Smarter Ways to Discipline Children

Research Suggests Which Strategies Really Get Children to Behave; How Timeouts Can Work Better

By ANDREA PETERSEN

When it comes to disciplining her generally well-behaved kids, Heather Henderson has tried all the popular tricks. She's tried taking toys away. (Her boys, ages 4 and 6, never miss them.) She's tried calm explanations about why a particular behavior—like hitting your brother—is wrong. (It doesn't seem to sink in.) And she's tried timeouts. "The older one will scream and yell and bang on walls. He just loses it," says the 41-year-old stay-at-home mother in Syracuse, N.Y.

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What can be more effective are techniques that psychologists often use with the most difficult kids, including children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. Approaches, with names like "parent management training" and "parent-child interaction therapy," are backed up by hundreds of research studies and they work on typical kids, too. But while some of the approaches' components find their way into popular advice books, the tactics remain little known among the general public.
The general strategy is this: Instead of just focusing on what happens when a child acts out, parents should first decide what behaviors they want to see in their kids (cleaning their room, getting ready for school on time, playing nicely with a sibling). Then they praise those behaviors when they see them. "You start praising them and it increases the frequency of good behavior," says Timothy Verduin, clinical assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York.
This sounds simple, but in real life can be tough. People's brains have a "negativity bias," says Alan E. Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of the Yale Parenting Center. We pay more attention to when kids misbehave than when they act like angels. Dr. Kazdin recommends at least three or four instances of praise for good behavior for every timeout a kid gets. For young children, praise needs to be effusive and include a hug or some other physical affection, he says.

Heather Henderson of Syracuse, N.Y., plays Legos with son Archer, 6. She has tried various tactics to discipline her sons but 'we're always at a loss.'

According to parent management training, when a child does mess up, parents should use mild negative consequences (a short timeout or a verbal reprimand without shouting).
Giving a child consequences runs counter to some popular advice that parents should only praise their kids. But reprimands and negative nonverbal responses like stern looks, timeouts and taking away privileges led to greater compliance by kids according to a review article published this month in the journal Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review.
"There's a lot of fear around punishment out there," says Daniela J. Owen, a clinical psychologist at the San Francisco Bay area Center for Cognitive Therapy in Oakland, Calif. and the lead author of the study. "Children benefit from boundaries and limits." The study found that praise and positive nonverbal responses like hugs and rewards like ice cream or stickers, however, didn't lead to greater compliance in the short term. "If your child is cleaning up and he puts a block in the box and you say 'great job,' it doesn't mean the child is likely to put another block in the box," says Dr. Owen.
But in the long run, regular praise does make a child more likely to comply, possibly because the consistent praise strengthens the parent-child relationship overall, Dr. Owen says. The article reviewed 41 studies looking at discipline strategies and child compliance.
Parents who look for discipline guidance often find conflicting advice from the avalanche of books and mommy blogs and the growing number of so-called parent coaches. (In 2011, 3,520 parenting books were published or distributed in the U.S., up from 2,774 in 2007, according to Bowker Books In Print database.)
"Many of the things that are recommended we know now to be wrong," says Dr. Kazdin, a leading expert on parent management training. "It is the equivalent of telling people to smoke a lot for their health."

Jason Greene for The Wall Street Journal

Heather and Jay Henderson with their two boys, Archer, 6, and Heath, 4, spend time together at their home in Syracuse, N.Y.

Parents often torpedo their discipline efforts by giving vague, conditional commands and not giving kids enough time to comply with them, says Dr. Verduin, who practices parent-child interaction therapy. When crossing the street, "A bad command would be, 'be careful.' A good command would be 'hold my hand,' " he says. He also instructs parents to count to five to themselves after giving a child a directive, like, for example, "Put on your coat." "Most parents wait a second or two," he says, before making another command, which can easily devolve into yelling and threats.
The techniques are applicable to all ages, but psychologists note that starting early is better. Once kids hit about 10 or 11, discipline gets a lot harder. "Parents don't have as much leverage" with tweens and teens, says Dr. Verduin. "Kids don't care as much what the parents think about them."
Some parents try and reason with young children, which Dr. Kazdin says is bound to fail to change a kid's behavior. Reason doesn't change behavior, which is why stop-smoking messages don't usually work, Dr. Kazdin says. Overly harsh punishments also fail. "One of the side effects of punishment is noncompliance and aggression," he says.
Spanking, in particular, has been linked to aggressive behavior in kids and anger problems and increased marital conflict later on in adulthood. Still, 26% of parents "often" or "sometimes" spank their 19-to-35-month-old children, according to a 2004 study in the journal Pediatrics, which analyzed survey data collected by the federal government from 2,068 parents of young children.
At the Yale Parenting Center, psychologists have found that getting kids to "practice" temper tantrums can lessen their frequency and intensity. Dr. Kazdin recommends that parents have their kids "practice" once or twice a day. Gradually, ask the child to delete certain unwanted behaviors from the tantrum, like kicking or screaming. Then effusively praise those diluted tantrums. Soon, for most children, "the real tantrums start to change," he says. "From one to three weeks, they are kind of over." As for whining, Dr. Kazin recommends whining right along with your child. "It changes the stimulus. You will likely end up laughing," he says.
Researchers noted that not every technique is effective for every child. Some parents find other creative solutions that work for their kids.
Karen Pesapane has found yelling "pillow fight," when her two kids are arguing can put a halt to the bickering. "Their sour attitudes change almost immediately into silliness and I inevitably become their favorite target," said Ms. Pesapane, a 34-year-old from Silver Spring, Md., who works in fundraising for a nonprofit and has a daughter 10, and a son, 6.
Dayna Even has found spending one hour a day fully focused on her 6-year-old son, Maximilian, means "he's less likely to act out, he's more likely to play independently and less likely to interrupt adults," says the 51-year-old writer and tutor in Kailua, Hawaii.
Parents need to take a child's age into account. Benjamin Siegel, professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine notes that it isn't until about age 3 that children can really start to understand and follow rules. Dr. Siegel is the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee that is currently reworking the organization's guidelines on discipline, last updated in 1998.

Write to Andrea Petersen at andrea.petersen@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared December 26, 2012, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Smarter Ways to Discipline Kids.

Opting Out of the 'Rug Rat Race'

For success in the long run, brain power helps, but what our kids really need to learn is grit

By PAUL TOUGH

We are living through a particularly anxious moment in the history of American parenting. In the nation's big cities these days, the competition among affluent parents over slots in favored preschools verges on the gladiatorial. A pair of economists from the University of California recently dubbed this contest for early academic achievement the "Rug Rat Race," and each year, the race seems to be starting earlier and growing more intense.

At the root of this parental anxiety is an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. It is the belief, rarely spoken aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success in the U.S. today depends more than anything else on cognitive skill—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests—and that the best way to develop those skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.

Charles Gullung

American children, especially those who grow up in relative comfort, are being shielded from failure as never before.

There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there. Fewer books in the home means less reading ability; fewer words spoken by your parents means a smaller vocabulary; more math work sheets for your 3-year-old means better math scores in elementary school. But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate group of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists has begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.

What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.
If there is one person at the hub of this new interdisciplinary network, it is James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago who in 2000 won the Nobel Prize in economics. In recent years, Mr. Heckman has been convening regular invitation-only conferences of economists and psychologists, all engaged in one form or another with the same questions: Which skills and traits lead to success? How do they develop in childhood? And what kind of interventions might help children do better?

The transformation of Mr. Heckman's career has its roots in a study he undertook in the late 1990s on the General Educational Development program, better known as the GED, which was at the time becoming an increasingly popular way for high-school dropouts to earn the equivalent of high-school diplomas. The GED's growth was founded on a version of the cognitive hypothesis, on the belief that what schools develop, and what a high-school diploma certifies, is cognitive skill. If a teenager already has the knowledge and the smarts to graduate from high school, according to this logic, he doesn't need to waste his time actually finishing high school. He can just take a test that measures that knowledge and those skills, and the state will certify that he is, legally, a high-school graduate, as well-prepared as any other high-school graduate to go on to college or other postsecondary pursuits.
Mr. Heckman wanted to examine this idea more closely, so he analyzed a few large national databases of student performance. He found that in many important ways, the premise behind the GED was entirely valid. According to their scores on achievement tests, GED recipients were every bit as smart as high-school graduates. But when Mr. Heckman looked at their path through higher education, he found that GED recipients weren't anything like high-school graduates. At age 22, Mr. Heckman found, just 3% of GED recipients were either enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of postsecondary degree, compared with 46% of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes—annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs—GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts.

These results posed, for Mr. Heckman, a confounding intellectual puzzle. Like most economists, he had always believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person's life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their eventual outcomes. What was missing from the equation, Mr. Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits, or noncognitive skills, that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school.

So what can parents do to help their children develop skills like motivation and perseverance? The reality is that when it comes to noncognitive skills, the traditional calculus of the cognitive hypothesis—start earlier and work harder—falls apart. Children can't get better at overcoming disappointment just by working at it for more hours. And they don't lag behind in curiosity simply because they didn't start doing curiosity work sheets at an early enough age.

Instead, it seems, the most valuable thing that parents can do to help their children develop noncognitive skills—which is to say, to develop their character—may be to do nothing. To back off a bit. To let our children face some adversity on their own, to fall down and not be helped back up. When you talk today to teachers and administrators at high-achieving high schools, this is their greatest concern: that their students are so overly protected from adversity, in their homes and at school, that they never develop the crucial ability to overcome real setbacks and in the process to develop strength of character.

American children, especially those who grow up in relative comfort, are, more than ever, shielded from failure as they grow up. They certainly work hard; they often experience a great deal of pressure and stress; but in reality, their path through the education system is easier and smoother than it was for any previous generation. Many of them are able to graduate from college without facing any significant challenges. But if this new research is right, their schools, their families, and their culture may all be doing them a disservice by not giving them more opportunities to struggle. Overcoming adversity is what produces character. And character, even more than IQ, is what leads to real and lasting success.

—Adapted from "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character" by Paul Tough, which has just been published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A version of this article appeared September 8, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Opting Out of the 'Rug Rat Race'.

Divorcé's Guide to Marriage

Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces

• By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

photo: Getty Images

Sometimes it takes going through a bad marriage to figure out what makes a good marriage. Five strategies for a successful, happy marriage from divorced people who learned these lessons the hard way. Elizabeth Bernstein has details on Lunch Break.

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.

People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.

Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise and that they resolve to change next time. "Divorced individuals who step back and say, 'This is what I've done wrong and this is what I will change,' have something powerful to teach others," says Terri Orbuch, a psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and author of the new book "Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship." "This is marriage advice learned the hard way," she says

Dr. Orbuch has been conducting a longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, collecting data periodically from 373 same-race couples who were between the ages of 25 and 37 and in their first year of marriage in 1986, the year the study began. Over the continuing study's 25 years so far, 46% of the couples divorced—a rate in line with the Census and other national data. Dr. Orbuch followed many of the divorced individuals into new relationships and asked 210 of them what they had learned from their mistakes. (Of these 210, 71% found new partners, including 44% who remarried.) This is their hard-earned advice.

Boost your spouse's mood

Of the divorced people, 15% said they would give their spouse more of what Dr. Orbuch calls "affective affirmation," including compliments, cuddling and kissing, hand-holding, saying "I love you," and emotional support. "By expressing love and caring you build trust," Dr. Orbuch says.
She says there are four components of displays of affection that divorced people said were important: How often the spouse showed love; how often the spouse made them feel good about the kind of person they are; how often the spouse made them feel good about having their own ideas and ways of doing things; and how often the spouse made life interesting or exciting.

The divorced individuals didn't specifically identify sex as something they would have approached differently, although Dr. Orbuch says it is certainly one aspect of demonstrating love and affection.
Men seem to need nonsexual affirmation even more than women do, Dr. Orbuch says. In her study, when the husband reported that his wife didn't show love and affection, the couple was almost twice as likely to divorce as when the man said he felt cared for and appreciated. The reverse didn't hold true, though. Couples where women felt a lack of affection weren't more likely to divorce.
Do something to demonstrate that your partner is noticed and appreciated every single day, Dr. Orbuch says. It can be as small as saying, "I love you," or "You're a great parent." It can be an action rather than words: Turn on the coffee pot in the morning. Bring in the paper. Warm up the car. Make a favorite dessert. Give a hug.

Talk more about money

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

Money was the No. 1 point of conflict in the majority of marriages, good or bad, that Dr. Orbuch studied. And 49% of divorced people from her study said they fought so much over money with their spouse—whether it was different spending styles, lies about spending, one person making more money and trying to control the other—that they anticipate money will be a problem in their next relationship, too.

There isn't a single financial fix for all couples. Dr. Orbuch says each person needs to examine his or her own approach to money. What did money mean when you were growing up? How do you approach spending and saving now? What are your financial goals?
Partners need to discuss their individual money styles and devise a plan they both can live with. They might decide to pool their money, or keep separate accounts. They might want a joint account for family expenses. In the study, six out of 10 divorced individuals who began a new relationship chose not to combine finances.

"Talk money more often—not just when it's tax time, when you have high debt, when bills come along," Dr. Orbuch says. Set ground rules and expectations and stick to them.

Get over the past

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

To engage in a healthy way with your partner, you need to let go of the past, Dr. Orbuch says.
This includes getting over jealousy of your partner's past relationships, irritation at how your mother-in-law treats you, something from your own childhood that makes it hard for you to trust, a spat you had with your spouse six months ago.

It isn't good advice just for those with broken hearts, she adds.

In Dr. Orbuch's study, divorced individuals who held on to strong emotions for their ex-spouse—whether love or hate—were less healthy than those people who had moved on emotionally.
Having trouble letting go of anger, longing, sadness or grief about the past? Keep a journal. Exercise. Talk to a friend (but not endlessly) about it.

Or try writing to the person who has upset you to explain your feelings: "Dear Mother-in-Law. It's about time you treated me like a full-fledged member of this family and stopped second-guessing my parenting decisions."

Then take the excellent advice Abraham Lincoln is said to have given his secretary of war, who had written an emotional missive to one of his generals.
"Put it in the stove," Lincoln said. "That's what I do when I've written a letter when I am angry."
"This is an exercise for you, to get all the emotions out on paper so you can release them," Dr. Orbuch says.

Blame the relationship

Photo Illustrations by Stephen Webster

The divorced individuals in the study who blamed ex-spouses, or even themselves, had more anxiety, depression and sleep disorders than individuals who blamed the way that they and their partners interacted. Those who held on to anger were less likely to move on, build a strong new relationship and address future problems in a positive, proactive manner.

It's hard not to blame. In the study, 65% of divorced individuals blamed their ex-spouses, with more women blaming an ex-husband (80%) than men blaming an ex-wife (47%). And 16% of men blamed themselves, compared with only 4% of women. Dr. Orbuch says the men may simply accept their ex's view of the breakup. More men than women admitted to an extramarital affair.

How do you blame in a healthy way? Say "we," not "you" or "I." Say, "We are both so tired lately," not "You are so crabby." When you remove blame, it's easier to come up with a solution.
Ask your partner for his or her view of a problem. Say, "Why do you think we aren't getting along?"
"There are multiple ways of seeing a problem," Dr. Orbuch says. "By getting your partner's perspective, and marrying it with your perspective, you get the relationship perspective."

Reveal more about yourself

 

Communication style is the No. 1 thing the study's divorced individuals said they would change in the next relationship (41% said they would communicate differently).

Spouses need to speak in a calm and caring voice. They should learn to argue in a way that produces a solution, not just more anger.

They have to practice "active listening," where they try to hear what the other person is saying, repeating back what they just heard and asking if they understood correctly.
To communicate well, partners need to reveal more about themselves, not just do "maintenance communication."

"It doesn't have to be emotional," Dr. Orbuch says. "But it should be about issues where you learn about what makes each other tick." Such topics help your partner understand you better.
Dr. Orbuch suggests a 10-minute rule: Every day, for 10 minutes, the couple should talk alone about something other than work, the family and children, the household, the relationship. No problems. No scheduling. No logistics.

"You need to tell each other about your lives and see what makes you each tick," Dr. Orbuch says.

Flummoxed by Failure—or Focused?

It's not about being smart. The key to getting past unsuccessful moments is a flexible view of learning

By KEN BAIN

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.

Where do helpless students get the notion that intelligence is fixed? In part from our culture, which bombards them with the idea that IQ tests measure how bright they are.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. "I hardly ever use the word intelligence," says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. "I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning." He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.

Over the past 25 years, social scientists have produced some key insights into how successful people overcome their unsuccessful moments—and they have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.
In a 1978 study, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and a colleague gave a series of puzzles to children, all of them about 10 years old. The first eight problems required some careful thought, but none was too demanding. The next four, however, were far too hard for anyone that age to solve in the allotted time. On the first eight, all of the youngsters solved the exercises and appeared to enjoy them. But everything changed with the impossible second set.

Reactions differed enormously. One group of students said things like, "I can't solve these problems. I'm not smart enough." They wilted in the face of failure. Children in the other group took a different approach: They kept telling themselves that they could solve the difficult problems with more effort.
Dr. Dweck and other psychologists have assigned labels to these two types of students. Students of the first sort are called "helpless" because they develop the idea that they just can't do something. If they continue to believe that they are generally smart, they still often become helpless because they are afraid to try anything new for fear that failure will undermine their self-image as "one of the bright ones."

Kids of the second sort, however, are said to have a mind-set of "mastery" or "growth." They believe that they can expand their abilities if they try. If they don't succeed, they look for new strategies rather than giving up.

Are these students just smarter than their "helpless" peers? Not according to Dr. Dweck. She has found that children in the two groups have roughly the same natural abilities. In fact, sometimes the "helpless" ones demonstrate greater native powers.

Brian Stauffer

Social scientists have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.

Where do helpless students get the notion that intelligence is fixed? In part from our culture, which bombards them with the idea that IQ tests measure how bright they are. Even well-meaning parents and teachers can foster this view. Melissa Kamins, who worked with Dr. Dweck, discovered that children who primarily receive personal praise ("how smart you are") rather than kudos for their efforts are more likely to develop fixed views of intelligence.

A growth mind-set can be learned. In a 2007 study by psychologists from Columbia and Stanford, nearly 100 seventh graders (most of them struggling in math) participated in an eight-week workshop on studying. The subjects were secretly divided into two large groups. Both groups received instruction on how to use their study time most effectively and how to organize and remember new material.

But then came the difference: One of the groups read aloud an article titled "You Can Grow Your Intelligence." It explained research on how nerve cells in the brain make stronger connections after we learn something new. Students in the other group spent that time reading an article about how memory works and learning new strategies for recalling material.

Most of the students went into the sessions generally believing that intelligence was fixed for life, but the group that read about the brain's growth emerged from the experience with much stronger notions about improving intelligence with effort. That group generally showed greater motivation to do well in math class in the weeks and months after the experience.

As the researchers noted, someone's theory about intelligence may not make much difference when times are easy. But when failures accumulate, those who believe that they can improve their basic abilities are far more likely to weather the storm.
—Adapted from Dr. Bain's new book, "What The Best College Students Do" (Harvard University Press).

A version of this article appeared July 14, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Flummoxed by Failure—or Focused?.

"Is That Allowed?" "It Is Here."

Three immigrant stories that illustrate what makes our country great.

By Peggy Noonan:

     There's something Haley Barbour reminded me of called the Gate Rule. The former Mississippi governor said it's the first thing you should think of when you think about immigration. People are either lined up at the gate trying to get out of a country, or lined up trying to get in.
     It says something about the health of a nation when they're lined up to get in, as they are, still, with America. It says, of course, that compared with a lot of the rest of the world, America's economy isn't in such bad shape. But it says more than that. People don't want to come to a place when they know they'll be treated badly. They don't want to call your home their home unless they know you'll make room for them in more than economic ways.
     And so this July 4, a small tribute to American friendliness, openness, and lack of—what to call it? The old hatreds. They dissipate here. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants could be at each other's throats for centuries, but the minute they moved here, they were in the Kiwanis Club together. The Mideast is a cauldron, but when its residents move here, they wind up on the same PTA committee. It sounds sentimental, but this is part of the magic of America, and the world still knows it even if we, in our arguments, especially about immigration, forget.
     So, three stories of American friendliness, openness and lack of the old hatreds.
     There was a teenager who came here with his parents and younger brother. They arrived in New York and got an apartment on 181st Street and Broadway. He spoke little English but went right into public school. The family needed money, so when he was 16, he transferred to night school and got a day job at a shaving-brush factory. He wore big, heavy rubber gloves and squeezed bleaching acid out of the bristles. Soon he went part time to City College, and then he entered the U.S. Army.

David Gothard

This is a classic immigrant story. It could be about anyone. But the teenager went on to become an American secretary of state, and his name is Henry Kissinger. Here is another part of the story that is classic: how Americans treated him. The workers at the factory were older than he, mostly Italian-American, some second-generation. They wanted to help make him part of things, so they started taking him to baseball games.
     "It was the summer of 1939. . . . I didn't know anything about baseball," he remembered this week. Now here he was in the roaring stands at Yankee Stadium. About the people in the bleachers, he said, "the most striking thing was the enormous friendliness, the bantering." In Hitler's Germany, "I saw crowds, I'd go to the other side of the street." Here, no sense of looming threat. "That I would say was a very American part of my experience."
     He was "enchanted" by the game—"the subtlety, the little nuances—you can watch what the strategy is and how they judge what the opponent is likely to do by the way the fielders position themselves. . . . It is a game that combines leisure with highly dramatic moments!"
     And there was the man called Joe DiMaggio. The factory workers would sort of say, "If you take a look at Joe DiMaggio," you will learn something about this country. DiMaggio was "infinitely graceful" as a fielder, "he would sort of lope towards the ball . . . nothing dramatic, he didn't tumble, he didn't strut, and he made it look effortless." He didn't "stand there wagging his bat. . . . He would just stand there with his bat raised. . . . He was all concentration."
     Years later they met, and Mr. Kissinger, faced with his boyhood idol, that symbol of those early years, was awed. It was like being a kid and meeting a movie star: "I didn't know exactly what to say to him." They became friends. "He had a fierce kind of integrity."
     So Henry Kissinger learned some things about Americans, and America, thanks to a bunch of Italian guys in a brush factory downtown. They were good to him. They were welcoming. Probably when they or their people were new here, someone was good to them.
     That is American friendliness. Here is American openness—meaning if you are open to it, it will be open to you. Mary Dorian was an uneducated Irish farm girl with no family to speak of and no prospects. She came to America on her own, around 1920. She wrote to the one girl she knew, a distant cousin in Brooklyn, to ask that she meet her at the ship. She landed at Ellis Island, went to the agreed-upon spot, and the cousin wasn't there. She had forgotten. Mary, my grandmother, spent her first night in America alone on a park bench in lower Manhattan.
She went on to find Brooklyn and settle in. She joined an Irish club and a step-dancing club. They didn't have anything like that back home.
     We make a mistake when we worry that sometimes immigrants come here and burrow more into their old nationality than their new one. It's not a rejection of America, just a way of not being lonely, of still being connected to something. She met her husband in an Irish club, and she got a job hanging up coats in a restaurant. Then she became a bathroom attendant at Abraham & Strauss on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. When she died in 1960, a lot of black people came to the funeral. This, in a Brooklyn broken up into separate ethnic enclaves, was surprising, but it wouldn't have been to her. They were her coworkers from A&S, all the girls who worked in the ladies room, and their families. They loved her.
     When she died, Mary Dorian had a job, a family and friends. She had come here with none of those things. She trusted America, and it came through.
     As for the old hatreds:
     There was a 7-year-old boy who came over from Germany on the SS Bremen. He was travelling with his younger brother—they too were fleeing the Nazis—and a steward. The Bremen anchored on Manhattan's west side on May 4, 1939, and the children were joined by their father, who was already in New York. They stood on deck watching the bustle of disembarking, and then the boy saw something. "Across the street from where we were, and visible from the boat, was a delicatessen which had its name in neon with Hebrew letters," he remembered this week.
He was startled. Something with Hebrew letters—that was impossible back home. He asked his father, "Is that allowed?"
And his father said, "It is here."
It is here.
     The little boy was Mike Nichols, the great film and stage director, who went on to do brilliant things with the freedom he was given here.
     Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don't. Maybe we just have to remember who we are—open, friendly, welcoming and free.
Happy Fourth of July to this tender little country, to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

A version of this article appeared July 7, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 'Is That Allowed?' 'It Is Here.'

 

Barcelona's Secret to Soccer Success

 By Simon Kuper

We all see that Barcelona are brilliant. The only problem is understanding just how they do it. That’s where my friend Albert Capellas comes in. Whenever he and I run into each other somewhere in Europe, we talk about Barça. Not many people know the subject better. Capellas is now assistant manager at Vitesse Arnhem in Holland, but before that he was coordinator of Barcelona’s great youth academy, the Masia. He helped bring a boy named Sergio Busquets from a rough local neighbourhood to Barça. He trained Andres Iniesta and Victor Valdes in their youth teams. In all, Capellas worked nine years for his hometown club.

During our last conversation, over espressos in an Arnhem hotel, I had several “Aha” moments. I have watched Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona umpteen times, but only now am I finally beginningto see. Guardiola’s Barcelona are great not merely because they have great players. They also have great tactics – different not just from any other team today, but also different from Barcelona teams pre-Guardiola. Barça are now so drilled on the field that in some ways they are more like an American gridiron football team than a soccer one.

Before getting into the detail of their game, it’s crucial to understand just how much of it comes from Guardiola. When a Barcelona vice president mused to me four years ago that she’d like to see the then 37-year-old Pep be made head coach, I never imagined it would happen. Guardiola was practically a novice. The only side he had ever coached was Barça’s second team. However, people in the club who had worked with him – men like the club’s then president Joan Laporta, and the then director of football Txiki Beguiristain  - had already clocked him as special.  Not only did Guardiola know Barcelona’s house style inside out. He also knew how it could be improved.

Guardiola once compared Barcelona’s style to a cathedral. Johan Cruijff, he said, as Barça’s supreme player in the 1970s and later as coach, had built the cathedral. The task of those who came afterwards was to renovate and update it. Guardiola is always looking for updates. If a random person in the street says something interesting about the game, Guardiola listens. He thinks about football all the time. He took ideas from another Dutch Barcelona manager, Louis van Gaal, but also from his years playing for Brescia and Roma in Italy, the home of defence. Yet because Guardiola has little desire to explain his ideas to the media, you end up watching Barça without a codebook.

Cruijff was perhaps the most original thinker in football’s history, but most of his thinking was about attack. He liked to say that he didn’t mind conceding three goals, as long as Barça scored five. Well, Guardiola also wanted to score five, but he minded conceding even one. If Barcelona is a cathedral, Guardiola has added the buttresses. In Barça’s first 28 league games this season, they have let in only 22 goals. Here are some of “Pep”’s innovations, or the secrets of FC Barcelona:

1.  Pressure on the ball
Before Barcelona played Manchester United in the Champions League final at Wembley last May, Alex Ferguson said that the way Barça pressured their opponents to win the ball back was “breathtaking”. That, he said, was Guardiola’s innovation. Ferguson admitted that United hadn’t known how to cope with it in the Champions League final in Rome in 2009. He thought it would be different at Wembley. It wasn’t.
Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.
Furthermore, if the guy won the ball back in his own defence, and Barcelona can instantly win it back again, then the way to goal is often clear. This is where Lionel Messi’s genius for tackling comes in. The little man has such quick reflexes that he sometimes wins a tackle a split-second after losing one.
The Barcelona player who lost the ball leads the hunt to regain it. But he never hunts alone. His teammates near the ball join him. If only one or two Barça players are pressing, it’s too easy for the opponent to pass around them.

2. The “five-second rule”
If Barça haven’t won the ball back within five seconds of losing it, they then retreat and build a compact ten-man wall. The distance between the front man in the wall (typically Messi) and their last defender (say, Carles Puyol) is only 25 to 30 metres. It’s hard for any opponent to pass their way through such a small space. The Rome final was a perfect demonstration of Barcelona’s wall: whenever United won the ball and kept it, they faced eleven precisely positioned opponents, who stood there and said, in effect: “Try and get through this.”
It’s easy for Barcelona to be compact, both when pressing and when drawing up their wall, because their players spend most of the game very near each other. Xavi and Iniesta in particular seldom stray far from the ball. Cruijff recently told the former England manager Steve McClaren, now with FC Twente in Holland: "Do you know how Barcelona win the ball back so quickly? It's because they don't have to run back more than 10 metres as they never pass the ball more than 10 metres."

3. More rules of pressing
Once Barcelona have built their compact wall, they wait for the right moment to start pressing again. They don’t choose the moment on instinct. Rather, there are very precise prompts that tell them when to press. One is if an opponent controls the ball badly. If the ball bounces off his foot, he will need to look downwards to locate it, and at that moment he loses his overview of the pitch. That’s when the nearest Barcelona players start hounding him.
There’s another set prompt for Barça to press: when the opposing player on the ball turns back towards his own goal. When he does that, he narrows his options: he can no longer pass forward, unless Barcelona give him time to turn around again. Barcelona don’t give him time. Their players instantly hound the man, forcing him to pass back, and so they gain territory.

4. The “3-1 rule”
If an opposing player gets the ball anywhere near Barcelona’s penalty area, then Barça go Italian. They apply what they call the “3-1 rule”: one of Barcelona’s four defenders will advance to tackle the man with the ball, and the other three defenders will assemble in a ring about two or three metres behind the tackler. That provides a double layer of protection. Guardiola picked this rule up in Italy. It’s such a simple yet effective idea that you wonder why all top teams don’t use it.

5. No surprise
When Barcelona win the ball, they do something unusual. Most leading teams treat the moment the ball changes hands – “turnover”, as it’s called in basketball – as decisive. At that moment, the opponents are usually out of position, and so if you can counterattack quickly, you have an excellent chance of scoring. Teams like Manchester United and Arsenal often try to score in the first three seconds after winning possession. So their player who wins the ball often tries to hit an instant splitting pass. Holland – Barcelona’s historic role models – do this too.
But when a Barcelona player wins the ball, he doesn’t try for a splitting pass. The club’s attitude is: he has won the ball, that’s a wonderful achievement, and he doesn’t need to do anything else special. All he should do is slot the ball simply to the nearest teammate. Barcelona’s logic is that in winning the ball, the guy has typically forfeited his vision of the field. So he is the worst-placed player to hit a telling ball.
This means that Barcelona don’t rely on the element of surprise. They take a few moments to get into formation, and then pretty much tell their opponents, “OK, here we come.” The opposition knows exactly what Barça are going to do. The difficulty is stopping it.
The only exception to this rule is if the Barça player wins the ball near the opposition’s penalty area. Then he goes straight for goal.

6. Possession is nine-tenths of the game
Keeping the ball has been Barcelona’s key tactic since Cruijff’s day. Most teams don’t worry about possession. They know you can have oodles of possession and lose. But Barcelona aim to have 65 or 70 per cent of possession in a game. Last season in Spain, they averaged more than 72 per cent; so far this year, they are at about 70 per cent.
The logic of possession is twofold. Firstly, while you have the ball, the other team can’t score. A team like Barcelona, short on good tacklers, needs to defend by keeping possession. As Guardiola has remarked, they are a “horrible” team without the ball.
Secondly, if Barça have the ball, the other team has to chase it, and that is exhausting. When the opponents win it back, they are often so tired that they surrender it again immediately. Possession gets Barcelona into a virtuous cycle.
Barça are so fanatical about possession that a defender like Gerald Pique will weave the most intricate passes inside his own penalty area rather than boot the ball away. In almost all other teams, the keeper at least is free to boot. In the England side, for instance, it’s typically Joe Hart who gives the ball away with a blind punt. This is a weakness of England’s game, but the English attitude seems to be that there is nothing to be done about it: keepers can’t pass. Barcelona think differently.
Jose Mourinho, Real Madrid’s coach and Barcelona’s nemesis, has tried to exploit their devotion to passing. In the Bernabeu in December, Madrid’s forwards chased down Valdes from the game’s first kickoff, knowing he wouldn’t boot clear. The keeper miscued a pass, and Karim Benzema scored after 23 seconds. Yet Valdes kept passing, and Barcelona won 1-3. The trademark of Barcelona-raised goalkeepers – one shared only by Ajax-raised goalkeepers, like Edwin van der Sar – is that they can all play football like outfield players.

7. The “one-second rule”
No other football team plays the Barcelona way. That’s a strength, but it’s also a weakness. It makes it very hard for Barça to integrate outsiders into the team, because the outsiders struggle to learn the system. Barcelona had a policy of buying only “Top Ten” players – men who arguably rank among the ten best footballers on earth – yet many of them have failed in the Nou Camp. Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic did, while even David Villa, who knew Barcelona’s game from playing it with Spain, ended up on the bench before breaking his leg.
Joan Oliver, Barcelona’s previous chief executive, explained the risk of transfers by what he called the “one-second rule”. The success of a move on the pitch is decided in less than a second. If a player needs a few extra fractions of a second to work out where his teammate is going, because he doesn’t know the other guy’s game well, the move will usually break down. A new player can therefore lose you a match in under a second.   
Pedro isn’t a great footballer, but because he was raised in the Masia he can play Barcelona’s game better than stars from outside. The boys in the Masia spend much of their childhood playing passing games, especially Cruijff’s favorite, six against three. Football, Cruijff once said, is choreography.
Nobody else thinks like that. That’s why most of the Barcelona side is homegrown. It’s more a necessity than a choice. Still, most of the time it works pretty well.

March 22, 2012 - Simon Kuper

http://www.miostadium.com/opinions/simon-kuper/barcelonas-secret-soccer-success

What Are the Benefits of Taking a Vacation?

by Chris Blank, Demand Media

Vacations provide a much needed break from everyday routine.

According to the 2009 International Vacation Deprivation Study, commissioned by travel service company Expedia, more than 30 percent of Americans did not use all their vacation days. One of the major reasons Americans leave vacation days unused is the fear of losing their jobs, according to CNN. However, vacations are beneficial, not only to workers, but to their companies and to the American economy as well.

Health Benefits

Taking time away from work and routine allows the body to replenish and repair itself, according to Karen Matthews of Mind Body Center at the University of Pittsburgh, quoted on npr.com. The center surveyed 1,399 participants recruited for studies on cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and other conditions, and found that leisure activities, including taking vacations, contributed to higher positive emotional levels and less depression among the participants. Other benefits include lower blood pressure and smaller waistlines, reports npr.com. Women especially seem to benefit from taking vacations, according to a 2005 study conducted by Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, published in the Wisconsin Medical Journal and reported on medicalnewstoday.com. Women who vacationed less often than once every two years were more likely to suffer from depression and increased stress than women who took vacations at least twice a year.

Creativity and Innovation Benefits

Robert Kriegel, author of "How to Succeed in Business Without Working So Damn Hard," says workers get many of their best ideas away from the job. Without the pressure to respond to each crisis that arises, workers have the opportunity to consider innovative approaches, Kriegel explains on money.cnn.com. "Vacation should be really defined as a time when we can really turn off those tech work savers and just relax and have fun," says Robert R. Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist with International Trauma Associates, quoted on abc.com. Workers in creative fields especially need the opportunity recharge their batteries."If you have a job that's very creative and you don't take time off you hit a wall and you need a change. The break will allow you to refresh your brain cells," explains Butterworth.

Economic and Productivity Benefits

Many locations count on tourism as a major source of revenue. Having fewer vacationers can make a significant detrimental effect in their budgets. The Vacation Deprivation study also suggests when employees take vacations, businesses and the economy benefit. According to the survey results, 34 percent of the respondents reported feeling better about their jobs and more productive after taking a vacation."The research is clear, despite leaving vacation days unused, Americans believe in the restorative power of taking time off," says Paul Brown, president of expedia.com, quoted on marketingcharts.com. Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of "The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World," explains on the CNN website that workers who forgo their vacations aren't doing themselves or their companies any favors. Even if they are physically present, they have often mentally checked out. "If people are overworked, they're surfing the Internet. They're not contributing to the bottom line," Hohlbaum says.

The Future Is More Than Facebook

Social media is already passé in Silicon Valley. 

America's innovation engine is now focused on transportation, energy and manufacturing.

By RICH KARLGAARD

In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg's net worth to more than $18 billion. That's about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft's IPO.

Facebook's big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America's best days are over.

The first is that America's innovation engine, Silicon Valley, is again overheating. Evidence: Last month Facebook swapped $1 billion in pre-IPO shares and some cash for Instagram, a two-year-old start-up with 11 employees and no revenue. A week later, another Silicon Valley start-up called Splunk, slyly allied with the decades's two hottest buzz generators—cloud computing and big data—went public at a $1.5 billion value on just $121 million in sales this year. Yet shareholders swooned for Splunk and bid up its $17 IPO share price to $37 in the first two days of trading.

This has to be a bubble, right?

The second worry is that only a certain kind of company is getting rich in the Obama economy. These are outfits that make algorithms—bits of software code cleverly strung together to take the form of an iPhone operating system, a LinkedIn social network, or a proprietary trading scheme.

The modern-day code rockers are not mere nerds, either. They form an Algorithmic Army of slightly surreal folks like, well, Mr. Zuckerberg. They seem to be pale men with oddly flat voices and faraway gazes who prefer to hide out in the bathroom during the IPO roadshow. When finally coaxed onto the stage to face investors, the great Zuckerberg appeared in a hoodie.

That can't be America's future, can it?

The debate about whether America will own the global economy in the 21st century or else become a dude ranch for rich Chinese and Brazilians hinges on whether innovation can break out of the box. Can it go mainstream and transform the really big things: transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education?

Enlarge Image

Bloomberg

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg

If it can't do that—or if it is thwarted by high taxes and complex regulation—then welcome to the new normal of 2% annual growth. Our future will become sadly familiar. Just follow Spain, France and Great Britain down history's sinkhole of lost status and influence.

But America can do better than that, and it will. In fact, the seeds are being planted now. In Silicon Valley, investing in social-media companies is already passé. Last year, as private investors were bidding up Facebook's valuation to $100 billion, the veteran Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee said "the next 500 social-media companies will lose money." He's broadly right. The time to make big returns in Facebook and in social media has passed.

There's a growing interest among bright minds to apply "exponential technologies" (the phrase used by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, founders of Singularity University) to solve problems much larger than whom to friend on Facebook. Transportation is one of those big deals. Would you rather own a car, an iPad or a Facebook membership? Thought so. By 2050 the planet will have nine billion inhabitants and three billion cars. This will create huge demand for fuel and road access.

Silicon Valley's biggest new thing, therefore, is not Instagram or Splunk but Google's robot-driven car. The Google car is only four years old. In 2008, it could barely get around pylons in a parking lot. Last year it got down San Francisco's snaky Lombard Street with no human driver and today it races over mountain passes with only R2-D2's second cousin behind the wheel. This rate of progress is normal in the algorithmic world, but it is new in the physical world.

Manufacturing? America will own the mid-21st century. Geopolitical instability and rising oil prices will wreck the late 20th-century rationale for outsourcing. Chinese labor costs are rising 20% a year while robotic costs are dropping by 30% a year. Do the math.

"Made in the USA" is set to have a major comeback. The showstopper will be 3-D printing, which makes physical objects from a digital file. It will turn our artists into artisanal manufacturers and reward American-style creativity.

Energy? America's natural-gas and shale oil boom will bridge us to 2030 or so when solar energy and algae-based fuels will be closer to market parity and begin to make a real contribution. As long as I'm on the topic of the natural-gas boom, what key technology made this happy surprise possible? High-tech horizontal drilling. Who knew? We were all too busy fiddling with our iPhone apps to see it coming.

Question: If America could have only one of the following—Facebook, Twitter or horizontal drilling—which would be the smarter choice?

Happily, we don't have to make that choice. America remains the world's innovator, a country without limits.

Mr. Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes.

A version of this article appeared May 17, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Future Is More Than Facebook.

Economic in One Lesson

When personal incomes are taxed 50, 60, 75 and 90 per cent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or ten months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or two months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a dime of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital. In addition, the capital available for risk-taking itself shrinks enormously. It is being taxed away before it can be accumulated. In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.

Henry Hazlitt in "Economics in One Lesson"


photo credit: Geirangerfjord with cruise ship and The Seven Sisters waterfall on far right, Geiranger, Møre og Romsdal, Norway (© Karsten Bidstrup/Lonely Planet Images)