11% Smarter Kids
Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways and action steps for this post are provided at the end.
Dan Harris—the network television news anchor who famously had a panic attack on live television (something you can watch on YouTube) and subsequently found relief to the anxiety behind the attack through practicing meditation—titled his book on his transformation through meditation 10% Happier.
The title is tongue-in-cheek. The idea of precisely quantifying the benefits of meditation, like prayer, is obviously ridiculous. At the same time, Harris felt that, silly as it was, the 10 percent figure was probably was a good approximation for the benefit most people could experience.
I am convinced we parents can increase our kids’ mental capabilities through supplementing their education (the sort I write about in these posts) by a similarly dramatic amount. And we can have this significant improvement while balancing the other chaos of our lives—work, personal life, and taking care of our other secret family, the one we keep one town over but don’t tell anyone about.
(I’m kidding. Who seriously has time to have a second secret family anymore? And how do those people who do keep a secret separate family attain work-life-life balance? I am often flailing just trying to keep work-life balance.)
And I’m going to be honest. While I titled this post 11% Smarter Kids in homage Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap and his extra powerful amps (“Well, it's one louder, innit? It's not 10.”), I think the impact you and I can have is higher, more like 30 percent smarter.
Smarter is obviously a loaded term, with intelligence being a complex construction, so to keep it simple, lets define smarter as: a 30 percent deeper, more complex understanding of the world and a 30 percent greater clue of what their personal destiny might be.
Today’s essay provides a powerful example of learning practices that we parents can encourage or institute to make inroads on the 30 percent figure, and it has to do with systematically supplementing K-12 education with documentaries.
To some degree, documentaries are likely already in your kids’ learning repertoire, but I am willing to wager that, if you read through this essay, you will have the sense that I am on to something with the related practices I recommend, and you will be inspired to ratchet up the role documentaries are playing in your household’s learning.
This inspiration starts with performing some documentary rebranding in our own minds. Because just the name is not inspiring; hhe literal meaning of documentary: pertaining to or derived from documents. And many of us grew up associating documentaries with films that were solidly in the eat-your-vegetables camp of entertainment. Or they were too focused on WWII military campaigns.
Documentaries have changed radically, something that started toward in the 1980s and 1990s with Roger and Me, Hoop Dreams (still a great option to share with teens), and the entire Ken Burns oeuvre, and they are experiencing a full golden age in the current era of proliferating streaming services.
Massive budgets, great storytelling, computer-generated imagery, and hosts who are amazing communicators and have taken on celebrity status (Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Attenborough) or were celebrities to begin with (Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio).
Consider the recently released series docu-series Limitless. It teaches viewers about advances in brain science and human performance optimization while following one of the top ten top grossing and most popular actors on the planet, Chris Hemsworth, on series of mini-quests to push his own limits (equally amazingly, acclaimed director, Darren Aronofsky, is the executive producer of the series).
These aren’t documentaries. They are highly advanced learning content systems that turn screen time into brain enhancement events and, when consumed at scale, will give your kid an unfair learning advantage that calls to mind Lance Armstrong’s blood doping.
That description might be a bit too P.T. Barnum, but you get what I mean by rebranding, and my version is closer to reality than equating the new lot with the documentaries of old.
I am not suggesting that this content is at the point that it can replace teachers. Sadly, given current technology, video Dr. Tyson can’t answer questions or help get kids tuning out back on track. At least not yet.
But these modern docs are an amazing complement to what our kids are learning in school. And that is putting it mildly (I am repeatedly amazed by how much my kids recall from docs they watched years ago and how often they bring up this type of learning—more frequently, it must be said, than school learning).
Because of what a powerful learning resource these documentaries can be, and because—and I should have emphasized this earlier—kids so often actually enjoy watching these modern docs more than many of the other enrichment activities we parents suggest, we need to institute some sort of benchmark to ensure we are more consistently taking advantage of documentaries.
In our own house, the current plan is to simply set the standard that, in the same way the kids need to read 30 minutes a day, they are each responsible for watching one quality doc a week.
Establishing that simple standard in the case of my 11-year-old would mean that she would watch well over 300 documentaries by the time she finishes K-12. Which sounds great to me.
You might prefer to scale that back and aim for biweekly or monthly, but assuming you are thinking of following suit, I would recommend the following steps for implementing this education supplementation strategy in your household:
Step 1 - Sign up for PBS docs as an Amazon Prime Channel, which is just $2.99 and provides access to an amazing library of content (PBS also has a PBS Passport program for getting access through your local station).
Step 2 - Curate lists of good docs on PBS and your other streaming services. You can create a separate user account/avatar on services like Netflix that you title Learning (or Docs, or You’re Grounded If You Don’t Watch One A Week) where you curate your list.
Step 3 - Explain the new standard to the kids: you are responsible for watching one doc a week (or whatever your chosen pace). End of story.
Step 4 - Have the kids maintain simple document on their phone, whether a Sticky of Google Keep note, where they keep track of their docs watched. A list like this gives a sense of progress and accomplishment that they will take pride in. Three hundred docs!!
There are other variations we could add for fun:
Inspired by family game night and movie night, establish an ongoing family documentary night,
Task the kids with researching documentaries online and keeping another list on their phone that is filled with documentaries to watch.
Inspired by book clubs, including the mommy/kid variety, have documentary watching clubs.
Leverage the features that some streaming services have your kids watch documentaries with their friends virtually.
Make a family documentary of your daily life—something as simple as trying to get everyone out the door in the morning.
And that’s it. A simple plan for making one of the world’s most powerful learning resources a systematic, life-changing supplement to our kids’ K-12 educational experience.
I can’t underscore enough that we all should take this resource seriously. Not doing so is like telling the school that you don’t want your kid to participate in their amazing new weekly lecture series that features great educators like Neil deGrasse Tysron and Chris Hemsworth (and, yes, that shirt comes off in the first episode!).
We wouldn’t opt out of such an exciting new school program, so we can all hopefully get it together and not opt of our own version of such a program, especially as it is a learning resource our kids will enjoy—mot to mention, this is a lecture series that doesn’t take off for summer vacation or holiday breaks.
Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print
Documentaries are experiencing a golden age in which they are becoming ever more entertaining and informative, while also covering more and more topics and aspects of life.
This golden age has created an ever-expanding learning resource that should be every bit as part of the learning lives of kids as the reading they do outside of school.
By establishing a simple standard for consistently watching documentaries, along with doing some work to help curate what our kids watch, we parents can facilitate documentaries becoming a powerful complement to school learning.
In the end, documentaries may be unrivaled in the degree to which they can advance our kids’ mental advancement through a resource that they will mostly enjoy accessing.