Benny has a rich, full life for a five-year old. He hangs out in bars. He attends grown-up movies like Juno with his parents (kid flicks like Finding Nemo scare him silly). And then there’s that way cool play group in Brooklyn. While other kids are off at kindergarten, Benny plays in the mud with his buddies. “His two friends are completely naked. Benny has on his underpants and a pair of socks,” author Joanne Rendell relates approvingly. ”The whole scene could be a performance art piece or perhaps an excerpt from a very twisted movie about child killers.”
Rendell is describing her decision to ”un-kindergarten,” a word she says she made up. “Decision,” in this instance, is a word I made up. Indeed, judging by her piece on babble.com Rendell doesn’t seem to expend much decision-making energy on things like routines, schedules and ”the whole school thing.”
Un-kindergarten for us means Benny can sleep late so I can write. It means we don’t have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. We can go to Europe and visit my family when the flights are cheap. Un-kindergarten also means we can pick and choose how we spend our days and who we spend them with. Benny can go to free classes at the Metropolitan Museum in the week when it’s less crowded. He can read a book on sharks when he feels like it. He can experiment with bungee cords while eating his breakfast at noon.
Commenters on babble.com aren’t having it. But they’re letting Rendell have it–with both barrels. Says one, “I’ll coin a new tern to go with hers: un-parenting. When you really, you know, can’t be bothered, because you’re got bars to hit and a vapid chicklit novel to write and friends in Europe to visit. Let the kid play in mud and pat yourself on the back for what a fabulous job you’re doing because he can always, you know, read a book about sharks or something to get himself educated.”
What’s wrong with boys? Last week we learned that parents of nearly one of every five U.S. boys have sought professional help about their sons’ emotional or behavioral problems. Newsweek’s Peg Tyre thinks it has a lot to do with changing child rearing and education practices over the last ten years–overscheduling, instead of structured play. Learning Mandarin in preschool instead of playing Duck, Duck, Goose. Schools, says Tyre, have become increasingly terra incognita for boys
In many communities, elementary schools have become test-prep factories—where standardized testing begins in kindergarten and “teaching to the test” is considered a virtue. At the same time, recess is being pushed aside in order to provide extra time for reading and math drills. So is history and opportunities for hands-on activities—like science labs and art. Active play is increasingly frowned on—some schools have even banned recess and tag. In the wake of school shootings like the tragedy at Virginia Tech, kids who stretch out a pointer finger, bend their thumb and shout “pow!” are regarded with suspicion and not a little fear.
In short, the bar of our expectations for kids has been set higher, but the psychological and physical development of our children hasn’t changed. “Some kids are thriving in the changing world,” notes Tyre. “But many aren’t. What parents and teachers see is that the ones who can’t handle it are disproportionately boys.”
Want to see improvements in education? Start insisting that your children fully apply themselves in school, counsels Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal, in an essay that will surely be clipped, copied and passed out on curriculum nights and at parent teacher conferences. “Let’s face it,” he writes, “more than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.”
Citing a summary of research by the Michigan Department of Education, Akst notes “the most consistent predictors of children’s academic achievement and social adjustment are parent expectations of the child’s academic attainment and satisfaction with their child’s education at school. Parents of high-achieving students set higher standards for their children’s educational activities.”
He also shoots down the stereotype of the overachieving, upper-middle-class parent “bombarding their precious little ones in utero with Mozart and then hectoring teachers and hiring tutors right up until the Harvard application essay.”
Researchers at Brigham Young and the University of Michigan found that parents preferred teachers who make their children happy over those who emphasize academic achievement. My experience in a nonobsessive school district is consistent with this. Our family’s intense focus on learning is regarded warily by some parents, whose dissatisfactions with school are mostly about testing and creativity but never about a lack of foreign-language instruction or overall academic rigor. Indeed, teachers have reported watering down the public middle-school curriculum in response to parental complaints that it was too difficult.
The lack of demand for serious schooling is the least of it, writes Akst. Too many kids are growing up in homes with little emphasis on reading, learning or culture. “Kids form lots of habits over the years, some good and some bad,” he concludes. “What a nice surprise that doing well in school can be one of them.”
I suspect a lot of teachers will hurt their necks vigorously nodding in agreement with Akst’s essay. There may not always be a cause-and-effect relationship between engaged parents and student performance. But like the race going to the swift and the fight to the strong, it is the way to bet.
Children whose mothers use cell phones frequently during pregnancy and who are themselves cell phone users are 80% more likely to have behavior problems.
“It’s a wonderful technology and people are certainly going to be using it more and more,” Dr. Leeka Kheifets of the UCLA School of Public Health, who helped conduct the study, tells Reuters. “We need to be looking into what are the potential health effects and what are ways to reduce risks should there be any.”
Poor Mexican children who participate in a government program with extensive family services are further ahead in kindergarten than the average Canadian kid, according to new research.
Mexican authorities in 1990 implemented a system of programs called CENDI (the Spanish acronym for Centres for Early Childhood Development) in Monterrey, an industrial city roughly the size of Greater Toronto, that provides community supports to low-income households from the time of pregnancy through to preschool. The programs are similar to what Canadian early childhood researcher Dr. Fraser Mustard has long been advocating in Canada, the Toronto Star reports.
“You can’t dump the whole responsibility (for childhood development) on families,” says Mustard, who advocates creating community “hubs” – ideally in local schools – where they can obtain nutrition and health advice from professionals, take part in parenting programs and involve their tots in programs. “Mustard says that way, parents get the support they need to do a better job, and problems can be caught and treated early on,” notes the paper.
The research will undoubtedly be used to bolster the argument of those who favor a broader social services role for schools. It’s hard to imagine broad comments about dumping the whole responsibility for raising children on families, however, playing well in the U.S.
Recent Comments