist walked through the supermarket’ because the words ‘doctor’ ‘nurse’ and ‘hospital’ are linked. If you are asked to remember a logical sentence such as ‘mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’, it’s not too difficult. If those same words are scrambled and become ‘cell the house mitochondria power is of’ it’s a lot harder to remember. And if those words are broken up into nonsensical syllables – ‘th ell ce he ous hon mit odria fi of’ – retaining them would become arduous. But some researchers have theorised that repetition over time primes us to connect information. So, if you revised ‘th ell ce he ous hon mit odria fi of’ enough times, you would start to connect ‘th’ and ‘ell.’ We can demonstrate semantic priming by telling a friend to say ‘silk’ ten times, then asking them what a cow drinks. They will almost certainly say ‘milk.’ The answer is, of course, water.

Yet another theory is that of deficient processing. Some literature points to the possibility that spaced repetition is not in itself especially efficient, but that massed learning is just very inefficient. By comparison, spaced repetition seems special when it is, in fact, a reflection of our true capabilities. Researchers posit that massed learning is redundant because we lose interest as we study information and retain less and less over time. Closely spaced repetition sessions leverage our initial interest before our focus wanes.

With properly spaced repetition, you increase the intervals of time between learning attempts. Each learning attempt reinforces the neural connections. For example, we learn a list better if we repeatedly study it over a period of time than if we tackle it in one single burst. We’re actually more efficient this way. Spaced sessions allow us to invest less total time to memorize than one single session, whereas we might get bored while going over the same material again and again in a single session. Of course, when we’re bored we pay less and less attention.³

In Focused Determination, the authors explain why variety also contributes to deficient processing.

There is also minimal variation in the way the material is presented to the brain when it is repeatedly visited over a short time. This tends to decrease our learning. In contrast, when repetition learning takes place over a longer period, it is more likely that the materials are presented differently. We have to retrieve the previously learned information from memory and hence reinforce it. All of this leads us to become more interested in the content and therefore more receptive to learning it.

“How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information in specifically timed intervals provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain. …Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be. Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once.”

— John Medina, Brain Rules

Taking Advantage of the Spacing Effect

We don’t learn about spaced repetition in school—something which baffles many researchers. Most classes teach a single topic per session, then don’t repeat it until the test.

Going over a topic once teaches very little—sometimes nothing at all, if the teacher is unengaging or the class is too long. Most teachers expect their students to take care of the memorizing part themselves. As a result, many of us develop bad learning habits like cramming to cope with the demands of our classes.

We need to break up with cramming and focus on what actually works: spaced repetition.

The difficulty of spaced repetition is not effort but that it requires forward planning and a small investment of time to set up a system. But in the long run, it saves us time as we retain information and spend less total time learning.

A typical spaced repetition system includes these key components:

A schedule for review of information. Typical systems involve going over information after an hour, then a day, then every other day, then weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly, then every six months, then yearly. Guess correctly and the information moves to the next level and is reviewed less often. Guess incorrectly and it moves down a level and is reviewed more often.
A means of storing and organizing information. Flashcards or spaced repetition software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) are the most common options. Software has the obvious advantage of requiring little effort to maintain, and of having an inbuilt repetition schedule. Anecdotal evidence suggests that writing information out on flashcards contributes to the learning process.
A metric for tracking progress. Spaced repetition systems work best if they include built-in positive reinforcement. This is why learning programs like Duolingo and Memrise incorporate a points system, daily goals, leaderboards and so on. Tracking progress gives us a sense of progression and improvement.
A set duration for review sessions. If we practice for too long, our attention wanes and we retain decreasing amounts of information. Likewise, a session needs to be long enough to ensure focused immersion. A typical recommendation is no more than 30 minutes, with a break before any other review sessions.

The spacing effect is a perfect example of how much more effective we can be if we understand how our minds work, and use them in an optimal way. All you need to learn something for life are flashcards and a schedule. Then, of course, you’re free to move on to actually applying and using what you’ve learned. Tagged: Gabriel Wyner, Gustav Fechner, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory, Robert Greene

Footnotes

1 When is the last time you used a2+ b2= c2 in real life?
2 This is different than the half-life of knowledge, the process by which information in memory becomes less valuable because your understanding of the world has changed.
3 You can test this by asking yourself what your last meeting yesterday was about.

Source: https://fs.blog/2018/12/spacing-effect/

December 20, 2018December 20, 2018

Merry Christmas 2018!

December 13, 2018December 13, 2018

Child Support Lawyer Job

September 13, 2016

New DHS Child Support Calculator

DHS/Child Support Services is pleased to announce that the online child support guidelines calculator is now available on our website. This calculator will allow you to calculate child support pursuant to the Oklahoma Child Support Guidelines. In addition to calculating the guidelines, this calculator now will allow you to print a computation form to attach to your orders and decrees using the “Print” function of your web browser.
The guidelines can be found on CSS’s Attorneys & Judges page on the “CS Guidelines” tab, or by clicking here: http://www.okdhs.org/services/ocss/pages/computation.aspx

August 10, 2016

What’s the Right Age for a Child to Get a Smartphone?

NOT long ago, many parents wondered at what age they should give their child full access to the car keys. Nowadays, parents face a trickier question: At what age should a child own a smartphone?

The smartphone, after all, is the key to unfettered access to the internet and the many benefits and dangers that come with it. But unlike driving a car, which is legal in some states starting at the age of 16, there is no legal guideline for a parent to determine when a child may be ready for a smartphone.

The topic is being increasingly debated as children get smartphones at an ever younger age. On average, children are getting their first smartphones around age 10, according to the research firm Influence Central, down from age 12 in 2012. For some children, smartphone ownership starts even sooner — including second graders as young as 7, according to internet safety experts.

“I think that age is going to trend even younger, because parents are getting tired of handing their smartphones to their kids,” said Stacy DeBroff, chief executive of Influence Central.

The downward age creep is meeting resistance. James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that reviews content and products for families, has a strict rule for his family: His children get a smartphone only when they start high school — after they have learned restraint and the value of face-to-face communication.

But Mr. Steyer added that other parents might decide that their children are ready sooner. “No two kids are the same, and there’s no magic number,” he said. “A kid’s age is not as important as his or her own responsibility or maturity level.”

So how do you determine the right time? To come up with some guidelines, I interviewed internet safety experts and combed through studies on smartphone use among children. I also asked for parents’ advice on regulating smartphone use and keeping children safe.

The takeaway will not please smartphone makers: The longer you wait to give your children a smartphone, the better. Some experts said 12 was the ideal age, while others said 14. All agreed later was safer because smartphones can be addictive distractions that detract from schoolwork while exposing children to issues like online bullies, child predators or sexting.

“The longer you keep Pandora’s box shut, the better off you are,” said Jesse Weinberger, an internet safety speaker based in Ohio who gives presentations to parents, schools and law enforcement officials. “There’s no connection to the dark side without the device.”

The Research

Let’s start with some of the data. Ms. Weinberger, who wrote the smartphone and internet safety book “The Boogeyman Exists: And He’s in Your Child’s Back Pocket,” said she had surveyed 70,000 children in the last 18 months and found that, on average, sexting began in the fifth grade, pornography consumption began when children turned 8, and pornography addiction began around age 11.

In a separate study published this year, Common Sense Media polled 1,240 parents and children and found 50 percent of the children admitted that they were addicted to their smartphones. It also found that 66 percent of parents felt their children used mobile devices too much, and 52 percent of children agreed. About 36 percent of parents said they argued with their children daily about device use.

There is also biology to consider. The prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that controls impulse, finishes developing in the mid-20s. In other words, parents should not be surprised if younger children with smartphones lack impulse control.

Pros and Cons

Smartphones undoubtedly bring benefits. With the devices, children gain access to powerful apps, including education tools for studying, chat apps for connecting with friends and the wealth of information on the web.

But they also are one step closer to distracting games, sexting apps and social media apps where online bullies are on the prowl. Even older children are not immune: Last year, at least 100 students at a Colorado high school were embroiled in a scandal that involved trading naked pictures of themselves on their mobile devices.

In the end, such cons may outweigh the pros, Ms. Weinberger said. If you hold off giving smartphones to children, many still have access to technology tools through devices like computers and tablets, she added. The main difference with a smartphone is that it is with a child everywhere, including outside of parental supervision.

Teaching Responsibility

Ultimately, parents will determine when their child truly needs a smartphone. When that time comes, there are approaches for testing the waters before handing one to the child.

One popular option is to start the child off with dumbed-down mobile devices, like feature phones that can only send text messages or place phone calls, and to assess whether they can use those devices responsibly.

Lynn Muscat, a parent in San Francisco, said she had considered buying a “dumb phone” for her 10-year-old son to keep in touch while he was at summer camp. She ended up buying the LG GizmoGadget, a Verizon smartwatch that has calling and texting capabilities and a locked-down list of contacts so that her son could interact only with people she had approved.

Ms. Muscat said she did not consider buying her child a smartphone partly because she felt the device would make him a target for muggers. She also was not appreciative of how smartphones had affected other children around him.

“It drives me nuts when I see his friends on it all the time — it seems very antisocial,” Ms. Muscat said. She said she planned to use the smartwatch to teach the responsibilities of using a mobile device safely before her son eventually earns the privilege of carrying a smartphone.

When you decide that it’s time to bestow a smartphone on your child, there are ways to set limits. To help parents enforce rules consistently, Ms. Weinberger has published a family contract listing the rules of smartphone use, which includes promises never to take nude selfies and never to try to meet strangers from the internet in real life. Parents state what the consequences are for breaking the rules, and the child must sign the contract before receiving a smartphone.

Mr. Steyer of Common Sense Media said he set other limits, like no smartphones at the dinner table and no phones in the classroom. If his children break the rules, he takes their phones away.

Parental Controls

There are some phone settings that can help keep children safe when they do get smartphones.

For iPhones, Apple offers a switchboard full of features that parents can enable or disable, including the ability to restrict the Safari browser from gaining access to adult content and the ability to prevent apps from using cellular data. The iPhone’s parental controls live inside the Settings app in a menu labeled Restrictions.

Android phones lack similar built-in parental control settings, though there are many apps in the Google Play app store that let parents add restrictions. Ms. Weinberger highlighted the app Qustodio, which lets parents monitor their children’s text messages, disable apps at certain times of day or even shut off a smartphone remotely. While that can be an aggressive approach to restricting a child’s smartphone, Ms. Weinberger said her job as a parent was not to make her children like her.

“My only job as a parent is to prepare you for the day you leave,” she said. “If that’s the case, I have to keep you safe, and you’re not going to like some of the things I say — and that’s O.K.”

April 8, 2016July 15, 2016

PreNuptial Agreements

By Rachel Grate January 20, 2016

Prenups: They’re not just for celebrities anymore. In fact, more of your engaged friends may be getting them than they admit. Prenuptial agreements are more popular than ever, and millennials appear to be driving the trend: In a 2013 survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 63% of divorce attorneys say they’ve seen an uptick in prenups.

“Historically, most people that were getting prenups were people with substantial wealth or family money, or people who were getting married for the second time and wanted to make sure their assets were protected for the kids,” Regina DeMeo, a Washington, D.C., divorce attorney, told Mic.

“Definitely since the Great Recession around 2009 there has been a spike in prenups overall, but the big surprise is the gain in use among the millennials, who often are marrying for the first time and may not have much.”

But despite their growing popularity, there’s still a stigma around prenups. Many people think prenups aren’t romantic, or they’re exclusively used by wealthy people trying to protect their assets against shallow gold diggers. Unfortunately, that fear of judgment discourages couples who’ve signed prenups from speaking up about what they are and how they actually work.

In the spirit of clearing the air, Mic spoke with three prenup experts to find out the truth about prenups — because you can’t decide it’s right for you without understanding what it actually is first.

What is a prenup, and how do you get one?

Think of a prenup as an insurance policy on your marriage that you get to write yourself. At its core, it’s a financial agreement between two parties. (Prenups can’t discuss custody of any future children, for example.)

“A prenup can be as simple as, ‘my stuff before we were married is still my stuff, and your stuff before we were married is still your stuff,” Sandy Arons, a certified divorce finance analyst, toldMic. “Not only that, but it can say, ‘if our marriage only lasts two years you get nothing. But if we remain married five years, you get more.'”

It’s important to take into account that a prenup isn’t foolproof. While all states recognize prenups in theory, in practice each state has different requirements for a prenup to hold up in court, which is why it’s important to follow the proper procedure if you are going to get one.

The first step is having an open financial discussion with your partner and deciding what you want your finances to look like before meeting with an attorney. Once that delightful conversation is over, you and your partner both need independent lawyers so there’s no conflict of interest.

“The laws do differ from state to state, but generally we all want to make sure there is 1. full disclosure of the finances; 2. ample time to review and negotiate; and 3. the opportunity to discuss with your own attorney,” DeMeo said. That means you can’t sign a prenup minutes before walking down the aisle.

Recently, some couples have gotten more complicated with their prenups, with celebrities like Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake reportedly including “lifestyle clauses” in their contracts that specify how the marriage will work. (Some lifestyle clauses even include requirements as to how many times per week the couple will have sex.) But those clauses rarely hold up in court.

The most common reasons people get prenups, and how to know if it’s right for you “The reason why people sign prenups is because they want to determine how financial issues are going to be resolved in the event they get divorced, instead of having the court determine the issues according to the law,” Robert Wallack, a celebrity divorce attorney, told Mic. “So we call it an ‘opt-out agreement,’ meaning that they’re choosing to opt out of having the court decide according to the laws of whichever state they’re in.”

There are lots of reasons why a couple may want to “opt out.” Now that the double-income household is more standard, old alimony rules feel old-fashioned for many couples. If one partner has a family business, for instance, or an independent retirement account or an inheritance, they may want to make sure that’s off the table as well.

A prenup can also change how assets are divided. A couple may be OK with splitting things 50/50, but if one partner is going to stay at home with kids, they might want more retirement savings while the other partner gets the more expensive car.

There are some new reasons driving millennials to get prenups as well: lack of funds, and potential future funds. Lack of funds are often caused by student loan debt — and people are understandably cautious about getting tied to thousands of dollars in debt. The other motivation is to insure your potential earnings are protected in the future.

“In the last six years, there’s been a real trend upwards for these millennials to get a prenup even if they don’t have money,” DeMeo said. “The potential of having something makes them want a prenup to protect what they could make during the marriage. People who are writers, they may have never once published a book, but if they do one day they don’t want to share their royalties in the case of a divorce.” That’s why DeMeo recommends prenups for any aspiring professional, though not all professionals agree.

Why talking about a prenup could actually be good for your relationship While the question of whether you should get a prenup largely depends on the couple, there’s one wrong answer: Not getting one because you don’t want to go through the awkwardness of talking about it with your partner.

“Research has shown that people would rather talk about their most intimate secrets than talk about money,” Arons said. “More people get divorced over fights about money than any other reason.”

Most experts told Mic the biggest mistake a couple can make is not talking about financial issues before a prenup is even considered. Don’t consider the conversation an interview, just bring it up during a walk in the park. Find out how your partner’s family handled money growing up, and how you would handle your own money as a couple.

“If the conversation is done properly, you’ve already been talking about financial issues for six months, so the prenup is not like hitting you in the face with a frying pan,” Arons said.

“Maybe the prenup discussion leads to the conclusion that they don’t want the prenup, but at least they’ve had the discussion,” DeMeo said. “When someone says, ‘My fiance’s going to freak out,’ that’s always a red flag.”

The bottom line is that although prenups get a bad rap, there’s evidence to suggest that for some couples, they might be a step in the right direction toward a happily ever after. In fact, some experts have suggested that getting a prenup might increase the likelihood that your marriage will be successful.

“Creating a prenup can initiate conversations with your fiancé that will set the stage for open communication about finances through all your years together,” Jeff Landers, a matrimonial finance expert, wrote in Forbes. “Considering how often money is cited as a cause of marital strife, this puts you way ahead of the game!”

In short, talking to your partner about getting a prenup isn’t a red flag so much as it’s about having an open and honest dialogue with your partner about money — and considering you’ve already make the decision to spend the rest of your life with this person, having that conversation shouldn’t be such a difficult step to take.

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Source: http://mic.com/articles/132479/here-s-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-prenups-but-were-afraid-to-ask#.jqXYq6g2L

February 18, 2016

The ‘Quiet Power’ Of Introverts

How Parents And Teachers Can Nurture The ‘Quiet Power’ Of Introverts

Updated February 18, 201611:28 AM ETPublished February 18, 20166:40 AM ET

ELISSA NADWORNY

LA Johnson/NPR

When Susan Cain wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking in 2012, it was a big success. The book made the cover of Time magazine, spent weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list and was the subject of one of the most-watched TED Talks, with more than 13 million views.

From that grew The Quiet Revolution, a company Cain co-founded that continues to produce and share content about, and for, introverts. The site offers an online training course for parents and stories submitted by readers about being introverted. There’s even a podcast.

Kids, Cain says, “are at the heart and center of it.”

“Introverts often are really amazing, talented, gifted, loving children, and they feel like there’s something wrong with them,” she says. “And our mission is to make it so that the next generation of kids does not grow up feeling that way.”

Quiet Power

The Secret Strengths of Introverts

by Susan Cain, Gregory Mone, Erica Moroz and Grant Snider

Hardcover, 288 pages

purchase

In her latest book, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, she’s taking her message about introverts to teenagers. Though the book is written for young adults, it’s also a tool for teachers and parents.

I talked with Cain about her mission of supporting introverts, and asked her advice on how to teach them.

So what does it mean to be an introverted child?

It’s really not different for a child than for an adult. It’s a person who feels at their best and at their most alive when they’re in quieter, more mellow environments. And it stems from a neurobiological difference between introverts and extroverts. Literally, different nervous systems. Introverts have nervous systems that simply react more to everything that’s going on around them, and that means they feel more in their sweet spot when there’s less stuff happening. And extroverts have nervous systems that react less, which means that they don’t get to their sweet spot until there’s more stuff happening. And so this is why you see these different behavioral preferences. An introverted kid would rather draw quietly or would rather play their favorite sport with one or two other kids. A more extroverted child would rather be part of a big gang and a big noisy birthday party, and not only not be fazed by it but seem to really relish all that stimulation.

And it’s different from being shy?

It is different. Shyness is much more about the fear of being judged. It’s a kind of self-consciousness and not wanting people to look at you and feeling easily embarrassed or easily shamed. These are all the feelings that a shy child would have. And in practice, many introverted children are also shy, but many are not, and you can also have children that are quite extroverted but who are shy, and as soon as they overcome their shyness, you see them being in the middle of the big gang. So it’s really important when you’re working with children to understand what is actually happening inside them so that you make sure that you’re responding to the right thing.

So let’s talk about schools. Where do they come in?

You know, lots of schools are really hungry for information on how they can do a better job of working with these kids.

They’re asking good questions: What indeed are the right ways to think about class participation? And are we over-evaluating as an educational culture? We overvalue the person who raises their hand all the time. Why is that important? Do we overvalue in quantity, as opposed to quality, of participation? Are there ways to think about class participation differently? Like we [at Quiet Revolution] have been encouraging schools to think in terms of classroom engagement rather than participation. Take a more holistic way of looking at how a child is engaging with this material or with their classmates.

Grant Snider/Dial Books for Young Readers

One of the anecdotes I loved in the book was when the teacher had her students think for a minute before answering. What other kind of good ideas or tips can teachers use like that?

Another idea is the think/pair/share technique, which I think many teachers are familiar with already, but may not realize the power of it within a population of students. This is a technique where the teacher asks the students a question; asks them to think about the answer. They pair up with another student to talk about their reflections. And then, once they’re paired, once they’ve articulated it with that partner, then you ask each pair to share their thoughts with the room as a whole. And this does a lot of great things for introverted kids. No. 1, it gives them the time to process. No. 2, it allows them to get the experience of articulating their thoughts out loud. But in front of only one other student, they don’t have to do it in front of the whole class. And then, often, once they have had that warmup period with one other student, they’re then much more likely to want to share with the whole class.

So this is a technique that works, it works equally well for introverts and extroverts. It’s great for the extroverts, too, but it just happens to work well with the more reticent kids.

What do you think about using social media or technology in the classroom? Helpful for introverts? Harmful?

Helpful. Well, of course social media is such a big thing, so for introverts, there are pros and cons. But my first impulse is to say helpful, and there are teachers now who are starting to incorporate social media into their classrooms and report that the more reticent children are much more likely to participate when their means of expression is through their screens. They can type their answer into a screen, the other students then see what they have written or typed or whatever, and then “real life” dialogue begins based on the initial ideas that were contributed through the screen.

So in general I’m a big fan of social media. I think incorporating it creatively into the class can work. If we’re talking about it as an educational technique, then I am all for it.

This brings me to another school-related trauma: the public speech. Should teachers kind of push introverts along, out of their comfort zone?

Yeah, so I think that it’s important, of course. The key, if we’re talking about public speaking or really anything that kids are fearful of, is to think of anxiety levels on a scale of 1 to 10, and to make sure you’re pushing kids within a zone of 4 to 6.

If you have a kid who is really freaking out, they’re really in that 7-to-10 zone, it’s just too dangerous to push them at that point. They might succeed, they might, you know, do well and feel this is great. But there’s too big a risk of it backfiring and the experience going poorly and the fear being further codified in their brain.

So you’re much better off meeting a fear in small steps. The answer is not: ‘OK, you never have to do … ‘ The Answer is: “OK. You’re afraid of public speaking. Why don’t you prepare your speech and work on it first with your best friend?”

Give the speech to your friend. And then, when you’ve done that, maybe you can give it to another, smaller group. From there, you work up in stages, to finally giving the all out speech. You look for ways to make the experience less anxiety producing.

In the book, you mention that loving the topic can help kids get into their speech.

Making sure that the child is speaking about a subject that they’re truly passionate about and excited to speak about is important. Because again, this is … biochemical. If you tap into your body’s behavioral activation system by speaking about something you’re excited about, then that overcomes the body’s behavioral inhibition system. Which is the system in your body telling you, stop. Slow down. Get the heck off the stage. So it does require extra work on the part of the teacher and an extra degree of thought and care, which I recognize is not always easy, you know, for overburdened teachers. But it goes a long way.

What about group work? Is that good for introverts?

In my experience, it depends a lot on how the group is structured. How carefully it’s structured. Because I’ve seen group work where it works really well, you’ve got kids who work well together, everybody knows their role. That can be a really positive experience. And then I’ve seen big free-for-all groups where it’s Lord of The Flies and you’ve got the most dominant kids taking over. Everyone else is checked out. So it can really go both ways.

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/02/18/465999756/how-parents-and-teachers-can-nurture-the-quiet-power-of-introverts

October 28, 2015

Halloween

As Halloween nears, it’s important to talk to children about staying safe during a night of trick-or-treating. Though the night is full of fun and festivity, children can be particularly vulnerable to lurking dangers on Halloween. The Tulsa Police Department would like to offer several tips to ensure that everyone has a safe celebration.
• Children should trick-or-treat with an adult
• Trick-or-treat in areas that are well lit
• Cross streets at corners, using traffic signals and crosswalks where available
• Look left, right and left again when crossing
• Walk on sidewalks or paths; if there is no sidewalk, walk facing traffic as far to the left as possible
• Wear light-colored costumes decorated with reflective tape or stickers
• Carry a flashlight or glow stick to increase visibility to drivers
• Only eat treats and candy that are properly wrapped in their original packaging after being checked by an adult
• It’s also a good idea to carry a cell phone while trick-or-treating in case of an emergency.
•When possible trick-or-treat in groups

It is also important that drivers do their part to keep trick-or-treaters safe.
• Be alert in residential neighborhoods
• Drive more slowly and anticipate heavy pedestrian traffic
• Remember that costumes can limit children’s visibility and they may not be able to see a moving vehicle
• Enter and exit driveways slowly and carefully

Happy Safe Halloween Everybody!

October 21, 2015

How Parents’ Behavior Affects Children During a Divorce

Co-authored by Sara Au

If you’re divorcing, it’s very likely that your world is being rocked like no other time in your life. You may feel shell-shocked, unmoored, enraged or depressed. All of those feelings–and more–are completely normal, and you need to deal with them or find help if you cannot. It’s natural for you to want to lash out at the world, or withdraw from it, or otherwise act on your feelings, but when you’re a parent you need to consider how your actions will affect your children and their behavior.

It’s so hard to hold it all together, but here are some do’s and don’ts that will go very far in helping your child adjust to this change in their lives, and protect their positive development during a difficult time:

It’s important not to share with your children how distressed, frustrated, or depressed you are about the situation. This does not mean you can’t show emotion. Showing and managing emotions help kids learn to do the same. But intense feelings that you struggle to manage should be dealt with using your own support system. You can’t expect your children to handle the burden of being your primary emotional support.
Keep your promises. If you say you’ll be somewhere with the kids, then make sure you are there. If your children are due to spend time with your ex, make sure you’re respectful of that time. Children need both parents in their lives whenever possible. It’s important that your kids have regular contact with you both.
Give your children privacy and space to freely interact with their other parent without feeling like you’re monitoring them. Of course, you need to know they are safe, but when they are with your ex, let them be with them, and let your ex shoulder the responsibility for them. (This might be a good time to get your children a cell phone, if they don’t already have one. Even if it’s a bit earlier than planned, that gives them the freedom to contact you both, and you the opportunity to contact them if needed. Just don’t be in constant contact when they’re away from you.)

Don’t take actions that undermine the other parent. If the other parent is actively undermining you, and you don’t have a civil relationship where you can compromise, then just focus on your own home’s stability and rules. Resist the urge to retaliate or complain to your children about the situation. Don’t grill your children about your ex-spouse and his or her activities, either. You can be a good role model for behavior regardless of whether your ex-spouse is doing so.
Don’t be a victim of divorce. Strive to be a model resilience and self-reliance. This is a horribly emotional thing to go through, but it’s just as powerful of a message when your kids see you bounce back. They do need to know that terrible things can happen in life, some of which are outside of our control, but we do not let such events ruin our lives forever.

If your family life has already become acrimonious, it’s not too late to take steps to turn that around. It will take time, but it can be accomplished. An amicable relationship between divorced parties is best for all involved, but if that cannot be managed, civility and avoidance of conflict between the adults will foster the best outcomes for the children.
Your choices and behavior have far-reaching consequences when you’re parenting through a divorce. Being able to partition your feelings and your reactions to problems between you and your ex is essential, so that you can be a role model for your children. (Finding an adult outlet to vent your feelings with is also essential–for your own well-being.)

Even though divorce can be difficult, children can make it through resiliently and can even thrive in homes where each parent is happier and potentially more fulfilled in their own personal life.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-l-stavinoha-ph-d-/how-parents-behavior-affe_1_b_8133150.html?utm_hp_ref=divorce&ir=Divorce

August 18, 2015

5 Things Divorced Parents Need to Know Before the Next Tax Season

Posted on August 12, 2015

{4:20 minutes to read} As spouses finalize their divorces, agreements are usually reached as to how the parents will account for their child on their separate individual income tax returns.

Here are five things you need to know about child-related deductions and tax credits:

1. It doesn’t matter which parent provides the greater amount of financial support. In recent years, the support test has been replaced by what is called the “place-of-abode” test. The child must still receive more than half of his or her support from the parents in order to qualify as an exemption, but the parent with whom the child resides with most of the year will be the parent who may claim the child, assuming that all other qualifications are met.

2. The non-custodial parent may claim a child. The qualifying non-custodial parent may claim the dependency exemption if the divorcing couple is in agreement, but that parent must attach a Form 8332 to their federal tax return. The form will include the signature of the custodial parent releasing their right to claim the child. Reliance on the agreement itself without the signed form may result in a denial of the deduction and related child tax credit.

3. The parent who qualifies as head of household does not need to claim the dependent child to file as head of household.

4. Credits and benefits are still available to the custodial parent who releases the dependency exemption. Therefore, the parent who is considered the custodial parent by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) still may claim the credits for child care expenses and the earned income credit, even if they do not claim the child on their return.

5. The agreements do not apply once the child reaches the age of majority. When a child reaches the age where he/she is considered to be an adult, then he/she is no longer considered in custody of either parent. Facts and circumstances of the previous year will determine whether that child may be considered a dependent for tax purposes, but the child is no longer under the rules of the divorce agreement.

The most common misconception that I hear is from the parent who says, “I pay child support; so I can claim him on my taxes.” And that statement is not necessarily true. Once again, because the support test was replaced by the “place of abode” test, it no longer matters which parent provides the larger amount of support, but rather, where the child lives most of the time.

These days many parents have “shared parenting time,” which is a 50-50 arrangement. But, because there are 365 days in a year, it could be argued that one parent, or the other, had physical custody of the child for one additional night.

A divorce financial professional can help you make informed decisions about child-related deductions before tax season arrives. How will you and your ex-spouse decide who will claim the child(ren) as exemptions on their tax returns?

Susan A. Moussi, CPA, CFP®, CDFA
SMD Tax & Divorce Financial Planning Consultants, Inc.
Phone: 614.429.4172
susan@smdtaxanddivorce.com