Talk to Me Baby

by Lisa Hansel
April 11th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum, Literacy, Parents, Preschool | 2 Comments »

“Annette, you make sure you talk to that baby.” Annette is my mother, and the quote is from my step-grandmother, Eva. Neither one had ever heard of any language or literacy research, but they shared essential wisdom about how to raise children. My mother knew the importance not just of talking to her children, but of reading aloud to them. Having educated herself by reading the canon, she also had good taste in books.

The first book I can distinctly recall her reading to me was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I was six and we had recently moved. I don’t know how many weeks of bedtime reading it took, but I know that by the end I did not find my new room so scary. If you’re wondering: no, I did not understand every scene in the book. But that did not matter; I had a wonderful (if partially made up) storyline running in my mind and I enjoyed the time snuggled up to mom. And yes, there were hundreds of children’s books in the house—but, for the most part, I had to read them to myself.

All that Little Women did for me came to mind as I eagerly read Tina Rosenberg’s piece on yesterday’s New York Times Opinionater. She provides a must-read look at a new program designed to minimize the achievement gap between poor and privileged children. Called Providence Talks, it sounds very promising:

The city plans to begin enrolling families in January, 2014, and hopes to eventually reach about 2,000 new families each year, said Mayor Angel Taveras. It will most likely work with proven home-visitation programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership. The visitors will show poor families with very young children how to use the recorders, and ask them to record one 16-hour day each month.

Every month they will return to share information about the results and specific strategies for talking more: how do you tell your baby about your day? What’s the best way to read to your toddler? They will also talk about community resources, like read-aloud day at the library. And they will work with the family to set goals for next month. The city also hopes to recruit some of the mothers and fathers as peer educators.

Providence Talks is designed to prevent the 30-million word gap identified by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in their seminal study:

Our ambition was to record “everything” that went on in children’s homes—everything that was done by the children, to them, and around them…. We decided to start when the children were 7-9 months old so we would have time for the families to adapt to observation before the children actually began talking. We followed the children until they turned three years old…. Our final sample consisted of 42 families who remained in the study from beginning to end. From each of these families, we have almost 2 1/2 years or more of sequential monthly hour-long observations. On the basis of occupation, 13 of the families were upper socioeconomic status (SES), 10 were middle SES, 13 were lower SES, and six were on welfare.

After six years of transcribing and analyzing the results, they found astounding differences in toddlers’ opportunities to learn language. “Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour).” By the end of the study, the children in professional families had larger recorded vocabularies than the parents in the families on welfare (1,116 vs. 974 different words). Not surprisingly, the recorded vocabularies of the children in professional families were more than double that of the children in families on welfare (1,116 vs. 525 different words).

Even if these children ended up in equally high-quality preschools (which we know they don’t), the children with small vocabularies would struggle to understand their teachers, while their peers with large vocabularies would not only understand their teachers, but converse with and question them.

As E. D. Hirsch has explained, vocabulary grows bit by bit, through multiple exposures to words in multiple contexts. The more words you know, the more context you grasp and the more quickly you learn new words. The larger your early childhood vocabulary, the easier your path to college or a good career.

Those of us raised in language-rich homes were born on third—and more of us should realize that we did not hit a triple. Far too often, we mistake the lack of opportunity to learn for lack of ability to learn. The Matthew Effect is real—the more you know, the faster you learn. But instead of focusing on the power of today’s learning to accelerate tomorrow’s learning, when we encounter a “slow” child we too often think that slowness is immutable. Richard Nisbett, a prominent cognitive scientist, has explained that learning makes you smarter. His book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count is well worth reading, but here’s a recent article he wrote that covers a lot of the same ground.

Appreciating that research, and my own good fortune (thanks mom!), I have high hopes for Providence Talks. But I have to say that it really must be followed by language-rich, knowledge-building preschool and K – 12 experiences. Children in wealthy families keep learning every day at school and at home, and their college-educated parents have the capacity to help with homework, construct enriching summer activities, buy hundreds of books and educational games, etc. If schools are to build on the strong start created by Providence Talks, they will have to be far more purposeful and organized in their efforts to increase students’ vocabularies, knowledge, and skills—especially in the early grades.

 

Teaching to CCSS: Making Bricks Without Straw?

by Robert Pondiscio
October 17th, 2012

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Literacy, Parents | 23 Comments »

The following post originally appeared on Schoolbook, the education blog of WNYC, New York City’s public radio station.  It appears here with the permission of the author.  – rp

Bricks Without Straw
By Matthew Levey

A decade into the education reform movement in New York, we have doubled our school budget to $24 billion. We’ve focused on teacher quality, and how to measure it. We’ve created many new, often smaller, schools.  Unfortunately our students’ scores on the key tests like the SAT and NAEP haven’t budged.

Frustrated reformers have pinned their hopes on new Common Core State Standards (CCSS ) that make explicit what a college-ready student should be able to do in math, reading and writing. The CCSS say content matters, but the authors didn’t dictate which content to teach or how to deliver it.

Under CCSS, third graders “develop an understanding of fractions, beginning with unit fractions” but the CCSS do not say how. Eighth graders should be able to “produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience” but the CCSS don’t pick the topic.

How we implement the CCSS will determine whether we improve student outcomes or not.. What I have observed so far, as a parent of three children in public schools and the husband of a teacher, suggests our approach to implementing the CCSS is not off to a great start. In selecting content and teaching children how to respond thoughtfully to it, we seem to think whatever we were doing before was good enough to meet the new standards.  Our schools, and our teachers, need to invest meaningfully in training and curriculum redesign; on the front lines that doesn’t appear to be happening.

Where’s the Content?

Non-fiction matters more than ever before, according to the CCSS. So how does my tested-above-proficient 8th grader come to believe that the Confederacy was winning the Civil War prior to the Battle of Gettysburg?  Perhaps it starts with history textbook with too many empty graphics, organized around themes rather than time. Maybe it starts by asking them to write about the battle before they were assigned the right chapters in the book? If content is king children don’t seem to be getting enough.

When my 5th grader’s teacher told us about the social studies curriculum, she practically apologized that she had to teach about government for two months, “because the kids find it boring.” The good news, she said, was that she too was learning a lot about the topic as she prepared her lessons. When a parent asked whether the current election campaign would be incorporated into the unit, the teacher said, “Oh that’s a good idea, maybe we could have them make ads for a candidate.”

Structure Matters too

Getting the content right is just part of the challenge.  Our children also need much more explicit instruction in how to put that content in context.

My daughter’s first written assignment this year was to imagine herself as a delegate in 1787, and explain whether she would vote for the Constitution if the Bill or Rights wasn’t included. Since my daughter hadn’t learned anything about the small states vs. big states debate, or any of the other big ideas that roiled Philadelphia that summer, all she could express was her feelings.  Like a true New York City resident, she didn’t feel the 2nd amendment made a lot of sense, but it was hard to say why.

Asked to write about the inevitability (or not) of the Civil War, my son struggled.  He knew about slavery and industrialization, but years of the Teacher’s College writing model used in our local schools left him ill-prepared to organize his knowledge effectively. Judith Hochman, whose program is credited, in part, for helping save New Dorp High School correctly observes that  “much writing instruction prior to ninth grade … is based around journals, free writing, memoirs, poems and fiction.”

The result, Hochman notes, is that students don’t know “how to communicate effectively to an audience. Students are given little or no preparation for the types of expository writing required in high school, college, and the workplace.”

Following her advice I pushed my son to think about using words like “although,” “unless” and ‘if” to build more complex thoughts. After a few hours of work, he turned to me and asked, “Why don’t they teach this in my school?”

In Exodus, when the Israelites asked to leave Egypt, Pharaoh forced them to make the same quantity of bricks, but without straw.  This ancient story has become a metaphor for an absurdly hard task.

Parents rightly expect our schools will improve if we use higher standards. But to do so, district and school leaders must look closely at the content they’ve selected and how it is delivered. Repurposing our existing approach and declaring it ‘new and improved’ simply will not do. It’s like asking schools to make bricks without straw, and that’s a recipe for trouble.  Just ask the Pharaoh.

Matthew Levey is the father of three New York City public school students. He is the co-founder of Bright Track, an educational advisory service, and a former Community Education Council president.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

by Robert Pondiscio
May 7th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 102 Comments »

“As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students,” writes Scott Joftus in Education Next. “As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.”

“Over more than 20 years in the field of education—including two with Teach For America—I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father.”

Joftus’s wonk side believes “student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds.”  However, as a Dad, he admits to getting angry when a troubled kindergartener disrupts his daughter’s class and forces the “talented, but inexperienced” teacher to spend more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

“I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.”

Commenters on the Ed Next blog offer both praise and criticism for Joftus.  “Teachers have been fighting policy wonks who have been destroying the happy learning environment for decades,” writes one.  “But you don’t listen, it is only when it becomes personal that you reconsider your opinions and admit the possibility that teachers have been right all along.”  “Had you guys listened twenty years ago, and respected our wisdom on safe and orderly schools, this educational civil war would not have had to happen,” observes veteran teacher and ed blogger John Thompson.

Rocketship schools CEO John Danner admits to similar cognitive dissonance when sending his kids to school.  “However, I would challenge you as your kids grow to think more about how those skills jibe with rigor,” he writes. “Rigor is actually a form of compassion. A teacher who expects a lot of their students prevents them from feeling the frustration your children feel now, but much later in their school career.  The real problem you are seeing is that your child’s teacher has high expectations but doesn’t understand how to differentiate.

Loftus’ tale serves to illustrate how regrettably wide the gulf can be between policy ideals and classroom realities.  The policies Loftus has worked to support–standards, improved teacher quality, enhanced learning time for strugglers, et al. –  are laudable, but risk melting into insignificance in the face of teachers overwhelmed with a critical mass of disruptive children in her room.  I don’t have any data on this, but I suspect that far fewer parents than wonks tend to lay the problem of learning time lost to disruption at the feet of teachers.  It is easy to say, as Danner does “differentiate.”  It is difficult, and always will be, to expect every teacher in every classroom to have the training, expertise and experience to handle every challenge offered up by 25 free agents in their classrooms every day.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Love a Book? Don’t Tell Your Kids!

by Robert Pondiscio
May 3rd, 2012

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Posted in Parents, Teaching | 8 Comments »

When you were a kid, did you ever read a book that changed your life?  Well, don’t tell your kids if you want it to have the same effect on them. “Remember how a parental recommendation was the kiss of death when you were a kid?” asks legendary children’s author Judy Blume. “That hasn’t changed — no matter how well-deserved the kudos are.”

Blume made the comment at the recent LA Times Festival of Books.  I’m mightily inclined to agree.  One of my teaching pet peeves has always been the tendency to wax rhapsodic over books and make our kids feel that they are somehow missing out–if not outright defective–if they aren’t as enraptured by a well-loved book as we are.  In a world in which kids can immerse themselves in “Call of Duty” and “Halo,” telling them “reading is magical” like telling them they should love spinach.  Don’t tell them. Show them.  Class readalouds of a compelling book have probably done more to spread the notion that reading is enjoyable than any earnest talk about the power of books to take us on journeys in our minds.

Other bits of advice on engaging readers from Blume, per the Huffington Post.

“As great as you think those nostalgic old book covers are, get your kids the new editions. The covers will draw them in. They want the new stuff.”

“Before you give your child the beloved book, leave it lying around the house, preferably on your nightstand. Then, when your daughter asks about the book, tell her that you picked it up for her, but now you’re not sure she’s old enough for it.”

“Try not to be judgmental of what your child is reading and don’t censor their book selection.”

Blume “hates it when books list what age reader the book is for.” She remembers pulling an illustrated copy of Lysistrata off the shelves when she was about 12, notes HuffPo. “She was very curious about the adult world and books gave her a look into that world.”

In an unrelated post, Dan Willingham notes that teachers are avid readers who “love books not only for the purpose of reading them, but as physical objects.”  He links to a section of Reddit called BookPorn.  Amazing pictures.  Enjoy.  But don’t tell the kids.

Mères Tigre? Non!

by Robert Pondiscio
February 5th, 2012

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Posted in Parents | 12 Comments »

Expat mom Pamela Druckerman wondered why French children seem so much better behaved than their American counterparts.  In a Wall Street Journal essay, she credits French parenting techniques, which she says are marked by an “an easy, calm authority with their children.”  French children don’t run off, talk back or engage in prolonged negotiations with their parents, she notes.  Like Americans, French parents talk to their kids, read to them, take them to sports, music lessons and museums.  But helicopter parenting?  Non!  Says Druckerman:

“The French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. ‘For me, the evenings are for the parents,’ one Parisian mother told me. ‘My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.’ French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.”

How do they get their children to behave?  When she asked French parents how they disciplined their children, Druckerman found they were often nonplussed.

“’Ah, you mean how do we educate them?’ they asked. ‘Discipline,’ I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas ‘educating’ (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.”

An essential part of this education, “is the simple act of learning how to wait,” writes Druckerman.  And it explains, in her view, why French babies sleep through the night while toddlers sit quietly in French restaurants as their parents eat dinner. Unlike American kids who snack all day, French kids have three meals a day and one snack around 4 pm, according to Druckeman.

“American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.”

Druckerman is painting with a pretty broad brush here in her characterization of American and (one assumes) French parenting practices.  Indeed, Druckerman’s observation that “middle-class America has a parenting problem” effectively translates to “affluent America has a parenting problem.”  A more authoritative brand of parenting never went out of style in many U.S. families.  Druckerman describes her “strategy” of finishing restaurant meals quickly to keep her daughter from being “kicked by a waiter or lost at sea” after refusing to sit still in her high chair.  “We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table,” she writes.  No doubt there are many families with a very different “strategy” for dealing with children who can’t behave themselves in restaurants.  It’s called “staying home.”

I’d like to see some data before I conclude that all American parents are Velveeta-eating surrender monkeys who cater to their children’s every whim.  But this is to quibble.  Druckerman’s observations are from her upcoming book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. I suspect that like last year’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, it will set American tongues to wagging anew over how we raise our children.

The Quality of Homework is Not Weighed

by Robert Pondiscio
September 12th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 27 Comments »

The perennial debate over whether U.S. students get too much homework or too little misses the point. The question is not quantity, but the quality of the assignments, says science writer Annie Murphy Paul. Writing in the New York Times, Paul says what should matter is how effectively homework assignments advance learning. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists “have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns,” she writes. “They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.”

“But the innovations have not yet been applied to homework. Mind, Brain and Education methods may seem unfamiliar and even counterintuitive, but they are simple to understand and easy to carry out. And after-school assignments are ripe for the kind of improvements the new science offers.”

Paul offers several examples. As its name implies, “spaced repetition” means exposing students to the same material in shorter sessions over a longer period of time. “Instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next,” she writes, “students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.”

Another technique, “retrieval practice,” suggests using tests “not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it.”

“We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.”

According to Paul one experiment showed that students using retrieval practice remembered 80% of the vocabulary words they studied, compared to one-third for those using conventional methods. She also describes a technique called “interleaving” which mixes up different kinds of situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. “When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly,” observes Paul. Each of these concepts, she concludes, are untapped opportunities to improve student achievement.

Paul’s article is unlikely to be persuasive to anti-homework dead-enders. But she offers a fresh way of considering one of education’s thorniest debates. It’s a must-read for teachers and parents. Paul herself is someone to watch. She is at work on a book titled Brilliant: The New Science of Learning. More importantly she’s proving to be a savvy chronicler of cognitive science and its lessons for educators–of critical importance in a field where “brain-based” is tossed around by hucksters as casually as “new and improved.”

Guest Post: Politics Driving Math Classes

by Robert Pondiscio
September 5th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Today’s post is by Laurie H. Rogers, a member of the executive committee for Where’s the Math? and author of “Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do About It.”  She blogs at Betrayed (http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/) where this post also appears.

Several days ago, someone sent me an article on “teaching math for social justice.” I actually hit my desk while reading it, narrowly missing the cat. I shouldn’t read things like that first thing in the morning. It raises my blood pressure and gets the next 12 hours off to a bad start.

In the article, teaching math for social justice isn’t about math or justice; it’s about pursuing a narrow political agenda in the classroom, through the children. Math is relegated to the wings, used as a vehicle through which the agenda is delivered.

The article was in a 2010 special edition of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics’ Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (JRME). This issue is dedicated to “equity” in math instruction, “with a focus on power and identity.” After years of advocacy, I shouldn’t be surprised by what comes out of the NCTM, but this special edition still was a cold shock.

The NCTM, you’ll recall, is responsible for the current incarnation of “fuzzy” math, born in the depths of hell in the 1980s. Many NCTM presidents and officers have their name on, and fingers in, today’s “reform” math curricula (including the curricula still sucking the lifeblood out of children in Spokane). Unhappily for this author, some now are involved in federal initiatives related to the Common Core State Standards and assessment consortia.

After decades of abject failure of the fuzzy approach, you’d think the NCTM would reject anything that further detracts from learning math. Instead, this trend to teach math through “equity and social justice” is gathering steam, fostered by social activists, self-interested groups like the NCTM – and well-meaning people who don’t realize the intent. For social activists, the agenda isn’t about “equity of opportunity” or justice under the law. It’s political, sociological activism, designed to move students in a specific political direction based on a particular world view. This activism, masquerading as math, is inappropriate and unhelpful. Read the rest of this entry »

Weary Tiger, Hidden Dilemma

by Robert Pondiscio
August 24th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents | 5 Comments »

Samantha Bee is on vacation with her three children, and she’s exhausted.  The Daily Show correspondent writes in the Wall Street Journal that she is a “tiger mother” to her three children, but the kind of tiger “who lays there helplessly in the sun as her tiger babies climb all over her, tugging on her fur and generally having their way with her.”  A self-described child of the ‘70s, Bee remembers spending her summers in front of the TV and wandering around aimlessly.  “Nobody cared if I read. Nobody cared if I wore sunscreen, or pants. I was like a house cat; my parents barely even knew if I was still living with them or whether I had moved in with the old lady down the street who would put out a bowl of food for me,” she writes.

“Thus, this emphasis on summer enrichment activities and exercise and fresh air and learning today feels unfamiliar to me. Whatever happened to letting kids’ IQs backslide for three months, all the way back to March? I can’t be the only one who wants to sit on a lawn chair parked in a kiddie pool all day while my children gently splash me with cool water, can I? I mean, isn’t it good for the brain to “cocoon” or something, to spin itself into some kind of intellectual chrysalis—to “hibernate” for a few months so that it can get hungry again and mate in the fall? That is a proven fact from a scientific study that I just conducted in my brain.”

Bee’s humorous piece is not intended to be a commentary on education, but the reader comments on the Journal’s site read like Meg Ryan’s deli scene in When Harry Met Sally (“Oh, yes…Yes!…Yes!!”) Clearly there are a lot of parents out there who, like Bee, have little interest in turning concerted cultivation into a blood sport.

The piece, and the chorus of tired Tiger Moms shouting their agreement, present a bit of a dilemma for those of us worried about low-income kids, low student achievement, and the general plight of academic have-nots.  For Bee’s kids, lying around all summer is not the cognitive equivalent of Malik and Jose lying around their apartment in the South Bronx.  Bee’s kids have literate, verbal parents, who stimulate their kids just by talking to them, and a steady level of interaction with educated adults.  They’re not even lying around.  They experience different environments (two weeks in the country, farmer’s markets, the lake) and probably spend a lot of time engaging in self-directed creative play with other kids.  They run around with friends outside and probably, when bored, end up inside watching Animal Planet or Arthur on PBS Kids.  It’s highly unlikely Bee is letting them hang out playing Mortal Kombat all day.  Her piece notwithstanding, the standards of even laissez faire middle class parenting make it equally unlikely that she’s going to completely disregard their health and nutrition.  The Bee kids in short, are growing up in a well-resourced, culturally rich and literate community among similarly literate kids and verbal, well-educated adults.  They practically absorb cognitive benefits through their pores. 

Tiger Mothers and Helicopter Parents loom large in the public imagination, and there can be little doubt that standards of middle class parenting have become far more aggressive since the 1970s.  But I suspect that most parents, consciously or unconsciously, do the cost-benefit analysis that Bee’s piece implies.  “My childhood summer vacations were spent languishing in front of the TV watching Phil Donahue and eating Boo Berry until my skin turned purple. Nobody cared if I read,” she writes, without completing the thought:  And I turned out just fine.  The upside of all the additional enrichment she lampoons is unclear, and (many parents surely suspect) not even unambiguously positive.  “OK,” you might think, “My kid isn’t a piano prodigy and it would be cool if she were doing science camp at MIT at age 10.  But she seems happy enough.  She’s well-rounded, interested in different things and gets along with other kids. And she’s still doing pretty well in school. That’s probably enough.”

And it almost certainly is enough for Bee’s kids and many, many others.  They may not end up running Google or winning the Intel Science talent search, but you could safely bet real money they end up doing just fine, thanks.  Cognitively speaking, they’re already on third base.

Summer slump?  Low educational productivity?  Year round schooling?  Forget it.  Other nations may be outeducating us, sending their children to school for 200+ days every year, but I suspect it will never happen here.  Affluent parents will never accept it.  The imperative of economic competitiveness is a non-starter among the parents of those who were born economically competitive.

The Science of Tiger Moms

by Robert Pondiscio
January 19th, 2011

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Posted in Parents | 24 Comments »

Had enough of tiger mothers yet?  Yale professor Amy Chua’s new book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which unapologetically promotes an aggressive and restrictive, putatively Asian style of child-rearing, has struck a nerve and prompted an electric response–from praise to condemnation.  One blogger insists “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy.”  Chua’s daughter says her mom’s not really so bad.  The Times’ David Brooks says Chua’s not bad enough. 

Fine, but what does the evidence say?  Would our children be better off with nation of tiger moms?  Laurence Steinberg says there is scientific evidence to back up some of what Chua’s promoting as good parenting.  “Kids need limits and structure, and it’s good for parents to have high expectations for them,” says the noted Temple University developmental psychologist.  “If you want your kids to do well in school, you want to do things like getting involved in their schooling, having expectations of success and praising them when they do well, he says in an interview with Scientific American.

“On the other hand, the downside to what she is advocating, if I understand her correctly, is that if parenting becomes too authoritarian—and by that I mean overly restrictive, overly punitive, squelching any attempt by the child at independence or autonomy—those parenting practices have been shown to be related to elevated anxiety, depression and psychosomatic problems. Kids raised in those circumstances are less self-assured and socially poised, and more compliant.”

Brooks, however, suggests Chua coddled her kids.

“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”

He’s kidding.  At least I think he’s kidding.

Chua says her Tiger mom parenting style was a key to her daughter’s academic success.  Steinberg is skeptical.  “It seems hardly a surprise to me that the children of two Yale law professors did well in school, and one might ask if that would have happened however they were raised,” he notes.  “For her to claim that her children turned out the way they did because of the way they were raised seemed like a stretch.”

Some of Chua’s extreme parenting tales have prompted revulsion from non-Tiger moms: she once called her daughter “garbage” for being disrespectful; she threatened to burn her stuffed animals if she failed to perform a piano piece perfectly; she rejected a birthday card because it wasn’t good enough.  “There’s no evidence that belittling or demeaning children in an insulting way is good for them,” Steinberg says.  “There are certainly ways to criticize and shape children’s behavior that is not that harsh or punitive.”

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, Chua’s daughter, says she wasn’t scarred for life.  “Maybe if I had poured my heart into it, I would have been upset. But let’s face it: The card was feeble, and I was busted,” she writes in the New York Post. “It took me 30 seconds; I didn’t even sharpen the pencil. That’s why, when you rejected it, I didn’t feel you were rejecting me. If I actually tried my best at something, you’d never throw it back in my face.

On the other hand, Steinberg shares Chua’s disdain for not cultivating a false sense of self-esteem. “I’m not aligned with parents who think that no matter what children do, it’s wonderful. I think kids should be praised for genuine accomplishment,” he notes.  Is tiger mothering here to stay? 

“Parenting fads and fashions wax and wane in their popularity. There was a time when this kind of advice would have been very popular and not seen as controversial at all. Before World War II you had strict, regimented parenting recommended, and then there was a movement toward more indulgent parenting in the 1950s and ’60s. The pendulum swings back and forth.”

Meanwhile “tiger mom” seems destined to become a synonym for authoritarian, no-nonsense parenting.  Look for it to join “app,” “friending,” “shovel-ready” and “staycation” as permanent features of the language.

Growing Up Gadgety

by Robert Pondiscio
November 22nd, 2010

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice, Parents, Students, Teaching | 12 Comments »

Is prolonged, focused attention a 21st Century skill? 

“Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters,” notes the New York Times.  ”But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.”

“Growing Up Digital, Wired For Distraction,” a major Times thumbsucker, is long enough to challenge the attention span not just of teens but Trappist monks.  But it’s must-reading for educators.  Behind the undeniable lure of technology is a risk that “developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.” 

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” says Michael Rich of Harvard Medical School, the executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

The tension, of course, is at the same time researchers are raising red flags about raising children immersed in a digital bath, education is redoubling efforts to increase technology use in the classroom for engagement, customization and efficiency.  The Times makes much of a research study, familiar to readers of this blog, that reading and academic works goes down not up, when computers arrive in the home.

The result is one of those Rorschach tests of an article, virtually guaranteed to confirm your biases  (The world is going to digital hell!  We’ll never engage kids if we don’t embrace technology!).  The most interesting section of the piece is the Times look at current research on ”what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.” 

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Other studies cited by the Times suggest that “periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.”  “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” observes Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

“The headline is: bring back boredom,” says Dr. Rich, who the Times points out, recently gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”

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