Our kids’ minds are made up of two parts: working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is where they do all their thinking. What we generally call learning is really the act of information moving from our kids’ working memory into their long-term memory.
We can also say that the working memory is where our kids do all of their experiencing. They experience the sounds and smells of a day at the beach. Their muscles and body experience new movements as they learn to play soccer or learn to dance. When they are thinking about new information learned at school, or experiencing new things through their body and senses their working memory is processing everything, and evaluating what is important enough to remember for later.
Our kids’ minds can’t remember everything that they experience. The working memory is really good at filtering out all the trivial information we encounter, such as what the other kids in class are wearing, or the exact location of every poster their teacher has on the wall, or that the two kids in the math problem on the test were named James and Alvaro. Our kids’ minds have to ignore most of what they experience, because there is just so much to experience minute to minute, and their minds move the information that is truly important from the working memory into the long-term memory, and forget the rest.
The long-term memory is where everything that your child has learned is stored already. Our kids’ memories are the things that they have learned. Put another way, there is no difference between making memories and learning. We think of making memories as generally involving the senses and our emotions: the taste of our birthday cake, the excitement and sounds of the amusement park we went to on our family vacation. In contrast, we think of things we have “learned” in terms of words or numbers and worksheets and tests. Really there is no difference, but this kind of points out why it is often more difficult to “learn” the school stuff than it is to “make memories” during a fun vacation. Our kids’ minds don’t often realize that the school stuff is actually important to their lives. They can’t see the future value of it, and it doesn’t involve a lot of the senses or emotions.
This is just the way it is. Our minds remember (a.k.a. learn) those things which are highly emotional, sensory or otherwise interesting. Much of the help we can give as parents is to help our kids minds know which information should be put into long-term memory. There are a number of ways to trick the mind into learning the school stuff, which I will go into more in future posts. But I’ll list them off here:
- Thinking about the information frequently, but not too frequently.
- Experiencing information through more than one sense.
- Experiencing the information connected to strong emotions.
It can be a challenge to increase the likelihood that our kids will learn what they need to learn, but we can be strategic about it. We\’re all busy parents and I hope to give you the tools to know where your time is best spent when it comes to helping your kids excel in school. We won’t be able to do everything, but we can help their little minds absorb more information than they would without us being there for them.
And remember that I often talk about our kids’ minds, because we’re here to help our kids. But really our minds work the exact same way. Everything said above about how our kids’ minds works applies to us as well. Our working memories are busy crunching through information trying to make sense of it, and our long-term memories are busy storing away the important bits for later use. We learn in exactly the same way as our kids do. And we can game the system, and trick our minds into learning stuff, in our own learning just as we do for our kids’.
