"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"
"Look me in the eye and tell me where you've been."
"Don't look away when I'm talking to you!"

Seems like we spend an awful lot of time telling kids what to do with their eyes...and most of the time, we're just getting in the way of good communication.

This adult insistence on steady eye contact -- which seems to have something to do with respect, something to do with wanting a guarantee we're being listened to, and something to do with ideas about how people pay attention -- may be causing kids to get flustered, lose their train of thought, and give wrong answers more often.

An experiment carried out by researchers in England, working with 20 five-year-old children, revealed that children who were instructed to look away from a questioner while considering their answer gave the correct answer 72 percent of the time. Children who weren't told to look away only answered correctly half the time. Other work by the same researchers suggests that by age 8, many children will automatically turn their gaze away from the human face while trying to concentrate, and that being able to do so was important to their thought process.

The researchers at Stirling University believe that it may be a matter of what my kids like to call "TMI", for "too much information." Human faces are so loaded with meaning that looking at them seems to be just too much for a brain hard at work on another task.

I find it to be nice scientific support for my own experience, which is that my kids come out with their best, weirdest ideas, and tell me the most interesting stuff, when we are driving around in the car, side by side, with eye contact not just rare but downright dangerous. It seems to get the wheels spinning and the sparks flying.

So, a new phrase for parents and teachers to practice: "Don't stop staring into space."