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Intelligence: Influenceable, Interactive, Infinite

A step at a time, you’re building the understanding you need to help your child. In this chapter, I want to introduce you to three important features of the new view of intelligence expressed in the image of the Intelligence River:

• Intelligence can be influenced.
• Interaction with other people is at the core of how children build their intelligence.
• There’s an effectively infinite supply of intelligence waiting for us, if we’ll only recognize that it’s there.

Is Intelligence Influenceable?

Do we know that our actions can really help our kids develop their Intelligence River? It depends on our standards for knowing.

There’s the kind of knowing that is about extensive and thorough research programs, with good experimental design; publication in scholarly journals where the work is subjected to professional scrutiny, with replication of important studies; and a slow and systematic building of knowledge. My training was in that kind of work, and I absolutely admire it — it’s the gold standard for scientific knowledge. If the theories we’ve looked at in this book are subjected to that kind of analysis, and hold up under that microscope, then we’ll be able to support them with some confidence — 20 years from now. (Who knows, your child might be part of the team that does the definitive research!) But that isn’t going to help you much now, is it? The practical form of our question must be: Does it make sense to believe you can use this new information to positively influence your child’s development now?

People haven’t always thought intelligence was something you could influence. But that pessimistic viewpoint had to do with a limited, even restricted, view of what it means to be intelligent.

What we want to know is, can we influence the new, greatly expanded views of intelligence that recent theories have offered us? We can’t know for sure, but I think there are reasons to be very optimistic that we can:

• Compared to the narrow scope of traditional views of intelligence, you’re interested in developing a whole galaxy of abilities — you’ve got many, many more targets.
• You’ve got better theories to guide you than were available even a few years ago. We know they aren’t perfect. We know they’re unproven. But they’re better than the old theory, expressed in traditional IQ tests, which effectively said “Here’s your number. You’re stuck with it. Next!”
• Common sense says you can affect many of the new intelligences. For example, consider the Director: Professional organizers can teach pretty much anyone (except maybe your 13-year-old!) to be better organized. Those skills help someone use their personal resources better — develop a better Director. Similarly, the inclusion of our knowledge base as a source of intelligence has wide effects: Increasing your child’s exposure to interesting information and to the areas of human knowledge will affect her knowledge-based Intelligence.
• There is proven research to support your common-sense intuition that you can affect many parts of your child’s Intelligence River. The research wasn’t thinking of these parts as intelligences, but as important human abilities. But the research still applies, whatever we call them. For one example of many, research has proved we can positively affect kid’s social problem solving — and thus their Personal Intelligence.

You know what makes me most optimistic of all? Watching skilled parents “work” with their kids. They prove to me that it can be done — that our actions make a difference. I stopped a lady in the grocery store last week to just say, “It’s a pleasure watching you and your daughter shop together.” I had followed them up and down the aisles as I shopped: They chatted happily and comfortably (Personal Intelligence) as they thought together about planning the week’s meals (the Director). They bought healthy food — the little girl was clearly athletic, strong, and glowing with good health (Body Intelligence). She was working hard to read the signs and labels (Reading and Writing Intelligence), and her mother quietly helped her with a couple of words and explained the meaning of one (Language Intelligence), mentioning briefly that mangoes grow in the tropics (Knowledge). OK, I have to admit, I didn’t see them doing any price comparisons (Number Intelligence), but they probably did that while I wasn’t looking! None of this had the look of heavy teaching. There was nothing of “I’ll make you smarter” about it. They were just having fun shopping together. It was all natural, unforced, easy in the same way that a great ice skater makes a triple-backward kaffloey “easy.”

Please take a second and answer a question: In the second sentence of that paragraph you just finished, why did I put “work” in quotations?

Finally, and above all, why not assume we can influence our kids’ Intelligence River? Would you rather wait on the research, or would you rather see what you can do before your kids grow up? Are the odds for your child better if you try, or if you just sit back and wait until we know for sure?