Too Much Education Too Early?

I’ve had two recent discussions lately that centered around the idea that parents today push their little kids too hard and expect too much of them, too young. The first was with my mother and law. Now she is no fan of education to be sure. She hated school and, frankly, two of her three children are the picture of what happens when you denigrate education: They are both under-achievers who don’t read and also don’t see the value of an education. Her son was the one child who went against his parents’ wishes and left home for college. He is a successful testament to the power of education. My mother in law was arguing against full day kindergarten. In fact, she doesn’t think kids should be in preschool. “They start too young, they are just babies, why do they need to learn how to write when they are three?” “A full day is too much for a five year old! Poor little thing!” Uh, well, they learn to write when they are three so they can learn to read when they are four or five and um, a full day is okay for a six year old? But I took this whole discussion with a grain of salt; considering the source and so on.

However, today I had a very intelligent, educated, well-read friend (no kids and no desire; one of those wonderful aunt types) say that she feels every parent she meets today is pushing their kid to be a prodigy of sometime, putting them in rigorous tutoring programs in preschool and getting them every educational toy on the market to try to have the brightest kid around. I admit that this perspective surprised me, coming from her. I see all extremes, not a trend towards kids being under too much academic pressure. Heck, I met a mom the other day whose child didn’t learn to write his name until he got to kindergarten and now she’s worried he’s going to end up in remedial classes since it never occurred to her he’d need to know any of this stuff before getting to school.

I grew up in a house with no TV and parents who focused a good deal of attention on my academic ability, even before I was in any kind of school. I could read, write, and do basic addition when I got to kindergarten. I certainly aspire to my daughter doing the same (if not better, don’t we all want that?).  At the same time, I’d never considered more extreme measures to do it than those of my parents: notebooks, attention, learning through natural curiosity.

I invested in one of those first-grade writing notebooks with the big spacing and the colored lines as well as larger pencils that are easier for little hands to grasp. Sometimes I write things for her (Dear Santa…) and she traces my words with a highlighter. I also let my daughter choose a workbook from Boarders that has turned out to be something she asks to do almost every day. I follow the advise on the book and limit her to a couple of pages a day so that she ends wanting more and I wait for her to ask to do it; it isn’t an assignment. We’ve just finished the first one–Kumon’s book of Uppercase letters–and she chose the book of numbers 1-30 for her next workbook. Maybe it is more than she really needs to be doing right now. But I can see that she knows I value it, and she values the time and attention it gets her, so I’m as optimistic that it will pave the way for a love of learning as I am that it will help her better learn how to write her letters and numbers. I know from my own experience that there are the values of our parents that we embrace and those we reject… and that both help shape who we become.

Pre-Web

I admit it: my daughter does watch the occasional YouTube video. This is mostly because her father and I are nostalgic about cartoons of our childhood. We pull up a classic bugs bunny or pepe la pew and enjoy watching her laugh at these familiar images. However, our girl can’t operate a computer mouse nor can she “keyboard” as they call typing in school these days. And I’m more than fine with my three and a half year old lacking computer literacy. My husband and I are both extremely technologically adept so I have no concerns that she’ll pick it up as soon as she actually needs to.

Yet I know there are a multitude of toys on the market that are essentially kids computers, computer games, or computer-like toys. There are also zillions of sites targeted at wee ones that have come in handy when my daughter asks me who various characters are from other kids’ lunch boxes, t-shirts, etc. However, I can’t help but marvel that there is actually a set of content providers out there building sites expressly with preschoolers in mind.

Today I read that both Nickelodeon and Disney are preparing online content for preschoolers. Disney is introducing Bunnytown, which is to promote its Saturday morning puppet show. However, Nickelodeon is promoting MyNoggin, a “curriculum-based learning” game that is part of a subscription based ad-free service. I am sure it is my inner Luddite showing, but I’m just not all that excited to get my daughter online quite yet. While I’m a huge fan of the internet for research, learning, and entertainment, I also believe in building a strong foundation instead of just slapping together a pre-fab house. I sincerely want my daughter to love books and to understand the basic underpinnings of learning before she ventures out into the wild wild web; I want her to go there properly armed.

Life’s Not Fair

So I was chatting with Amanda the other day and she was talking about the difficulty of maintaining a sense of equality between her two boys. She and I share many parenting theories, but differ on many as well. And we say viva la difference! Part of what is interesting about blogging together is the juxtaposition. Anyhow, I was thinking about a common kid complaint she struggles with more than I, given her two kids to my one: “That’s not fair!” Uh, well, duh. I’m sure it wasn’t just my mom who replied to my complaints about unfairness without a moment’s hesitation: “Life’s not fair.”

Without a doubt, only-children differ in many ways from their multi-sibling friends: some positive and some negative. One thing they don’t get to learn right at home is how to share with other children. Sure, we try to teach our girl to share with us, but at preschool or daycare is when she’s really learning these lessons. Heck, I’ve heard her be downright nastily possessive with her wee peers and I shudder to think how often her teachers must have to correct this behavior in her (and others). But these are hard lessons she needs to learn, and better now than later.

While I don’t envy any mom who has to break up these scuffles dozens of times a day at home, I think they are better taught there than out in the cruel world. Even for moms lucky enough to be able to afford two (or more) of everything, the world just doesn’t work like that. Life is, in fact, unfair. While there may be four balls on the playground, there are not likely to be enough for every kid to have her own. While you may be equally academically qualified to get into a university, some other candidate may live in a regional area the school needs students from to meet a quota. While you may have a nearly equivalent academic record in college, with similar internships and activities, the factors that land you the job may not have anything to do with fairness. And so it goes.

None of these daily battles we fight–for manners, for neatness, for healthy eating–are easy or fun. However it seems to me that if we don’t fight them we will be leaving our kids to fight them (and maybe lose) out in the world without us.

Grow up!

I hire interns who are usually between 19-21. I hire assistants who are usually between 21-25. Over the past five years, I’ve had a couple who were amazing: budding young worker bees with tons of promise, needing only job-specific tutelage to get started on the success track.

However, the majority of these college and just out of college young people have ranged from: I’m brilliant so don’t really need to pay full attention or apply myself completely to My poo doesn’t stink (my mom told me so!) so anything I bother to do should be good enough. Now I was pretty sure that my perception of these youths was tainted by my general antipathy and curmudgeonliness. But it turns out I’m not alone in my opinion.

I got an email today about a new book by Dr. Terry Noble, who makes five suggestions for parents who want to encourage personal responsibility in their children:

1. Cut Their Allowance to Zero
Taking away your child’s allowance lets them know that you are not a personal ATM. They must earn their pocket money themselves.

2. Whatever Happened to Chores?
Instead of lining your children’s pockets for contributing nothing to the household, why not pay them for cutting the lawn, taking out the garbage or sweeping the porch?

3. Give Them Responsibility at a Young Age
Children are chomping at the bit for some responsibility by the ages of 8 and 9. Why not teach them responsibility with jobs that they can handle such as putting away the dishes and clearing the table after a meal?

4. Get Them Moving
What are they learning sitting on the sofa?! Getting kids away from the television and video games will help them not only with their physical health, but will also force them to interact with their peers…a skill that seems to be on the decline in our “virtual” world.

5. Be a Positive Role Model
Children lack suitable role models, mostly due to everyone being so darn busy. Lead your child by example–taking the time to listen to their daily lives will translate into them caring about others.

NowI’m not endorsing Noble. He appears to be self-published, and is not a child psychologist or anything like that. But he also appears to be self-made and unafraid to express some thoughts I’ve had for a long time: You should build your child’s self esteem, yet not unequivocally. When your kids work hard and or do well, hurrah! But every single move they make isn’t, in fact, the best–much less the end-all, be-all. A touch of humility, even (shudder) insecurity, may actually leave a bit of room in your child’s ego for actual learning. And life has got a lot to teach, sometimes the hard way.

Playground Talk

Yesterday, my daughter and I drove to a playground in one of the many well-to-do nearby towns. We got there just after four and, as expected, there were quite a few kids since it was after school hours. It seems to be pretty standards playground etiquette for moms to make polite conversation while their young kids struggle up ladders and climbing walls. This is a nice break from “normal” social mores in CT, in which you aren’t supposed to speak to any strangers lest they be outside your socio-economic class.

It is fairly unlikely to make actual adult friends at a CT playground, but at least it gets you out of the house and off the toddler conversational plane for an hour or so. Yesterday, I met three nannies, three actual mothers, and a dad. The latter was particularly awkward, and I feel bloody sexist about the whole thing: His daughter was playing beautifully with another girl about her age and his son and my daughter were imitating each other climbing up then sliding down various slides. Thus we trudged around the playground on a parallel trajectory for a good five minutes before he ventured a bit of idle chatter. Any female parent would have already said something pleasently inane about how cute the kids were and the conversational ball would have been off and running. But I admit that not only did it take an awkwardly long time to start a conversation between we mixed-gender care givers, I was suspect of his motives for another full 10 minutes.

Ultimately, he turned out to be one of the friendliest people I’ve met in ages. And fancy this: he, his wife, and two kids just moved here from Telluride, CO. (Yes, that’s why he was so friendly! He’s not from here!) Turns out he’s been a stay-at-home dad for four years and is just re-entering the workplace, while his wife has pursued a very demanding career. They too are raising vegetarian children… long and short: what a nice chat. As my daughter and I left, I noticed another dad on a lonely circuit around the playground. He was wearing the Connecticut workingman’s uniform–blue shirt and khakis–so I’m pretty sure he was another kind of fab dad. The kind that gets off a hard day at work and scoops up his 18 month old to toddle off the playground for an hour before dinner. He was, however, doing it sans playground chat-mates.

Tripple A

As Amanda so sagely put it: I make Woody Allen seem calm. In my office, they describe certain people as Type A. They call me Tripple A. In part, this is why I opted not to be a stay at home mother, out of fear I would put this level of hyper energy into over programming my poor child’s every waking moment.So when it came to childcare options, I researched. I have a spreadsheet to prove it. Same with pre-school: I have a file folder with research on everything from Montessori to KinderCare. Well, I finally came to the conclusion that she’s happy where she is and that they have a lovely preschool teacher and all is right with the world. But no. She quit.

So now they’ve “promoted” a wonderful caregiver who not only isn’t a certified preschool teacher, she didn’t even attend college. Now I realize that teaching preschool is not akin to rocket science, but this did throw me for a loop. All my research and planning for naught!

Best part: I didn’t even find out about the teacher situation until I picked my daughter up after her first day of preschool. She was so excited, wearing a new dress and toting a new thermos in her lunch box.

When I got to school, she was playing on the Pirate Ship for the first time, as only the preschoolers get to, so I sat down with another mom to watch. I turn to the mother and say, “So, big day, huh?” She looks at me blankly. “First day of preschool, my girl was so excited.” “Uh,” says this other mom, “how do I get my son in preschool?” I must have sat for a full minute in shock, then replied “well, he is in preschool, he’s three.” “Oh,” she said in a near monotone, “good.” Can I get a chorus of reality check?

To Nap or Not to Nap

To nap or not to nap, that is the question. A friend of my daughter, who is exactly 10 days older than she is (3.5) came over for a couple of days last week while daycare was closed for vacation. His grandparents picked him up after lunchtime and my daughter asked his grandma if he was going home to take a nap. His grandmother gave me an exasperated look and confided that the young lad doesn’t nap anymore because it wasn’t “convenient for his mother.”

It is a fact: naps are not always convenient. While the fact that my girl still takes an afternoon nap is really the only reason I can have her come home at lunch the three days I work from home–knowing I’ll get a minimum of two more hours of uninterrupted work after she and I have an hour together around lunch time. So in a way, naps are convenient for me (and I’m sure most moms welcome a couple of peaceful hours a day).

At the same time, I totally get how inconvenient they are. When we’re trying to plan our weekends, we always have to factor in naptime in the early afternoon or be prepared to reap the aftermath of a grumpy child. I’m actually thrilled we’re to a point where our girl can occasionally skip a nap and not necessarily be downright evil as a result.

There’s no doubt that kids need a lot of sleep. At 3.5, most kids need between 11.5 – 12.5 hours of sleep a day, which can be at night or split between nighttime and a nap. This knowledge (and the reality of our child’s behavioral issues if she’s sleep deprived) has kept the nap part of our life for one other big reason, simple familial math: My husband would only see our daughter for a couple of minutes a day if she didn’t nap. He’s gone from 7:20-5:50 every day. If she slept 12 hours a night from say, 7-7, uh, he’d glimpse her on the way out the door and get to gaze at her across the dinner table before tucking her in. So despite some hard spells in which naptime have been a battle of wills, and a few short spells in which naptime was really an hour quietly reading in her bed, the nap remains part of our lives–convenient or not.

Supers

Do you know what really irritates me?  I mean besides people who insert y’s and i’s in names that don’t require them.  Super moms.  Super moms really piss me off.  The only thing worse than the Super mom is the Super Kid.  Unfortunately they usually travel in packs and are therefore impossible to avoid.  A new pair of Supers just started going to my son’s preschool.  Whithin moments of meeting them, I slinked away with my inferior tail between my stubby, chubby, inferior legs.

You all know the type.  Supermom looks like Barbie and returned to her size 0 pants immediately after giving birth.  She never feeds her kid junk food and never has ketchup stains on her shirt.  Super kid has never seen a millisecond of television and can write her name even though she just turned 3.  Not only that, but she can also spell most short words in perfect penmanship.  In case of emergency Super Kid can dial 911 on both rotary and touch tone phones.  She can also perform rescue breathing until the proper authorities arrive, who by the way, she can flag in from the street. 

Meanwhile, as I am hearing about all of the super things Super Kid can do, my kids are picking thier noses. And if emergency ever struck and I was somehow incapacitated, they would devour my body and pillage the house like the tiny jackals they are.   So, I went home feeling defeated and like a lousy mom.  However, what I should’ve been thinking was that at least my kids were allowed to be kids.  Super kid was micro-managed and deprived a carefree childhood.  If Super kid was ever given the opportunity, I’m sure she would enjoy watching a movie and eating a few chips. 

Furthermore, I think that perhaps it would help all of us if blinders were given out in the baby bags they pass out at the hospital right along with formula samples and breast pads.  Wouldn’t we all be so much happier with what we are,  if we weren’t constantly looking at what we aren’t? 

There’s Always Therapy

My in-laws can’t tell me enough how wonderful our daughter is. She’s polite, she’s “easy,” she speaks so well. But they also don’t hesitate to tell me I’m too hard on her when I insist that she say “excuse me” when interrupting our conversation or that I have a zero-tolerance policy on (the first signs of) tantrums. So today I looked my father in law square in the eye when he ways saying I was being to hard on her and said “I’m a mean mom, but if I have a good kid as a result, that’s fine by me.” He actually laughed and said it should be the title of a book. I started laughing with him and said, “I have the subtitle for the book: …and if she hates me, there’s always therapy.”

Childrearing and the Unified Front

I’m no military theorist, but I have noticed that some parents work as a team, while others are at odds. I’ve also noticed that the behavior of the resulting offspring differs as well.

Last night, we had a couple over for dinner with two amazing teenaged daughters. That’s right, I did say amazing teenagers. In fact, their girls have been wonderful all the 9 years I’ve known them. Sure, they have dust-ups, but these are polite, charming, focused girls who I’d be proud to call my own. In fact–being not innately geared toward breeding myself–they gave me a lot of inspiration to have kids at all: You can remain coherent, interesting people AND raise decent humans.

Anyhow, there we were, mid meal, when my girl helped out a panicked “I have to go potty!” (Nothing goes better with ceviche  than graphic toilet talk.) My husband quickly scooped her up and bolted for the toilet, as she can hold it a bit long when distracted by social situations. The remaining dad at the table looked at me and said, “you guys are such great parents. You are such a team and you have a really wonderful daughter because of it.” His wife clarified this unexpected effusiveness, explaining that they’d recently dined with another couple who have a 4 and a 6 year old who are complete wild things. They said they’d actually almost left because the children were so constantly screaming that they actually just felt uncomfortable, like they were witnessing something they shouldn’t be.

On the ride home, the two had pondered the possible reasons why the kids were so out of control and they may have hit on it: Mom has one set of rules which dad completely disregards; blatantly at times saying things like “She’d kill me if she knew I was letting them do X, ha ha” while mom is in the kitchen.

I’m not saying my husband and I never disagree on what is the “right” thing to do with our daughter, but we try to do it out of her earshot. The fact is, kids are innately brilliant at the divide and conquer tactic. Even the most minor chink in the mommy-daddy front, and they charge in tantrum-guns blazing to demolish any semblance of peace or sanity. No, there’s no one way to be a parent, and no one set of rules for kids. But if mom and dad work together, at least they have consistency working for them against this, the wiliest (and most worthy) of adversaries.