"Or you may have noticed that on a day you had to make a lot of tough decisions at work, you found yourself short-tempered with your wife and kids when you got home. Because you had used up your willpower earlier in the day, it was harder to control your impulses later on."... also known as football season.

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/01/08/willpower-part-ii/

Willpower Part II: How Your Willpower Is Depleted

by BRETT & KATE MCKAY on JANUARY 8, 2012 · 80 COMMENTS

in A MAN'S LIFE, PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

In the first post of this three-part series, we offered a general outline of the nature of willpower, noting that it is a real mental energy which regulates your thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance control by keeping in check desires and behaviors at odds with your values and long-term goals.

We then compared the battle between your willpower and those unwanted desires to Al Bundy and Theodore Roosevelt sitting on your shoulders in the roles of the classic angel and devil.

We ended by saying that the winner of that battle depended on the strength of TR relative to Al at a given moment. And today we will explore what affects that balance and just how your willpower is weakened, a fascinating subject in and of itself, and one that is a necessary precursor for understanding how to then conserve, strengthen, and harness this vital force.

Willpower: A Finite Resource

In addition to the TR/Bundy image, it is also helpful to think of your willpower like a muscle. All of these qualities of your muscles also apply to your willpower:

• Your muscles become weak and flabby through disuse and a lack of exercise.
• In order to build the strength of your muscles in the long-term, you must exhaust them in the short-term.
• While you can build the strength of your muscles over time, on any given day when you walk into the gym, your muscles have a finite amount of strength–there’s an absolute max weight you can lift before your muscles reach failure.
• If you exhaust your muscles with one exercise, you’ll have less strength and endurance on the next exercise because your muscles will be fatigued. Your muscles need time to recover before they can be fresh again for your next workout.

We’ll come back to the first two points in our final post. Today we’re going to concentrate on those last two, exploring the fact that on any given day you have a finite supply of willpower, and that when you use part of that supply for one thing, you have less of it for others.

How Is Willpower Depleted?

Your supply of willpower is depleted in two ways.

First, by exercising self-control.

Every time you have a desire to do something that conflicts with accepted social norms or with your values and goals, and your willpower overrides that desire and keeps you on track, part of your willpower supply gets depleted. The stronger the desire and the harder it is to resist, the more of your willpower fuel is burned up in the struggle.

The need for self-control kicks in more times a day than you probably realize. In one study, participants were given beepers that randomly went off seven times a day and asked to record what they were experiencing when they heard the beep. Researchers found that at any given moment, 50% of the participants were feeling a desire right when the beeper went off–whether to eat, sleep, have sex, or surf the web–and another quarter of them had experienced a desire in the few minutes preceding the beep. All in all, the researchers found that on average people spend four hours a day resisting desires.

If that number seems high, think of all the desires you may have had in the last five minutes:

I want to eat that leftover pizza. But I’m not really hungry, I’m just bored. Bob just posted a ridiculous and false partisan article on Facebook. I really want to leave a comment telling him about all the errors in the piece, but that will just stir things up for no reason. I shouldn’t be on Facebook anyway, I need to get back to work. I really want to put my head down on the desk and take a nap….

The four hours you spend resisting desires each day doesn’t even include the second thing that saps your willpower: making decisions.

As with exercising your self-control, the harder the decision, the more your willpower supply gets drained. But even a back-to-back series of small and enjoyable decisions will eat up some of your willpower.

While simply shopping around and weighing different choices diminishes your willpower, it’s the moment when you lock in that choice and cast the die that gobbles it up the most. When you lock in one choice, you must reject other possibilities, and humans hate narrowing their options.

The diminishment of your willpower supply through the making of decisions and the exercise of self-control has been named “ego depletion” (for Freud’s term for the self) by foremost willpower expert, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister.

Your Brain on Ego Depletion

So what’s going on in your brain when your willpower energy gets depleted?

When you’re suffering from ego depletion, your brain’s anterior cingulate cortex—the part of your brain that detects a mismatch between what you intended to do and what you’re actually doing—slows down. When your willpower tank is full, and you start getting off track, the ACC is quick to jump in with a, “Hey, hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing? Get your hand off that mouse and put your eyes back on the textbook. We have a final in 2 hours!” But when your willpower muscle is fatigued, your anterior cingulate cortex reacts with a delayed and muted alarm.  The more of your willpower that’s been depleted, the slower the ACC responds, and the more likely you are to give into whatever the next temptation is you’re hit with, especially if the temptations come back-to-back. Then you might get no alarm at all, no voice that says, “You really don’t want to do that.”

It’s as if when your willpower gets low, TR falls asleep on watch, and Al has the run of the place. You can also imagine it like those video games where your health meter declines as you get injured—but if you can run around for awhile without being hit again, the health meter starts to climb back up and replenish itself. Crouch behind something and recover and you’re gold, but get hit again before that breather and you’re a dead man.

The Effects and High Cost of Ego Depletion

What happens to you when TR falls asleep and Al takes the wheel? Two things. Both of them bad.

Not Enough Slices of the Pie to Go Around

The biggest effect of ego depletion is what we mentioned in the beginning when we compared willpower to a muscle–when your willpower gets used up on one task, decision, or goal, you have less it for working on other tasks, decisions, and goals. Basically, the more ego depletion you experience, the less willpower you have to control your thoughts, emotions, and actions. There’s only so much willpower pie to go around.

This can be seen in a study that was conducted with two groups of college students. Both groups fasted before being brought into the laboratory. At the lab, the students were taken into a room and sat at a table on top of which two platters of food had been placed—one filled with warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and the other with raw radishes.

One group was told they could eat all the cookies they wanted–the other that they could only nosh on the radishes. The researchers left the students alone in the room, but watched them secretly through a window. The cookie eaters happily enjoyed their repast. The radish-eaters, on the other hand, were seen valiantly trying to resist eating a cookie while glumly biting into the raw roots.

After their snack, both groups were given puzzles to work on that were actually impossible to solve (they were not told this). The students who had eaten the cookies worked on the puzzles for an average of 20 minutes before giving up. But the radish-eaters threw in the towel after an average of only 8 minutes.

Why did the radish-eaters give up so quickly? They had already used up some of their willpower supply on resisting the cookies, and thus had less of it available for working on the puzzles.

Similar studies confirmed this result; once people use up their willpower on one self-control-requiring task, they struggle and do more poorly on the subsequent one.

This phenomenon is something you probably already intuitively understand and have experienced in your own life.

Take your college finals for example. As you focused your willpower energy on studying, you had less of it for other things, and your hygiene and diet went in the crapper. Wearing jeans and eating chicken breasts was replaced by donning pajama pants, scarfing pizza, and guzzling beer (researchers have found that as counterintuitive as it may sound—at least to those who haven’t been in college for awhile—drinking goes up during finals not down, because of ego depletion). You probably chalked those changes up to stress, but ego depletion is also playing a role—you simply don’t have enough willpower to keep all your impulses in check.

Or you may have noticed that on a day you had to make a lot of tough decisions at work, you found yourself short-tempered with your wife and kids when you got home. Because you had used up your willpower earlier in the day, it was harder to control your impulses later on.

In my own life I can track my state of ego depletion on whether or not I respond to negative feedback on the blog. Being a blogger is of course an awesome job, but one of its drawbacks is that you are constantly barraged with baseless criticism, petty complaints, and inane comments from people who miss the point of an article by such a wide margin, it makes you worried about the future of mankind. In the real world, it would be like having a constant stream of people march by your desk saying, “You’re doing that wrong.” “You misspelled that.” “You’re a idiot.” You’ll invariably feel a very strong urge to confront these critics on why they’re wrong or how they really, seriously need to get a life. But I’ve found that responding is a huge waste of time–the naysayer never changes his mind, which only raises your blood pressure further. So I’ve tried to make it a policy to never respond to pointless criticism, and am generally successful…except when I’m suffering ego depletion. A couple of months ago the launch of our new book fell on the same date we were moving into our first house, and since I was putting my willpower towards those and other important things, I found myself lashing out to any unfavorable comment. I just didn’t have enough willpower left to control that angry urge.

This is why you start smoking again when you get stressed. And why they put the candy by the checkout line in grocery stores; after making all those choices on what to buy, your willpower guard is down. This is why it makes sense that ascetic monks stay single and celibate as well; children are specially-patented willpower-sucking machines (“Do not throw crying baby out window, do not throw crying baby out window”) who would consume the willpower needed to wholly focus on one’s spirituality.

This is also one of the elements that makes rising out of poverty so difficult; the downtrodden have a ton of tough decisions to make every day, leaving them more prone to giving into short-term impulses, even if those choices conflict with their long-term goals.

Risk Aversion

In addition to making it more difficult for you to control your emotions, impulses, and behavior, ego depletion also makes you risk-averse in your decision-making. When your willpower starts running dry, you begin to default to the easiest, safest, status quo option, the one that least locks you into a set path, in order to avoid expending any more mental energy. Your brain gets tired and starts to seek the path of least resistance. You become what author John Tierney calls a “cognitive miser” and will focus on just one factor of a decision instead of looking at the whole picture…”Give me whatever one is cheapest.” “Whatever you think is best.” But these “whatever” decisions may not be in your best interest or in line with your long-term goals. It’s like being tired after a day of shopping for a big ticket item, and when the salesman presents you with the store’s suggested package, you sign off on it, even though it’s more expensive and includes features you don’t actually need.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: Your willpower is a finite resource and when the tank runs dry, you become much more prone to making decisions that distance you from your goals, torpedo your progress as a man, and hurt other people in your life. But as with any force in the world, once you understand how it works, you can become the master of it and learn how to minimize its destructive potential and then strengthen, conserve, and harness the energy for your own purposes. And that is where we will turn next time.

Source:

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

 Illustrations by Ted Slampyak

The BCS was BS

Check out this link to view just how crappy the BCS has been...

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/bcs-360938-championship-team.html?pic=15

Published: June 26, 2012 Updated: June 27, 2012 11:32 a.m.

Text:    Next Article »

Goodbye, BCS: The biggest controversies revisited

With an expiration date set for the Bowl Championship Series, we examine 14 of the most maddening developments in its 14-year history.

  

Goodbye, BCS: The biggest controversies revisited

15 of 15

YES REMATCH


The no-rematch sentiment that quashed Michigan-Ohio State II in 2006-07 could not stem the tide (no pun intended) for one in 2011-12. Despite losing to LSU during the regular season, Alabama got a second chance over Big 12 champion Oklahoma State, which had an identical 11-1 record. While the Cowboys were frustrated and their fans incensed, the Crimson Tide blanked the Tigers to claim the BCS title. Of course, they split overall, so that game proved … what exactly?

PHOTO BY BUTCH DILL, AP, TEXT BY MICHAEL LEV, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Spoiled Americans

I have to admit, I am guilty of some of these bad parenting traits.  I totally understand when the author mentions parents who say it is easier to just do it yourself.  Time to make some changes, because it is the right thing to do and I don't want my kids living at home drinking my beer after they graduate from high school!

Let's not get all wrapped up around the fact that the US study identifies Los Angelenos... I have seen awful parenting and immature adults everywhere I have lived... including the South.  

I would be interested if the researchers connected American studies to the business of contemporary life, different demographics, and the influence/absence of the father.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all&mobify=0

BOOKS

SPOILED ROTTEN

Why do kids rule the roost?

by Elizabeth KolbertJULY 2, 2012

It almost seems as if we’re trying to raise a nation of “adultescents.”

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River.

A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack thekapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old.

While Izquierdo was doing field work among the Matsigenka, she was also involved in an anthropological study closer to home. A colleague of hers, Elinor Ochs, had recruited thirty-two middle-class families for a study of life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Ochs had arranged to have the families filmed as they ate, fought, made up, and did the dishes.

Izquierdo and Ochs shared an interest in many ethnographic issues, including child rearing. How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didn’t. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game.

In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.

In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldn’t get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: “Untie it!” His father suggested that he ask nicely.

“Can you untie it?” Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Ben’s sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. “You tie your shoes and let’s go,’’ his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. “I’m just asking,’’ he said.

A few years ago, Izquierdo and Ochs wrote an article for Ethos, the journal of the Society of Psychological Anthropology, in which they described Yanira’s conduct during the trip down the river and Ben’s exchange with his dad. “Juxtaposition of these developmental stories begs for an account of responsibility in childhood,” they wrote. Why do Matsigenka children “help their families at home more than L.A. children?” And “Why do L.A. adult family members help their children at home more than do Matsigenka?” Though not phrased in exactly such terms, questions like these are being asked—silently, imploringly, despairingly—every single day by parents from Anchorage to Miami. Why, why, why?

     With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.

The notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes has given rise to a new genre of parenting books. Their titles tend to be either dolorous (“The Price of Privilege”) or downright hostile (“The Narcissism Epidemic,” “Mean Moms Rule,” “A Nation of Wimps”). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.

Not long ago, Sally Koslow, a former editor-in-chief of McCall’s, discovered herself in this last situation. After four years in college and two on the West Coast, her son Jed moved back to Manhattan and settled into his old room in the family’s apartment, together with thirty-four boxes of vinyl LPs. Unemployed, Jed liked to stay out late, sleep until noon, and wander around in his boxers. Koslow set out to try to understand why he and so many of his peers seemed stuck in what she regarded as permanent “adultescence.” She concluded that one of the reasons is the lousy economy. Another is parents like her.

“Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment,” Koslow writes in her new book, “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest” (Viking). They inhabit “a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain.” She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: “The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.” One practical tip that she offers is to do nothing when your adult child finally decides to move out. In the process of schlepping Jed’s stuff to an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Koslow’s husband tore a tendon and ended up in emergency surgery.

Madeline Levine, a psychologist who lives outside San Francisco, specializes in treating young adults. In “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins), she argues that we do too much for our kids because we overestimate our influence. “Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their child’s future success,” she writes. Paradoxically, Levine maintains, by working so hard to help our kids we end up holding them back.

“Most parents today were brought up in a culture that put a strong emphasis on being special,” she observes. “Being special takes hard work and can’t be trusted to children. Hence the exhausting cycle of constantly monitoring their work and performance, which in turn makes children feel less competent and confident, so that they need even more oversight.”

Pamela Druckerman, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, moved to Paris after losing her job. She married a British expatriate and not long after that gave birth to a daughter. Less out of conviction than inexperience, Druckerman began raising her daughter, nicknamed Bean, à l’Américaine. The result, as she recounts in “Bringing Up Bébé” (Penguin Press), was that Bean was invariably the most ill-behaved child in every Paris restaurant and park she visited. French children could sit calmly through a three-course meal; Bean was throwing food by the time the apéritifs arrived.

Druckerman talked to a lot of French mothers, all of them svelte and most apparently well rested. She learned that the French believe ignoring children is good for them. “French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them,” she writes. “To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration.” One mother, Martine, tells Druckerman that she always waited five minutes before picking up her infant daughter when she cried. While Druckerman and Martine are talking, in Martine’s suburban home, the daughter, now three, is baking cupcakes by herself. Bean is roughly the same age, “but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own,” Druckerman observes. “I’d be supervising, and she’d be resisting my supervision.”

Also key, Druckerman discovered, is just saying non. In contrast to American parents, French parents, when they say it, actually mean it. They “view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution,” Druckerman writes. “It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own.”

       Not long ago, in the hope that our sons might become a little more Matsigenka, my husband and I gave them a new job: unloading the grocery bags from the car. One evening when I came home from the store, it was raining. Carrying two or three bags, the youngest, Aaron, who is thirteen, tried to jump over a puddle. There was a loud crash. After I’d retrieved what food could be salvaged from a Molotov cocktail of broken glass and mango juice, I decided that Aaron needed another, more vigorous lesson in responsibility. Now, in addition to unloading groceries, he would also have the task of taking out the garbage. On one of his first forays, he neglected to close the lid on the pail tightly enough, and it attracted a bear. The next morning, as I was gathering up the used tissues, ant-filled raisin boxes, and slimy Saran Wrap scattered across the yard, I decided that I didn’t have time to let my kids help out around the house. (My husband informed me that I’d just been “kiddie-whipped.”)

Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka begin encouraging their children to be useful. Toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, they observed, while “three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives.” Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood.

The cycle in American households seems mostly to run in the opposite direction. So little is expected of kids that even adolescents may not know how to operate the many labor-saving devices their homes are filled with. Their incompetence begets exasperation, which results in still less being asked of them (which leaves them more time for video games). Referring to the Los Angeles families, Ochs and Izquierdo wrote, “Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves.”

One way to interpret these contrary cycles is to infer that Americans have a lower opinion of their kids’ capacities. And, in a certain sense, this is probably true: how many parents in Park Slope or Brentwood would trust their three-year-olds to cut the grass with a machete? But in another sense, of course, it’s ridiculous. Contemporary American parents—particularly the upscale sort that “unparenting” books are aimed at—tend to take a highly expansive view of their kids’ abilities. Little Ben may not be able to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown.

In “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting” (Broadway), Hara Estroff Marano argues that college rankings are ultimately to blame for what ails the American family. Her argument runs more or less as follows: High-powered parents worry that the economic opportunities for their children are shrinking. They see a degree from a top-tier school as one of the few ways to give their kids a jump on the competition. In order to secure this advantage, they will do pretty much anything, which means not just taking care of all the cooking and cleaning but also helping their children with math homework, hiring them S.A.T. tutors, and, if necessary, suing their high school. Marano, an editor-at-large at Psychology Today, tells about a high school in Washington State that required students to write an eight-page paper and present a ten-minute oral report before graduating. When one senior got a failing grade on his project, his parents hired a lawyer.

Today’s parents are not just “helicopter parents,” a former school principal complains to Marano. “They are a jet-powered turbo attack model.” Other educators gripe about “snowplow parents,” who try to clear every obstacle from their children’s paths. The products of all this hovering, meanwhile, worry that they may not be able to manage college in the absence of household help. According to research conducted by sociologists at Boston College, today’s incoming freshmen are less likely to be concerned about the rigors of higher education than “about how they will handle the logistics of everyday life.”

       One of the offshoots of the L.A. family study is a new book, “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century” (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology), which its authors—the anthropologists Jeanne Arnold, of U.C.L.A., Anthony Graesch, of Connecticut College, and Elinor Ochs—describe as a “visual ethnography of middle-class American households.” Lavishly illustrated with photographs (by Enzo Ragazzini) of the families’ houses and yards, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the crap-strewn core of American culture.

“After a few short years,” the text notes, many families amass more objects “than their houses can hold.” The result is garages given over to old furniture and unused sports equipment, home offices given over to boxes of stuff that haven’t yet been stuck in the garage, and, in one particularly jam-packed house, a shower stall given over to storing dirty laundry.

Children, according to “Life at Home,” are disproportionate generators of clutter: “Each new child in a household leads to a 30 percent increase in a family’s inventory of possessions during the preschool years alone.” Many of the kids’ rooms pictured are so crowded with clothes and toys, so many of which have been tossed on the floor, that there is no path to the bed. (One little girl’s room contains, by the authors’ count, two hundred and forty-eight dolls, including a hundred and sixty-five Beanie Babies.) The kids’ possessions, not to mention their dioramas and their T-ball trophies, spill out into other rooms, giving the houses what the authors call “a very child-centered look.”

When anthropologists study cultures like the Matsigenkas’, they tend to see patterns. The Matsigenka prize hard work and self-sufficiency. Their daily rituals, their child-rearing practices, and even their folktales reinforce these values, which have an obvious utility for subsistence farmers. Matsigenka stories often feature characters undone by laziness; kids who still don’t get the message are rubbed with an itch-inducing plant.

In contemporary American culture, the patterns are more elusive. What values do we convey by turning our homes into warehouses for dolls? By assigning our kids chores and then rewarding them when they screw up? By untying and then retying their shoes for them? It almost seems as if we’re actively trying to raise a nation of “adultescents.” And, perhaps without realizing it, we are.

As Melvin Konner, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Emory University, points out in “The Evolution of Childhood” (Belknap), one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is its “prolonged juvenile period.” Compared with other apes, humans are “altricial,” which is to say immature at birth. Chimpanzees, for instance, are born with brains half their adult size; the brains of human babies are only a third of their adult size. Chimps reach puberty shortly after they’re weaned; humans take another decade or so. No one knows when exactly in the process of hominid evolution juvenile development began to slow down, but even Homo ergaster, who evolved some 1.8 million years ago, seems to have enjoyed—if that’s the right word—a protracted childhood. It’s often argued by anthropologists that the drawn-out timetable is what made humans human in the first place. It’s the fact that we grow up slowly that makes acquiring language and building complicated social structures possible.

The same trend that appears in human prehistory shows up in history as well. The farther back you look, the faster kids grew up. In medieval Europe, children from seven on were initiated into adult work. Compulsory schooling, introduced in the nineteenth century, pushed back the age of maturity to sixteen or so. By the middle of the twentieth century, college graduation seemed, at least in this country, to be the new dividing line. Now, if Judd Apatow is to be trusted, it’s possible to close in on forty without coming of age.

Evolutionarily speaking, this added delay makes a certain amount of sense. In an increasingly complex and unstable world, it may be adaptive to put off maturity as long as possible. According to this way of thinking, staying forever young means always being ready for the next big thing (whatever that might be).

Or adultesence might be just the opposite: not evidence of progress but another sign of a generalized regression. Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why this should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids’ shoes. ♦

More by Elizabeth Kolbert:

The Case Against Kids: Is procreation immoral?

America’s Top Parent: What’s behind the “Tiger Mother” craze?

Unconventional Crude: Canada’s synthetic-fuels boom.

ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPH ABBREDERIS

The Maturation of Lane Kiffin

I have to admit that I have not always liked Lane Kiffin, but after watching the last five games of the 2011 season it was hard not to be.  Part of my perceived dislike for him came as a result of being the "next coach" after Pete Carroll, who I very much liked.  And while Lane Kiffin is more like a traditional football coach than Pete Carroll every will be, he is apparently is coming into his own.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8056179/lane-kiffin-history-usc-football

STEPHEN DUNN/GETTY IMAGES

The Trojan Prince

Examining USC's history of unorthodox head coaches and the maturation of Lane Kiffin

By Michael Weinreb on June 25, 2012

Before the golden age of USC football began, there was a scandal, a juicy little tale of ambition and betrayal straight out of a James Ellroy novel. On May 23, 1956, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney named Julius Miller Leavy invited reporters to a news conference: His alma mater, UCLA, had been rocked by pay-for-play allegations, banned from postseason play for three years, and fined $93,000, and now Leavy was going to rain hellfire on his crosstown rival in return. He had, he said, "documentary evidence" that USC had paid 60 players more than $70,000 over a two-year period. This led to further revelations of wrongdoing at other schools, to acrimony up and down the coast, to Leavy being hung in effigy on the USC campus. It facilitated the breakup of the Pacific Coast Conference, and brought on the formation of the Athletic Association of Western Universities, which would eventually become the conference we now know as the Pac-12.

By the time USC promoted a relatively anonymous 36-year-old assistant named John McKay to head coach in 1960,¹ the scandals had dissipated, but the school's football program was on shaky ground. USC hadn't won a consensus national championship in three decades, not since the era of coach Howard Harding Jones and the brief tenure of a swaggering tackle who still went by his given name of Marion Morrison. McKay, who managed to be both comedic² and aloof, installed the Power I formation, recruited some of the best and fastest African American players in Los Angeles (including running back Mike Garrett), and after two middling seasons won the first of four national titles. This was in 1962, and Student-Body Left/Student-Body Right — that enduring image of a Trojan running back standing upright, hands on knees, awaiting a pitch in the backfield — would become the defining meme of the defining West Coast football program. Fifty years later, as USC builds a $70 million athletic facility bearing McKay's name, one could argue that it still is. (If McKay hadn't left USC for the hapless expansion-era Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976 — a decision his son said he made largely for the money — he would be widely recognized as an iconic college football coach, up there with Bryant and Rockne. Instead, he's more often remembered for his gallows humor: When asked to comment on the Bucs' execution, he famously declared he was in favor of it.)

There was a dreamlike quality to watching USC games as a kid while a woolen blanket of snow coated our central Pennsylvania backyard: The sunshine, the Song Girls, Charles White and Marcus Allen sprinting toward the hashmarks out of the Power I, a former McKay assistant named John Robinson carrying on his predecessor's legacy. Those of us east of the Colorado River like to think we take our football more seriously than they take pretty much anything on the Left Coast, but according to a study by sociologist Patrick Adler, there are more NFL players from Los Angeles than any other metropolitan area, and while the South's influence is waning, the West Coast is the fastest-growing region for professional talent.³

I bring all this up because USC is on the brink of relevance again, because after a brief two-season hiatus due to a scandal weighted by five decades of inflation, the Trojans are near the top of the arbitrary preseason polls compiled by the glossy preview magazines that chewed up my summer vacations as a child. And once again, they're led by a young coach in his late 30s who tends to inspire skepticism. And I don't know if this is the dawn of another dreamlike golden age for the Trojans, but I know there are a lot of people back east who sincerely hope that it isn't.

The object of their scorn, of course, is Lane Kiffin, who in his 14 months as head coach at the University of Tennessee managed to drive a wedge through the entire Bible Belt. From the beginning of his tenure in Knoxville, Kiffin felt a need to live up to the contentious reputation that trailed him from his abbreviated tenure under Al Davis in Oakland; it was as if he deliberately cast himself as the smug McGinley-esque frat boy with the hot wife who specialized in artless put-downs. He insulted Nick Saban and dissed Steve Spurrier, and most notably, he engaged in a juvenile pissing match with Urban Meyer (then at Florida), clumsily condemning Meyer's recruiting tactics by inadvertently committing a recruiting violation himself. When he left for USC (where he'd been offensive coordinator under Pete Carroll), Tennessee students set fires in the street, literally scorching the earth in his wake.

But something's happened since Kiffin went back west; it's almost as if he's begun to grow into himself. He reportedly made up with Meyer, he's toned down the combativeness, and, according to ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, he had an especially revealing conversation with Steve Spurrier, in which Kiffin confessed he was trying to emulate the Head Ball Coach's loudmouth histrionics and the Head Ball Coach told him he had gone about it all wrong.

"He's really growing into the job," said J.K. McKay, John McKay's son, who played for his dad and is now a senior associate athletic director at USC. "That whole Tennessee thing seemed to me kind of overdone nationally."

Part of J.K. McKay's job is to keep Kiffin from appearing on SportsCenter for the wrong reasons, and so far, that's largely happened. The Trojans have built strong recruiting classes despite the NCAA restrictions on their numbers, and the fact that Matt Barkley chose to return to USC rather than enter the NFL draft means he must have developed some sort of rapport with his coach. "Lane's actually a pretty quiet guy," McKay told me. "He's also a pretty funny guy. He has a real dry sense of humor."

If that seems hard to believe, maybe it should be. Kiffin still hasn't proven much, but there is something about L.A. that seems to agree with him, in the same way it did with McKay and John Robinson and Pete Carroll before him. Maybe it takes a certain type of coach to succeed out there: McKay, the shy son of a West Virginia coal miner, never bought into the hoary coaching clichés, and his intensity was tempered by those goofy one-liners; Robinson was once described by the Los Angeles Times as having the "appearance and manner of a courtly, affable bank president"; and Carroll, freed from the AFC East rat race, became a hyper-cool swami⁴ who hung out in South Central in his spare time.

"They don't know themselves," Carroll told author J.R. Moehringer when asked what causes coaches to fail. "So they act in accordance with what they think they should be acting like, as opposed to finding out who they are so they can act directly in connection with the essence of who they are."

When USC first hired Kiffin, I didn't think he was capable of that sort of philosophical transformation. But now I wonder if he was merely imprisoned by youth, by geography, by a perception of who he should be rather than who he actually was. Now I wonder if the allure of Southern California is so powerful that it's capable of mellowing out anyone. Even Lane Kiffin.

This is why sports should be about developing character and learning life lessons and NOT about "winning".  Parents and fans need to realize this!

An Unimagined Success

by A MANLY GUEST CONTRIBUTOR on JUNE 22, 2012 · 21 COMMENTS

in A MAN'S LIFE

Editor’s note: This is guest post from Marcus Brotherton. It originally ran on Men Who Lead Well (www.marcusbrotherton.com).

How many times have we hoped for a specific type of success, only to have it elude us? We dream of being an Olympic sprinter, a prize-winning surgeon, or a writer of the great American novel.

But try as we might, the specific type of success we long for never comes.

Sgt. Joe Toye, one of the original Band of Brothers, fit this profile. The hardscrabble son of an Irish coalminer, Toye was a promising athlete, excelling at both boxing and football. But Toye’s father died when Toye was in 7th grade, and Toye needed to drop out of school, go to work, and help feed the rest of the family.

He would never become a professional athlete. That dream was dead.

When WWII hit, Toye volunteered for the elite paratroopers and became a squad leader, a go-to organizer who always got the job done. He dreamed of a long-term career in the military, and he was just the type of man the Army was looking for.

Whenever the company commander needed a volunteer, Toye was first on the list. Volunteering for these missions required extreme bravery, but when called, Toye never hesitated.

Once, his company was pinned down in ditches outside Neunen, Holland. Their British tank support was being annihilated. The commander needed to find out what he was up against. He looked around, spotted Toye, and said, “Joe, I need a live prisoner.” Wordlessly, Toye left his squad, crept into no-man’s land, and came back with a prisoner from the 107th Panzer Brigade.

Everything changed one wintery day in Bastogne. During a barrage of intense shelling, Toye was hit badly. He was evacuated to a hospital in London where his leg was amputated below the knee.

His military career was over. Another dream was dead.

After Toye came home, life was never the same. Toye was a big-hearted family man, but he also floundered in life. He drank too much. He fought. He struggled with nightmares from the war. He divorced and remarried. He drew some disability because of his missing leg, but not enough to support a family. He found work sharpening bits in a steel mine, where he stayed for more than 20 years until he retired.

Once, Toye remarked to his son that he didn’t feel like he had done much with his life. None of his dreams had ever come to pass.

Along the way, however, something unforeseen began to unfold.

Toye’s youngest son, Jonathan, was born with a severe birth defect. The son was mentally handicapped and couldn’t walk, talk, or feed himself. The boy’s condition hit Toye hard. There was no way a working family could care for the boy on a daily basis, so the son was placed in a home for special needs children, about an hour away from where the Toyes lived. Toye tried hard. He visited his son every chance he could.

After Toye retired from the steel mill, his handicapped son became everything. Each day, Toye spent hours with Jonathan, feeding him, cleaning his messes, talking with him, telling him he was proud of him.

Caring for his son became Toye’s life.

Jonathan wasn’t supposed to live much longer than childhood, but Jonathan had tough blood in him. Years passed. Toward the end, Toye’s goal became simply to outlive his son.

Jonathan died at age 32, three times longer than anyone thought he would live.

A year and a half after his son died, Joe Toye died too.

How strange: although we strive for a specific kind of success, it may never come. Instead, unexpected opportunities appear in our lives. Call these chances for unimagined greatness. Windows for living well.

“The point of life is not to just get by,” wrote St. Paul of Tarsus. “We want to live well, but our foremost efforts should be to help others live well.”

Using that criterion, I’d say Joe Toye was a tremendous success.

Physical Activity and Academic Performance

Here are two articles discussing the relationship between physical activity and academic performance.  Highlighting is mine.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/06/16/childhood-obesity-linked-to-poor-math-performance/40203.html

Childhood Obesity Linked to Poor Math Performance

By TRACI PEDERSEN Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on June 16, 2012

Childhood obesity affects math performance in school, as well as social skills and wellbeing, according to new research from the University of Missouri.

Researchers looked at data from over 6,000 children enrolled in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, which gathered information from children beginning in kindergarten and followed them through the fifth grade.

On five different occasions, parents gave feedback regarding family dynamics, and teachers also reported on the children’s social skills and emotional wellbeing. Researchers then administered academic tests to the children and measured their height and weight.

Results showed that children who were obese throughout the study period had lower math scores in the first through fifth grades than children who were not obese.

“Obesity that persists across the elementary school years has the potential to compromise several areas of children’s development, including their social and emotional wellbeing and academic performance,” said Sara Gable, associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study.

Not only did obesity affect math performance, but overweight children also reported feeling sadder, lonelier and more anxious than kids of more average weights. Researchers said this negative emotional state could be contributing to the poor math performances.

Although weight may indeed add to poor school performance, there is likely a variety of factors that also contribute to an obese child’s overall wellbeing, experts said.

“Obesity does not prevent kids from doing math, but obesity develops in families where there may be less oversight, less education, fewer resources,” said Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Center.

Although obesity has been tied to poor school performance in past research, this study looks at the connection between the timing of obesity onset and factors such as behavior, relationships and academic performance.

The research strives to fill in the blank space that connects the weight dot to the academic performance dot, said Katz.

Although it is hard to determine whether obesity actually affects cognition, “we certainly can say that obesity affects everything fromself-esteem to social standing to mood and even hormonal balance, so the likelihood that there would be a whole cascade of effects between weight and math test scores is very high,” said Katz.

The study is published in the journal Child Development.

Source:  University of Missouri

______________________________________________________________________________

http://www.jssm.org/vol11/n2/4/v11n2-4abst.php

JOURNAL OF SPORTS SCIENCE & MEDICINE

Research article

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION CLASSES ATTENDED BY KOREAN ADOLESCENT STUDENTS

Sang-Yeob Kim1 and Wi-Young So2

1Division of Physical Education, College of Education, Sungkyul University, Anyang-si, Kyounggi-do, Korea 2Department of Human Movement Science, Seoul Women's University, Seoul, Korea

Received 03 November 2011 Accepted 01 February 2012 Published 01 June 2012

© Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (2012) 11, 226 - 230

ABSTRACT

Increased physical activity (PA) is the relationship with improved cognitive and memory functions of the brain. The physical education (PE) classes held in school comprise a type of PA. However, there is no epidemiological evidence showing a relationship between school performance and the number of PE classes attended per week in adolescent students. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the number of PE classes attended per week is related with school performance in Korean adolescent students. In 2009, 75,066 adolescent students from middle school first grade to high school third grade participated in the 5th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey (KYRBWS-V) project. The relationship between school performance and the number of PE classes attended per week was assessed using multivariate logistic regression analysis after adjusting for covariate variables such as gender, age, body mass index, parents' education level, family's economic status, vigorous and moderate PA, and muscle strengthening exercises. The odds ratio (OR) for attending <3 PE classes per week and school performance was 1.125 for good school performance, 1.147 for average school performance, 1.146 for poor school performance, and 1.191 for very poor school performance, when compared to very good school performance. It was concluded that attending >3 PE classes per week was positively correlated with improved school performance and that attending <3 PE classes per week was negatively correlated with school performance in Korean adolescent students. Key words: Adolescent, Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey, physical education classes, school performance.

PDF (198KB) ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSION AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY REFERENCES (in a separate window) KEY POINTS TABLE 1 TABLE 2

INTRODUCTION
Regular physical activity (PA) improves the health of many bodily systems, including the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems (Di Stasi et al., 2010; Leung et al., 2008), whereas factors such as physical inactivity lead to a sedentary lifestyle that in turn leads to increased weight (Canoy and Bundred, 2011; Park et al., 2004; Thomas and Albert, 2002) and adverse health effects such as musculoskeletal disorders, cardiac diseases, hypertension, stroke, type II diabetes, obesity, some types of cancers, and metabolic syndrome (Eckel et al., 2005; World Health Organization, 2011). Therefore, increasing PA is considered as an important approach for preventing adult diseases. Many studies have reported that increasing PA is beneficial for improving health outcomes (Baker et al., 2011; Daniels et al., 2005; Keteyian, 2011). Recently, several studies have reported that increased PA is associated with improved cognitive and memory functions of the brain (Flöel et al., 2010; Ploughman, 2008). The precise mechanisms underlying this association are unclear and inadequately understood. However, there are 3 hypotheses that can explain how PA affects brain function. The first hypothesis is that PA increases oxygen saturation and angiogenesis in the brain areas essential for performing tasks (Kleim et al., 2002; Kramer et al., 1999). The second hypothesis is that PA also increases the activity of brain neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine, thereby facilitating information processing (Kubesch et al., 2003; McMorris et al., 2008; Winter et al., 2007). The third hypothesis is that PA upregulates neurotrophins such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, insulin-like growth factor-I, and basic fibroblast growth factor. These neurotrophins support neuronal survival and differentiation in the developing brain (Schinder and Poo, 2000). These studies indicated that because PA is related to brain function, increasing PA may improve school performance and academic achievements in adolescent students. However, although PA has been shown to increase brain function and some practical evidence exists on the association between PA and academic performance (Sibley and Etnier, 2003), there is no epidemiological evidence supporting this finding in the literature on adolescent students. Furthermore, although a physical education (PE) class represents a type of PA in school, there is no epidemiological evidence showing that such classes are beneficial for adolescent students. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the number of PE classes attended per week is related to school performance in Korean adolescent students. The results will be used to further assess the differences in the school performance of Korean adolescent students according to the frequency of PE classes per week and will then be used to recommend increased PA as an approach for enhancing school performance and achievements.	PDF (198KB) ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSION AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY REFERENCES (in a separate window) KEY POINTS TABLE 1 TABLE 2

METHODS
Participants The 5th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey (KYRBWS-V) was conducted in 2009 as a cross-sectional epidemiological study with a complex sample design that included multistage sampling, clustering, and stratification. The KYRBWS-V consisted of questions about PA based on the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) of the World Health Organization (Craig et al., 2003). It was a national school-based survey conducted by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDCP) to determine the prevalence of health risk behavior in Korean adolescent students (Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). A representative sample of students from middle school first to high school third (age, 13-18 years) was selected; this sample included 76,937 students from 24,000 classrooms (secondary sampling units) of 800 middle and high schools (primary sampling units) and from 192 strata that were identified using the stratified multistage cluster sampling method. After sample determination, classroom teachers assigned each participating student a unique identification number that was used by the students to access the survey web page. On the web page, the students were first asked about their willingness to participate in the survey. Students who were willing to participate in the survey were asked to answer a self-administered questionnaire, which they completed anonymously in school. Students who did not wish to participate were not asked to answer the questionnaire. Furthermore, because private information was not collected by the KYRBWS-V, ethical approval was not required for this study. All the details pertaining to data collection procedures have been reported by the KCDCP (Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010), and the reliability and validity of the data obtained using the questionnaire have been evaluated in other studies (Bae et al.,2010a; 2010b). The present study obtained data from the KYRBWS-V to evaluate the association between the number of PE classes attended per week and school performance, taking into consideration potential covariate variables such as gender, age, body mass index (BMI), parents' education level, family's economic status, vigorous and moderate PA, and muscle strengthening exercises. Thus, 75,066 adolescent students (39,612 boys and 35,454 girls) participated in the study, and the response rate was 97.6%. The characteristics of the subjects are shown in Table 1. Independent variables To determine the number of PE classes attended per week by all the subjects, the following question was asked in the KYRBWS-V survey: "(Q1) How many PE classes do you attend per week in school?," with the following response options: (1) no PE class, (2) once per week, (3) twice per week, and (4) >3 times per week. Next, these responses were classified into the following 2 groups for multivariate logistic regression analyses: (1) >3 PE classes per week and (2) <3 PE classes per week. Dependent variables Self-reported school performances were evaluated for each adolescent student by asking 1 question: "(Q2) In the past 12 months, how has your average school performance been?" The response options were (1) very good, (2) good, (3) average, (4) poor, and (5) very poor. Covariate variables The covariate variables were as follows: 1. Gender: The 2 response options were (1) male and (2) female. 2. Age: Data pertaining to the ages of the students, as defined by the KYRBWS-V, were used without any modifications. 3. BMI: The students were asked to self-record their height and weight. BMI (kg/m2) was calculated from the data recorded by each student. 4. Parents' education level: The 4 response options were (1) unknown, (2) middle school or lower, (3) high school and (4) college or higher. 5. Family's economic status: The 5 responses ranged from (1) very rich, (2) rich, (3) average, (4) poor, and (5) very poor. 6. Frequency of vigorous PAs such as digging, aerobics, heavy lifting, or fast cycling during the week: The 6 responses ranged from (1) no, (2) once per week, (3) twice per week, (4) thrice per week, (5) 4 times per week, and (6) over 5 times per week. 7. Frequency of moderate PAs such as bicycling at a regular pace, carrying light loads, or playing doubles tennis during the week: The 6 responses ranged from (1) no, (2) once per week, (3) twice per week, (4) thrice per week, (5) 4 times per week, and (6) over 5 times per week. 8. Frequency of muscle strengthening exercises such as sit-ups, push-ups, and weight lifting or weight training during the week: The 6 responses ranged from (1) no, (2) once per week, (3) twice per week, (4) thrice per week, (5) 4 times per week, and (6) over 5 times per week. Statistical analysis All the results are presented in terms of mean ± standard deviation values. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to determine whether the number of PE classes attended per week was related to school performance in the participants of this study, after adjusting for the covariate variables. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05, and all the analyses were performed using SPSS ver. 12.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA).	PDF (198KB) ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSION AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY REFERENCES (in a separate window) KEY POINTS TABLE 1 TABLE 2

RESULTS
The results of the multivariate logistic regression analyses of school performance for the groups of Korean adolescents participating in >3 and <3 PE classes per week are shown inTable 2. This table compares the information about the Korean adolescents who attended <3 PE classes per week to that of Korean adolescents who attended >3 PE classes per week, according to school performances that ranged from (1) very good to (5) very poor after adjusting for covariate variables such as gender, age, BMI, parents' education level, family's economic status, vigorous and moderate PA, and muscle strengthening exercises. Results show that for students attending <3 PE classes per week, good school performance increased by 12.5%, average school performance increased by 14.7%, poor school performance increased by 14.6%, and very poor school performance increased by 19.1% as compared to very good school performance.

DISCUSSION
The aim of this study is to investigate the association between school performance and attending <3 PE classes per week in Korean adolescents. The results of our study show that attending <3 PE classes per week was associated with poor school performance in Korean adolescent students, despite adjusting for school performance-related covariate variables. Several cross-sectional studies have shown that less PA is associated with poor cognitive function and memory functions of the brain (Flöel et al., 2010; Ploughman, 2008). Thus, the results of our epidemiological study indicate that PE classes represent PA, which may increase the cognitive and memory functions of the brain. Furthermore, they indicate that increasing the frequency of PE classes positively affects school performance in Korean adolescent students. School performance may be highly associated with the reading, speaking, writing, and understanding levels of individuals, which in turn are related to brain activities and functioning. Here, our cross-sectional study showed that school performance was associated with the frequency of attending PE classes. Limitations and future research This study has several limitations. First, the KYRBWS-V was conducted using online methods; consequently, the parents' education level and the family's economic status were recorded by the students themselves, and these data may therefore be inaccurate. Second, this study was a cross-sectional epidemiology study. Therefore, we could not elucidate the cause-and-effect relationship but could only assess the interrelationship between school performance and the frequency of attending PE classes. However, because our study sample comprised 75,066 students from all parts of Korea and was thus highly representative of the Korean adolescent population, the relationship between school performance and the number of PE classes attended per week could be generalized to all Korean adolescents. However, in the future, better-designed studies should be performed to determine the extent to which these variables, including the covariate variables, affect the school performance of Korean adolescents.	PDF (198KB) ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSION AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY REFERENCES (in a separate window) KEY POINTS TABLE 1 TABLE 2

CONCLUSION
It was concluded that in Korean adolescents, attending >3 PE classes per week was positively correlated with school performance; in contrast, attending <3 PE classes per week was negatively correlated with school performance.

KEY POINTS
Korean adolescents, attending >3 PE classes per week was positively correlated with school performance. Korean adolescents, attending <3 PE classes per week was negatively correlated with school performance.

AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY
Sang-Yeob KIM Employment: Adjunct Professor, Division of Physical Education, College of Education, Sungkyul University Degree: PhD E-mail: 100sprinter@hanmail.net