Tag Archive for 'parenting'

“Infantilizing Our Kids Into Incompetence”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 20, 2009 in Education News and Parents. 1 Comment

A new revolution is under way, according to the cover story of the latest Time Magazine.  It’s aimed at rolling back “the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads.”    Call it slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting, the magazine notes, but the message is the same: “Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.”

A fair amount of the piece looks at the mixed blessing of hyperinvolved parents in schools.  Parental involvement in education is unambiguously good.  But how much is too much?  Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, you know it when you see it. 

Teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students’ homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a “no rescue” policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter’s coordinated outfit.

Time writer Nancy Gibbs quotes a guidance counselor at a Washington prep school who urges parents to make friends with parents who don’t think their kids are perfect, and willing to push back: “When schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that’s a trade-off worth making.”

Lenore Skenazy, whose account of letting her nine-year-old son ride the subway on his own  was the shot heard round the world of the helicopter parenting backlash, points out there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy. And the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million.

When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.”

The best quote in the piece belongs to Skenazy.  “10 is the new 2,” she quips.  “We’re infantilizing our kids into incompetence.”

If Bedtime is Book Time, Why Not “Morning Math?”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 7, 2009 in Parents. 2 Comments

The best idea I’ve heard in a long time comes courtesy of Lisa Guernsey of Early Ed Watch (where is Sara Mead, anyway?) who points out that every parent gets the idea that bedtime is book time, but what about math?  She’s encouraging parents “to build math moments into the morning routine, just as book reading is part of the bedtime drill.”

Rummage through the sock drawer with your 4 year old, encouraging her to find a matching pair. Voila. You’ve covered one math concept already. Go to the freezer and pull out the frozen waffles for your 6-year-old. “You want one-and-a-half? How about three halfs instead?” Wink, wink, another concept down the hatch. Ask your 8-year-old to pour the juice so that the glasses are 75 percent full. Aha. A good opening for a chat about fractions.

Guernsey points out that we’ve had plenty of research and public service campaigns encouraging parents to read to their children, yet math skills trump reading skills as one of the best predictors of school success.  “Imagine what might happen with a similar campaign that suggests ways for parents to do math in the morning with their children,” she urges. ”Look for numbers on cereal boxes. Talk about the score of last night’s ball game. Point out patterns on their hats and mittens as you dress them for school.”

What a simple, brilliant idea.  Pass it on.

Kids, Don’t Try This At Home

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Parents. 2 Comments

Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass of Gossip Girl, and Nancy Botwin, played by Mary-Louise Parker on Weeds, top Common Sense Media’s list of the “10 Worst TV Role Models.”  The Gossip Girl duo represent the “ultimate mean girl” and a “drinking, drugging gigolo,” while Botwin “makes consistently terrible parenting decisions, getting her sons caught up in a world of drug dealing, crime, and violence” (that’s only good enough for #3?).

Other’s making the list: Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell on The Office (”so self-absorbed that he can’t see beyond his own ambitions”); Peter Griffin of Family Guy (”watches way too much TV, for starters”); and Naomi Clark  on 90210 (”conniving, manipulative, and out for herself”).  If kids and teens watch these shows, Common Sense Media suggests parents use the characters on-screen behaviors for discussion.  “Even negative role models can open the door to a discussion of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior,” they note.

Ask Your Child About Content, Not Grades

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 10, 2009 in Curriculum and Parents. 2 Comments

Don’t ask your kids about grades, test scores or homework, advises Kerry Dickinson of the East Bay Homework Blog.  Instead, focus on the content of the subject he or she is studying.

Instead of “What did you get on the test?” say, “What are you learning in science?” If you are connected to some school communication tool (like Schoolloop) you can look at homework assignments and grades privately. Benefits: you are teaching them to take ownership of their own schedules. You are letting them manage their own time. You are taking the focus off scores and putting it on learning.

Dickinson’s ”10 Tips to Start the School Year Off Right” offers a list of ideas from common sense to counterintuitive: Don’t overschedule your children; don’t sign your child up for academic tutoring unless he or she is in jeopardy of failing a class; and don’t attend every sports game or extracurricular activity (”your child will be participating for the love of the game or of the activity, not to earn your approval”).

(H/T: Kathleen Manzo via Twitter)

Parents Read More, Praise More, But Keep Kids on a Short Leash

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 19, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Children today have fewer chores around the house and greater autonomy than previous generations, but they’re kept on a shorter leash outside the home.  That’s the takeaway from a novel study that analyzed 300 advice columns and editorials from randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine from 1929 to 2006.  Dr. Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College was studying changes in the portrayals of parental authority and children’s autonomy over time, Science Daily reports:  

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

“Today’s parents face demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children,” says Rutherford.  “Allowing children more autonomy to express themselves and their disagreements at home may well be a response to the loss of more substantial forms of children’s autonomy to move through and participate in their communities on their own.”

Meanwhile an Ohio State study tracked parenting patterns over two generations and found ”great increases” in the amount of reading and affection shown to children today–and reductions in the amount of spanking.

In general, the amount of affection parents show their children increased significantly over the generations. Sixty percent of fathers and 73 percent of mothers in the second generation reported showing their children physical affection and praising them within the last week. But only about 40 percent of their parents showed open affection on a weekly basis.  Reading to children also showed a generational shift. Nearly three times more mothers in the second generation reported reading to their children daily compared to their own parents.

Bringing Home Life “Out of the Shadows”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 20, 2009 in No category. 8 Comments

Making schools better “should be only one part of our national strategy” on education, writes Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson.  “Life at home has been a relatively neglected topic and needs to come out of the shadows.” In a commentary at CNN.com Ferguson, who heads the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, says helping parents do their best needs to be as big a priority as achieving excellent schools.

This goes beyond public policies. I am talking about changes in mindsets and lifestyles in a national social and cultural movement to close achievement gaps between groups — a movement to achieve excellence with equity.  More reading at home is a place to start….Black and Hispanic students reported less leisure reading at home compared to whites, watched television more, were much more likely to have televisions in their bedrooms and (perhaps as a consequence) were more prone to become sleepy at school. Also, blacks and Hispanics, including those with college-educated parents, reported fewer books in their homes than whites whose parents had fewer years of schooling.

Ferguson cites research indicating that high achieving students across racial lines have parents who are “both responsive and demanding.”

According to the study, white parents were much more likely to be both responsive and demanding than black and Hispanic parents; whereas black parents, in particular, were often highly demanding, but tended not to be as responsive in the ways the study measured. Among early adolescents, differences along these dimensions helped account for the higher test scores of whites as compared with blacks and Hispanics.

“Findings like the above should be part of the conversation among black and Hispanic community leaders as they respond to the fact that even the children of college-educated parents often achieve at lower-than-expected levels,” Ferguson writes. 

In the Wee Small Hours

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 9, 2009 in Parents and Research and Reports. 11 Comments

An NIH study of over 15,000 teenagers shows a link between sleep and mental health.  “Teens whose parents let them stay up after midnight on weeknights have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime,” notes USA Today’s Greg Toppo. 

The findings are the first to examine bedtimes’ effects on kids’ mental health — and the results are noteworthy. Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year.  The differences are smaller but still significant — 25% and 20%, respectively — after controlling for age, sex, race and ethnicity.

Going to bed after midnight on weeknights reportedly increases the risk of depression by 42%.  The lead researcher, Columbia University Medical Center’s James Gangwisch, says the takeaway for parents is “try as much as possible to sell teenagers on the importance of getting enough sleep.”

Hey, it’s his study, but I have to wonder: Perhaps the difference-maker isn’t the sleep, but having a bedtime?  Is it possible that parents who set rules and routines for their children such asregular bedtimes are more involved in their kids’ lives?  Maybe their kids are less likely to feel adrift and depressed as a result.

 

 

Who’s Bigger?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 20, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Education News. 8 Comments

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli is showing us no love. 

Mike has a piece about edublogs in the new Education Next.  It’s good; you should read it.  But in a table of the top education policy blogs, the Core Knowledge blog is conspicuously absent.  And it’s not like we wouldn’t have made the Top Ten, based on Mike’s methodology, Technorati’s “authority ranking” — the number of blogs linking to a particular blog in the past 180 days. 

Here’s how the edublogs in my bookmark list stack up based on Technorati’s authority rankings:

Joanne Jacobs  217
Eduwonkette  167
Eduwonk  146
Campaign K-12  125
The Education Wonks  119
Flypaper  95
Jay P. Greene  93
The Quick and the Ed  87
Matthew K. Tabor  85
Core Knowledge 84
This Week in Education  79
Edwize  74
Intercepts  69
Schools Matter  68
Bridging Differences 66
D-Ed Reckoning 56
Edspresso  46
NCLB Act II  40
Sherman Dorn 39
Eduflack 29
Swift and Change Able 27
Thoughts on Education Policy 25

Note, this list excludes pure teacher blogs, even though some of them do veer off (how could they not?) into policy from time to time.  Petrilli’s piece, meanwhile, heaps well-earned praise on Eduwonkette, who came out of nowhere in the past year to (by Mike’s Top Ten list) become the Top Wonk.

The story of Eduwonkette is particularly illuminating; she was recently revealed to be Jennifer Jennings, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, she recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger, even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.

Mike is also dead-on in noting the absence of an authoritative parenting blog.  “There’s no significant parent voice in the national online conversation,” he writes, “just as there’s no national parent advocacy group in Washington. That’s a real shame; someone should blog about it.”

$7,000 For Blocks and Play-Doh?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2008 in No category. 3 Comments

Parents pay an average of $7,000 a year for preschool education, a pricetag that leaves some parents reeling in uncertain economic times.  ”This is blocks and Play-Doh, essentially. What are we doing?” Elizabeth Henderson, a mother of three in Tustin, Calif., tells Smart Money.  She pays $500 a month to send her youngest to a nearby preschool for three half-days a week.

Forced to choose between paying for preschool and saving for college, the magazine notes, parents are increasingly looking at three options: Parent co-op preschools, where parents take turns working in the classroom with the kids and teacher; at-home day care with an educational bent; and homeschooling.

You can always try this too.  Play-doh not included.

Full Speed Ahead!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 29, 2008 in Research and Reports. 1 Comment

A few years ago John Cloud of TIME Magazine wrote that the idea that kids are overscheduled and need to slow down is “a fine example of transference.  Aren’t you really the one who wants to lose the BlackBerry and go fishing?”  Looks like he was right.  The Washington Post takes note of new research that indicates kids not only cope with a heavy schedule, but thrive with it.  It’s the parents, however, who are stressed out.  And, (as is often the case when members of professional classes feel burdened by a problem) it’s not that much of an issue to begin with.

Two studies based on data about how children spend their days show that only a minority are heavily scheduled and that organized activities are linked to positive outcomes in school, emotional development, family life and behavior. The children most at risk have no activities at all, the studies showed.

“I found the opposite of what I expected,” Sandra L. Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland at College Park, tells the Post.  Hofferth “started out with a pretty solid belief that lots and lots of activities are bad for children.” But, says the paper, she found a higher level of activity was not linked to such stress symptoms as depression, anxiety, alienation and fearfulness.

The American Academy of Pediatrics warned in 2006 that a hurried lifestyle could create anxiety or contribute to depression for some children.