Author Dr. Ran Anbar On The 5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School
An Interview With Jake Frankel
…Make Room for Mistakes. A child who’s learning is also a child who makes mistakes. Expect it to happen. When it does, encourage your child to focus on what can be done differently in the future instead of lamenting about what has happened in the past. In a similar vein, share your thoughts with your child about good study and career options. Then, allow them the freedom to choose and pursue interests in their own way. If they choose an interest that does not pan out, recognize that this is part of the learning process. Be supportive of your child’s endeavors, including by providing further input when they ask for it. For some parents it’s hard to stand by and watch their child flounder. I tell them this analogy: When your children learned to walk as toddlers, they fell, got up, fell again, got up, and finally learned to walk. Falling was part of the process, as their brains learned there are certain ways they can’t walk well. Teenagers go through the same process when they make poor choices and find out they do not work. It’s part of a healthy way of growing up…
School is really not easy these days. Many students have been out of school for a long time because of the pandemic, and the continued disruptions and anxieties are still breaking the flow of normal learning. What can parents do to help their children thrive and excel in school, particularly during these challenging and anxiety-provoking times?
To address this, we started a new series called ‘5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School.” In this interview series, we are talking to teachers, principals, education experts, and successful parents to learn from their insights and experience.
As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Ran D. Anbar, MD.
Dr. Anbar is a leader in the field of clinical hypnosis and a board-certified physician in both pediatric pulmonology and general pediatrics. He has served as a professor of pediatrics and medicine, director of pediatric pulmonology at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, and as president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. Over his career, Dr. Anbar has successfully treated over 8,000 children.
Dr. Anbar is author of the acclaimed Changing Children’s Lives with Hypnosis: A Journey to the Center, and The Life Guide for Teens: Harnessing Your Inner Power to be Healthy, Happy, and Confident. He blogs regularly for Psychology Today Online, and offers hypnosis and counseling services at Center Point Medicine in La Jolla, California, and Syracuse.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us a bit about your “backstory”?
I am a pediatric pulmonologist who found out about the power of the mind 27 years ago when I encountered a patient who was gravely allergic to milk products. Twice in his life he almost died from eating a milk product. He told me that when he smelled cheeseburgers he would develop asthma attacks. When I asked him to imagine eating a cheeseburger, he developed a severe breathing problem in front of my eyes.
I told him to “STOP IT!” and he did.
I said, “You’re putting me on!” but he said, “No, I’m not. That was my asthma.”
In that moment, I thought to myself, If you can think your way into a disease, can you think your way out? The answer is yes.
I have since learned that every patient with chronic disease can benefit from learning how to self-regulate their emotions. This usually helps improve their physical and mental health symptoms, and sometimes even helps resolve them.
Once I learned about the powers of the mind, I began teaching many of my pediatric patients about how they can help themselves deal better with life challenges, including those involving academic issues at school. Helping kids help themselves was so rewarding that a decade ago I shifted my career to providing hypnosis instruction and counseling to children, adolescents, and young adults.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’ve had many interesting encounters with my patients, including the cheeseburger story. An even more remarkable encounter occurred when I learned to speak to patients’ subconscious. It turns out that the subconscious usually is more knowledgeable and wiser than the conscious brain of my teen patients. Through interactions with their subconscious teens can gain insights that can be helpful to them throughout all parts of their lives, including school.
One particular 14-year-old patient was shown Hebrew writing by his subconscious. He had never studied Hebrew (he wasn’t even Jewish), but he was able to point to letters that he was seeing in his mind on a real-life Google Hebrew alphabet chart. I am a native Hebrew speaker, as I was born in Israel, and therefore I understood exactly what his subconscious was showing him.
Later, his subconscious said that he showed my patient Hebrew so that I would learn that the subconscious can have access to information beyond a patient’s fund of knowledge. He confirmed that if I was a speaker of Chinese, he would have shown the patient Chinese.
This experience taught me that there is much to learn about the depths of subconscious knowledge, and that there may be a wealth of information that can be accessible to us through our subconscious.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) said, “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.”
This quote encompasses everything I teach my patients and apply to my own life. When people recognize that their thoughts control their reality, their lives can be transformed. This is the reason I wrote The Life Guide for Teens: Harnessing Your Inner Power to be Healthy, Happy, and Confident. The book shares 180 tools people can use to improve their lives through thinking in better ways.
For instance, if you say, “I can’t do it,” your brain says, “OK, you can’t do it. You might as well quit.”
If, instead, you say, “I want to do it,” your brain says, “OK, how are we going to get you there?”
In a way, the brain is like a computer that does what it’s told. I have learned to tell my brain what I would like to accomplish, and this has helped me achieve much success and happiness.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
In life, perseverance is the key to success. You can be very smart, but if you are unable to persevere you won’t be able to get through some of life’s challenges. On the other hand, if you work hard, even if you’re not particularly talented, you will go to good places. I remember a Hebrew student of mine who was preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. She could not carry a tune, and we had to repeat each phrase she was studying 50 times or more. Nonetheless, she did the work, and when she became Bat Mitzvah she chanted her portion better than more talented students who did not have her strong ability to persevere.
Flexibility is another key. When I met my patient who reacted to the thought of eating cheeseburgers, I was introduced to a new idea that thoughts can affect physical symptoms. That’s not a concept I learned during my medical training. When I learned about using the imagination (through hypnosis) to help people, I was able to pivot to a new way of thinking. When you’re flexible, you are more able to take advantage of life opportunities that you may encounter.
Trusting yourself is a third key trait. When we learn to listen well to our inner wisdom, we’re often guided to good places. When I work with patients, I often consult my subconscious regarding what I might say to them. I do this through quieting my mind and listening.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Besides continuing to publicize my first two books, Changing Children’s Lives with Hypnosis and the newly published The Life Guide for Teens, I am hard at work on my third book in which I am going to describe the unusual interactions I have been privileged to have had with the subconscious of many of my patients.
I hope that my third book will help open the eyes of even more people to the potential of accessing the subconscious and beyond, and how this could be of benefit in achieving success in life.
For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about why you are an authority on how to help children succeed in school?
I have counseled over 8000 pediatric patients over the past 25 years about their challenges, including many school-related issues such as difficulties with focus, learning style, dealing with teachers, and relationships with friends.
In The Life Guide for Teens, I devote chapter 12 to discussing how teenagers can get along better with friends and teachers, and chapter 15 to how they can do better in school. Also, in each chapter there is a note for parents that tells them what they can do to help their children socially and academically.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. Can you help articulate the main challenges that students face today that make it difficult to succeed in school?
I think students are overloaded by information, not only by what is presented to them at school, but through social media. For many students, it’s difficult to sort important and true facts from false or partially false information.
At school, many students are distracted by their computers or smartphones, and thus do not pay full attention. Ironically, when schools have attempted to address this issue by asking students to turn in their phones for the duration of a class or school days, some parents have protested because they want to have the ability to contact their children in case of emergency, or more often just to coordinate schedules.
The omnipresence of electronics at home also represents a challenge to students. Not only are they distracted from studying, but they also stay up late at night to continue their entanglement with phones, tablets, and computers. This causes them to lose sleep. Rather than sleeping the 8–10 hours a night teenagers require for good mental and physical health, the vast majority sleep 7 hours or less. Worse, lack of sleep is known to cause increased anxiety, depression, suicidality and poor school performance.
Finally, many schools don’t pay adequate attention to the overall workload imposed on their students. An active, advanced student may have up to three hours of sports practice and five hours of studying each day — just to keep up. That doesn’t even include time spent in other extracurricular activities such as clubs, work, or responsibilities at home. These great demands on students’ time end up leading to decreased sleep time and tremendous pressure.
Can you suggest a few reforms that you think schools should make to help students to thrive and excel?
First, I think that the method of presenting information through lecturing should be changed significantly. We’ve been using this approach since before the general population knew how to read. Elementary students require a lot of redirection, so having a teacher standing in front of a class can be of benefit. However, beginning with middle and high school students, a lot of didactic material can be presented in an asynchronous fashion, and class time can be reserved for discussions, experiments, and perhaps test-taking. Such interactions encourage active rather than passive learning. In the near future, artificial intelligence applications could also be used to personalize the educational experience, so each student can be presented with educational challenges that will help address their needs.
Second, the in-person school day that follows this guideline could be shortened to 4 hours, perhaps in two shifts. That would allow early risers to attend school from 8–12, and late risers to attend from 12–4. Many teens experience a delayed sleep-wake cycle that makes it difficult for them to fall asleep relatively early at night, and therefore they would be better off being able to get up later in the morning. A two-shift school would allow for smaller classes, without an increase in the number of teachers required. A shortened school day will allow teenagers to be involved meaningfully in extracurricular activities without sacrificing sleep.
Can you please share your “5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School?”
As parents, we all want to make life better for our children, and while they’re in school we see plenty of opportunities. You may want to jump in and help a lot with their homework. You may want to confront a teacher who gives your child a low grade. You may want to organize your teen’s study schedule. Those are all normal impulses, but following through with them often does more harm than good because it deprives your child of opportunities to learn by dealing with challenges. With that in mind:
– Focus on Strategy. Rather than constantly reminding your child of homework, test prep, or other school-related obligations, help them establish routines that support their doing so independently. For example, instead of going into your teen’s room each morning to wake them up, offer an alarm clock. Instead of checking in every day (or multiple times a day) on the parent portal, encourage your child to use online access to keep track of their grades day-to-day. And instead of asking: Did you remember your cleats? Ask, What’s your plan to remember your cleats?
– Encourage Planning and Realistic Expectations. When your child is facing a large-scale task or challenge, ask how they plan to break it up. Subdividing projects into smaller pieces and seeing them through is an essential life skill. Help your child figure out whether their expectations are realistic about how quickly they can complete their work. Further, for high achieving children, discuss that it’s fine to have high expectations. However, they should learn to gauge their success by their progress towards their goals, rather than whether they achieved their goals. Otherwise, a child who is only happy when a high goal is reached spend most of their time being unhappy, which is counterproductive.
– Instead of Assigning Tools, Offer Options. Rather than telling your child to use a reminder app on their phone, to use a day planner, or to keep track of tasks on a wall calendar, provide them options, then ask what tool might be helpful and assist them in acquiring it. When a child is invested in the selection process, they’re more likely to utilize the option they chose.
– Make Room for Mistakes. A child who’s learning is also a child who makes mistakes. Expect it to happen. When it does, encourage your child to focus on what can be done differently in the future instead of lamenting about what has happened in the past. In a similar vein, share your thoughts with your child about good study and career options. Then, allow them the freedom to choose and pursue interests in their own way. If they choose an interest that does not pan out, recognize that this is part of the learning process. Be supportive of your child’s endeavors, including by providing further input when they ask for it. For some parents it’s hard to stand by and watch their child flounder. I tell them this analogy: When your children learned to walk as toddlers, they fell, got up, fell again, got up, and finally learned to walk. Falling was part of the process, as their brains learned there are certain ways they can’t walk well. Teenagers go through the same process when they make poor choices and find out they do not work. It’s part of a healthy way of growing up.
– Celebrate Achievements. Children thrive when their achievements are acknowledged and applauded by their parents. For instance, when I was in middle school and high school my father used to reward me with a book of my choice for every A I achieved. He didn’t even complain that I bought mostly non-serious books.
As you know, teachers play such a huge role in shaping young lives. What would you suggest needs to be done to attract top talent to the education field?
Teachers are often underappreciated and underpaid. Further, some of them face the impossible task of teaching a classroom with many students who have different needs. Some of the reforms I suggested earlier may help attract top talent because students’ needs may be better served in a new educational system, making effective teaching easier to implement.
I would encourage schools to partner with local businesses that can provide regular interactions for students with successful professionals. Not only will students benefit, but business employees would be more exposed to the educational system, and perhaps inspired to contribute more to our children’s education. Similarly, I think schools should offer opportunities to local college students to shadow and participate in classroom education so that they can learn more about the amazing experience of enriching young minds.
The government can help attract more people into teaching by offering student loan forgiveness opportunities.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I would pick Bill Gates because of his interest in improving the education system, including through innovative teaching methods.
I’d love to share with him how children can learn to help themselves through simple mind/body techniques such as positive self-talk, self-calming, and listening to their inner selves (all of which are taught in The Life Guide for Teens). I would want to discuss with him how we can introduce instruction of these self-help skills within the educational system.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can check out my website: dranbar.com
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts with you and your readers!
Author Dr Ran Anbar On The 5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In Schoo was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.