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Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter
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We didn’t want our son to have Pokémon cards—until they began turning him into a human computer. NurtureShock author and Newsweek blogger Po Bronson on games that increase children’s brain power 100-fold.
This is a story about the science of kids’ brains. But before we get into things like how dopamine enhances neural signaling, let’s talk about Pokémon.
Early in our son’s life, my wife let it be known that she didn’t have many clear-cut rules about how we’d raise him. To her, the world of parenting was not to be artificially cleaved into what’s Good for Kids and what’s Bad for Kids. However, she felt the need to warn me of two exceptions: violent videogames and Pokémon cards.
“We are not going to let him do those,” she stated firmly.
Pokémon had taken over his brain. But in ways my wife never expected.
The violent videogames I understood. Pokémon, I did not—I wasn’t really aware what Pokémon cards were. But while babysitting during graduate school, my wife had seen young kids become crazily obsessed with the cards, to the point where the preoccupation seemed to take over their young lives. “It eclipses their interest in other things,” she said. “And it’s the earliest form of status trap, too. Their sense of self-worth becomes tied up in what cards they possess. They get feelings of superiority merely by owning an Infernape card.”
Not knowing what an Infernape card was, I readily accepted my wife’s declaration. She made a child’s fixation on Pokémon cards sound like a heroin addiction.
But then, the summer my son was 5, we traveled to Seattle to visit his cousins. Several of these cousins, a little older than he was, were into Pokémon cards. My son wanted, more than anything, to merely belong. Sensing this, we decided not to object when his cousins gifted him a dozen low-level cards—a few Pikachus, and something cute that looked like a baby turtle.
At the end of the summer, the cards were stashed away. It wasn’t until the next summer vacation, again with his cousins, that Pokémon began to take over our son’s mind. His cousins fed him a supply of cards, and at first, he was again motivated principally by a desire to fit in. But then we noticed a few other things. He could go upstairs with his cousins to look over the cards and then pretend to be Pokémon characters for two solid hours—even though there was almost nothing else he could do, without distraction, for more than 20 minutes. Pokémon didn’t seem so much an addiction as good-natured absorption—genuine, intrinsically oriented self-direction. We also realized the cards were teaching him category systems and math.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman Twelve, 263 pages, $24.99.
That following school year, in his first-grade class, Pokémon became social currency. About half his class was entranced by the cards. At times it seemed ridiculous, but then I’d hear my son plop down two cards and talk out more complicated math problems than anything he saw at school: “160HP minus 110HP plus 30 resistance points minus 20 weakness points equals 60 points left,” he’d say, then plop down two more cards to solve.
I didn’t know then what I know now: Through this repetition, his brain was transforming. Heavily used neurons were learning to fire together, and these chains of neurons were becoming myelinated in thin sheaths of fat; by this process, “gray matter” is converted into “white matter.” The sheath surrounding the nerves acts as an electrical insulator, increasing neural speed by 100-fold. Active repetition also began tuning up the nerve capsules that connected his prefrontal cortex to his parietal cortex in the back of the brain. When these superhighways of nerve tissue come on board, the brain learns to delegate math to the back of the brain, making computation speed radically faster.
While we weren’t aware of the neuroscience, it was plainly obvious: Pokémon cards were making our son’s brain really fast at elementary-school math. I began to buy him cards. Lots of cards.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
My oldest son is age 5 and has been curious about the Pokemon cards the "big" kids are playing. I can relate to your wife's sentiments and have been resisting exposing him. Thank you for opening my eyes to the unexpected possibilities these cards hold. Now, can you fill me in on the redeeming value of Sponge Bob?
My niece used to love Sponge Bob and I've watched many episodes. Sponge Bob is rich with plot lines about feelings, differences, motivations, boundaries and interpersonal relationships. Look at it the way a psychologist might.
Sounds reasonable, As a kid I would play some RPG video games which had more text to read than many novels my school assigned. But I always had my parents to make sure I got the school work done first. I guess it comes down to parenting first and then finding whats fun.
Thank you for this article. I have experienced that "spritz" a few times in my life. Didn't know what it was, but I knew it was good!
LOL!
Truly, want to know what makes a kid think, what makes him correlate disparate pieces of information, in creative ways?
Give him a large cardboard box, some markers, and tell him you have scissors if he needs them.
Then just watch.
The point is, children learn better and mroe efficiently if they learn creatively.
Nice to see popular culture latching onto an idea that was popularized by John Dewey in the 1920's.
Now if we could just get the educational insitutions to listen.....
socialist. (note: I am joking).
All children learn differently.
Think about that sentence a loooooooooong time.
Now - what's wrong with our educational system again?
We need much, much more modular teaching/learning. And classroom activities that stimulate all of the brain, not just one part.
Gender-identified activities are such straitjackets. Even jacks and dodgeball, rope-skipping and basketball all teach valuable coordination skills, yet are "tagged" as gender-specific. We need good alternatives that teach the same skill sets, but are not gender-identified, or work to remove the stigma actively.
Teacher:student ratios are far too high: even 20 kids in one class is a heavy load for one teacher. Kids should be grouped how they learn (auditory learners, visual learners, etc.) in 3-grade clusters (K-2, 4-6) with a teacher skilled in that form of teaching. Etc. Etc. ETC. This is not rocket science, just common sense.
Every single child in America should have equal educational opportunity.
We also banned Pokemon cards when we saw friends' kids' becoming totally obsessed.
Then I read Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D. and it changed my parenting style. He writes that playtime is where kids work out problems and a parent should never discourage any type of play that the kid likes. He admitted to loathing Barbie dolls but playing along with his daughter when she asked him to join.
So, begrudgingly, we allowed Pokemon cards. At first we merely endured them. But after awhile we were overwhelmed by the Pokemon card system. It is so unbelievably complicated ! So many rules! So many exceptions to rules! Hundred of characters. A kid has to be intelligent to keep all that info sorted out in their brain.
Now I'm all for Pokemon. Just don't ask me to play because I suck at it.
Magic Cards are tools of Satanists.
What??
Magic Cards teach you how to find loop holes in the rules
RoughAcres, you are right.
Now let's see if anyone notices.
RoughAcres is right. I don't know if he/she was suggesting this, but I wouldn't spend all day teaching all kids in their dominant learning style, though. Studies have shown that people retain information in much more meaningful ways if it is transmitted in more than one mode. Also, kids need opportunities to develop their non-dominant learning styles every day, and to understand and respect the fact that everyone learns differently.
It's not how smart you are, it's how are you smart.
Thanks for posting that. I'm going to use that quote from now on.
Thank you for pointing out the good that comes from games. Anything that's engaging to a kid will teach them something, and trading cards have a lot more to offer than other games.
I wrote a longer response here - http://geekstack.com/blog/opposite-of-a-dumb-toy/
My son started with Pokemon cards around age 6 (when they first came out in the 90s in America) in much the same way as the writer's son. From Pokemon he moved onto Yu-gi-Oh, cards, then Magic Cards(which he still plays at 16), and then to Age of Mythology computer strategy game. Age of Mythology seemed to teach him a lot about Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythology and what resources are necessary to build cities and empires. We visited Quebec City when he is was 10 and he was able to talk intelligently to tour guides about the resource/geographic factors that affected the development of Quebec City. All during this time, I saw the educational/focus benefit of card/strategy games for him and did not discourage his playing. He has severe ADHD, so seeing him engaged and focused on an activity was a joy.
Unfortunately, in sixth grade, he took the next step, and became enthralled with World of Warcraft MMORPG. This game took over his life, required monthly on-line fees, and unbeknownst to us, he began staying up all night playing the game. Then he took my credit card and started ordering virtual gold and on-line characters to move up to a higher level more quickly. It took a few months of spotting odd charges on my credit card for me to realize what was happening. Life became a game of cat and mouse between parent and child, as his drive to play the game took over. We repeatedly deinstalled the game, put on parental controls, and he figured out ways around the blocks. The dopamine produced by the game was greater than any dopamine produced by school, sports, any other interests. When we finally figured out how to totally block his access, he turned to weed and skipping school as his dopamine fix.
Finally in tenth grade, at the end of our rope, we sent him off to wilderness therapy for ten weeks followed by six months at a wilderness boarding school with no technology at all but lots of high adventure. Our story is not unique, but way more common than most people realize. At our suburban high school, World of Warcraft addiction is the number one reason why kids drop out (says the school counselor).
The psychiatrists planning the new DSM are creating a new mental health disorder called Internet Addiction. Pokemon did not cause his internet addiction, but his obsession with it as a young child indicated a vulnerability to problems later on that we wish we had more watchful for before it got out of control.
Thank you.
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