Everything Exams

Can an Optimistic Way of Thinking Make a Difference to Children’s Mental Health and Academic Performance? Part 1…

I’m always on the lookout for ways in which I can help my children as well as my students build their resilience and confidence, so that ultimately, they are in a position to achieve their full potential. This is how I came across research which has been carried out on the strength known as optimism. 

Optimism is a way of thinking really – if you are optimistic, you expect things to turn out well and have confidence in your ability to influence a positive outcome. It’s more than this though, and also encompasses how someone reacts when things go wrong. Instead of feeling a sense of failure when something turns out badly, an optimist will see the situation as a mixture of things they did well and ones they could have done better. They will then use this experience as an opportunity to grow their skills, going out of their way to learn how to improve their performance next time with the belief that they can and will do better.

I was always impressed by the optimism of one of the students whose family I worked with for a number of years. When I began tutoring him, his academic performance was close to the bottom of his class. In tests, he frequently got the lowest grade, made obvious by the school including his position relative to the rest of the class on his reports. When his classmates came over on play dates, his generosity of spirit shone through as he praised his classmates’ superior achievements in tests, musical abilities and sporting successes. He could have chosen to perceive his own performance as a failure in some way, saying to himself that he was incapable of doing well or lacking the necessary skills. He could have just given up trying. Instead, he saw every test as an opportunity to improve. Increasingly, he worked harder and harder and I still remember the day he came back from school with a massive grin on his face, having gained the top mark in his end-of-year exam in Biology. This was the start of a run of success for him.

A three-year study was carried out in Australia involving over 5000 students aged between 12 and 14. Their levels of optimism, thinking style, emotional problems and any issues with substance abuse were recorded beforehand and at regular intervals during the study. Students who were more optimistic about their futures were happier, and, incredibly, the likelihood of students exhibiting depressive symptoms was reduced by nearly a half for those in the most optimistic quarter of students as compared to the lowest quarter. Results supported the promotion of an optimistic thinking style for young people. Between genders, boys had lower rates of depression at all levels of optimism than girls, but the positive effect of optimistic thinking was the same for both overall. Somehow, optimistic thinking seems to protect young people from certain mental health risks, depression in particular. Other studies have shown that optimism is closely associated with academic, career and political success, plus better health in old age. You might well be thinking that that’s all well and good if your child is an optimistic sort of person, but what if my child just isn’t? 

Before continuing, I’d just like to mention that there is a negative to optimism and it does have a slightly darker side. If you feel optimistic about everything, everything is going to turn out okay, so why not try something really risky? It will be fine, right? This sort of internal argument is one that would benefit from the wisdom that comes from the strengths of prudence and perspective. We must ensure that we encourage our children to be optimistic but, at the same time, continue to avoid things that could be rash or dangerous. Personally, this is definitely one of my tendencies, and I do need to remind myself of this occasionally, as I can get a little carried away with optimistic thinking…

Back to the positives of optimism, though, practising optimistic thinking makes children more resilient, more likely to see things through to the end and feel more confident and in control of their own destiny in the process.

To answer my question above, luckily, research in this area has shown that this way of thinking is not something that is part of a child’s inherent nature alone but a skill that can be learnt and nurtured. This is the reason I will definitely be delving a little deeper and returning to this subject in future posts…

References

1. Patton GC, Tollit MM, Romaniuk H, Spence SH, Sheffield J, Sawyer MG. A prospective study of the effects of optimism on adolescent health risks. Pediatrics. 2011 Feb;127(2):308-16. doi: 10.1542/peds.2010-0748. Epub 2011 Jan 10. PMID: 21220404.

2. Syed, Matthew. Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success (and Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes). New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015.