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Key points
- The new school year can be stressful, but there are ways to give it a positive boost.
- Make an inventory of your child's strengths, skills, best traits, and goals they worked for and achieved.
- Keep a note card of pick-me-up activities that work best for your children.
You’ve no doubt heard and read much about dopamine and pleasure, but this neurotransmitter can also be activated to promote motivation and perseverance for a bright start to the new school term.
Dopamine is one of more than 200 different chemical neurotransmitters carrying messages to and between neurons. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter most closely associated with pleasure and intrinsic motivation. When dopamine activity increases, so does our sense of satisfaction and pleasure and desire to persevere. For example, when we are immersed in a favorite activity, we are likely to experience positive feelings that sustain our desire to continue participating in the activity and to repeat it when possible. As a bonus, other mental processes, including attention, memory storage, comprehension, higher-level thinking, and creativity, are also enhanced with increased dopamine release (Reeve, 1996; Black et al. 2002; Nader et al., 2002).
As a new academic year gets underway, here are some dopamine-release boosters to promote your child’s positive outlook and motivation regarding school.
Promote your child’s optimism
In studies assessing the influence of optimism on student success, subjects were randomly assigned to a positive-mood-induction group, in which they were prompted to think about the happiest day of their lives. A control group received no such prompt. Both groups completed questionnaires evaluating self-efficacy for math and were then given five minutes to do 50 math problems. Students in the optimism-activated, positive-mood condition completed significantly more problems accurately than children in the control condition (Bryan & Bryan, 1991).
As your children approach the new school term, help them be optimistic by making an inventory of their strengths, skills, and best traits, along with the goals that they are working toward and those they have already reached. By writing these down and keeping this inventory accessible, your children can ignite their reasons to be optimistic in times of need. If stress and worry are blocking them from connecting to happy thoughts, they can write down the negative ideas on a worry pad to then set aside to divert their brains from obsessive rumination.
Acknowledge their progress toward their designated goals with mini celebrations along the way. For example, after 30 minutes of focused effort on homework, they can look forward to something they enjoy and that boosts dopamine, such as listening to music, tossing a ball with you, or reading something humorous (Armenta et al., 2017).
As you notice positive effort toward their goals, give specific praise for what you observed. Expressing your awareness specifically, such as their perseverance through challenging math problems or correcting spelling errors in their writing, will be more rewarding than general statements such as “Good job.”
Listen to music
Dopamine activity in the brain’s reward areas can increase with the pleasure of listening to music (Salimpoor et al., 2011). Before starting homework or studying for a test, have some of your child’s favorite music at hand for them to enjoy as an effort motivator. Guide them to create a playlist of songs that boost their moods as customized, go-to dopamine boosters to sustain perseverance through challenges or setbacks.
Enjoy humor
This should be the easiest of all, but at times of stress, we can feel guilty about having fun. Keep a supply of funny quotes, quips, and cartoons your child can hear or read as dopamine boosters. You’ll find that humor goes a long way in brightening your child’s mood and optimism when challenges seem out of reach.
Encourage movement
Movement and physical activity are often associated with increased release of dopamine. Incorporating movement into learning yields benefits from the associated increase in memory, attention, and perseverance associated with the dopamine boost (Erickson et al., 2015). Encourage your children to act out vocabulary words, use hand gestures to represent directions on a map, or move their bodies around a chair to represent movement of electrons around the nucleus of an atom or planets around the sun.
Keep your boosters handy
Guide children to make a poster or list of the dopamine pick-me-ups that work best for them and keep this at their desks at home or in binders in school. These can remind them of how they can reboot their effort and outlook. A mood boost in time saves nine (hours of whining).
Congratulations on having the powerful opportunity to guide your children to make the most of and experience the joyful possibilities related to school. It is one of parenting's greatest challenges but also one of the greatest potential sources of rewarding satisfaction. Have a great year.
References
Armenta, C. N., Fritz, M. M., Lyubomirsky, S. (2017). Functions of positive emotions: Gratitude as a motivator of self-improvement and positive change. Emotion Review, 9(3): 183–190.
Black, K., Hershey, T., Koller,J., Videen,T. Mintun, M., Price, J, Perlmutter, J. (2002) A possible substrate for dopamine-related changes in mood and behavior: Prefrontal and limbic effects of a D3-preferring dopamine agonist Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 99(26), 17113–17118.
Boot, N., Baas, M., van Gaal, S., Cools,R., & De Dreu, C. Creative cognition and dopaminergic modulation of fronto-striatal networks: Integrative review and research agenda. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2017 Jul:78:13–23.
Bryan, T. and Bryan, J. Positive Mood and Math Performance - October 1991. Sage Journals. Volume 24, Issue 8.
Erickson, K., Hillman, C., Kramer, A. Physical activity, brain, and cognition. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2015, 4:27–32
Nader M., Daunais, J., Moore, M., Nader, S., Moore, R., Smith, H., Friedman, D., & Porrino, L. (2002). Dopamine systems. Neuropsychopharmacology, 27, 35-46.
Reeve, J (1996). The interest-enjoyment distinction in intrinsic motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 13, 83–103.
Salimpoor, V., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, and Zatorre, R. (2011) Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nat Neurosci. 2011 Feb;14(2):257–262.
