Hyperparenting: The Helicopter Parent and Carl Honore with a Stinger Missile

When we went to visit daycares before Curious Boy was born, many of them tried to impress us with their school-like settings and workbooks for 3 year olds. Now, I'm a big fan of letting kids be kids for as long as possible, and Philosopher Mom is a pediatric occupational therapist. We both kept our mouths shut and ran like hell to a family-style home daycare down the street. Getting kids ready to succeed in school is one thing, but forcing them to attempt tasks before they are developmentally ready can really make them suffer.

The hyperparenting trend, where you schedule all of the life out of your kids life is having an incredibly detrimental effect on children's happiness.

Author Carl Honore, who also wrote "In Praise of Slow", has released a new book called "Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyperparenting". He has been making the rounds on CBC Radio 1, and it seems as though we have a lot in common. He suggests that getting kids into too many activities and putting too much academic pressure on them early on can be ruinous for a child's mental health and actually be counter-productive. He present the case of Finland as a contrast to North America. Children in Finland to not enter school until the age of 7, there is virtually no homework assigned during elementary school and Kumon/Sylvan type tutoring is unheard of. Fins consistently score very highly on internationally standardized tests and rate themselves as 3rd happiest in the world. Certainly something to think about, while you are crying becuase Aiden didn't get into the right preschool and now his chances of going to MIT are shot.

Listen to Carl Honore on Sounds Like Canada
and on the phone-in segment of Radio Noon (Part 1 and Part 2)

Playing. Seriously

This weekend's NYT Magazine has a great article on the science and study of play.  It seems as though many of our intuitive ideas about why we play are disproved by research on both animals and humans.  The quest for a theory of play goes on.  Let the games begin.

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’

Read the article here

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Red fish, blue fish - How kids identify objects

Curious Boy is going through a dramatic language explosion, in both French and English.  One thing that has struck me though, is his choice of words to describe various objects.  It turns out that I'm not the only person who finds this interesting.  Cognitive Daily has a 
post elaborating on research into the word choices that children make when asked to locate an object.  

The research shows that kids start with simple, obvious identifiers like colour and move to more complex ones (like location) as they age.  There is a marked progression from colour to location between the ages of 3 and 4.  In perspective, adults almost always use location to identify an object.

You're so smart, I'm making you stupid.

I know that everyone and their daycare worker must be talking about this article from New York Magazine entitled "How Not to Talk to Your Kids" by Po Bronson. (I thought Teletubbies could barely talk, let alone write....sorry, I couldn't help myself. The kid loves 'em.), but I felt like I had a some perspective to add on this.

The article is a bit lengthy, but the gist of it is that kids fare better when they are praised for their effort or skill at a specific task rather than simply being told that they are smart.

Growing up I was one of the "smart kids". School came very easily until University, and didn't get really hard until grad school. My whole life I was told how smart I was, and looking back, I realize that I fell precisely into the trap that the article outlines. It turns out that kids who are praised for being smart rather than working hard are more likely to give up quickly when faced with something that doesn't come easily.



Sounds a lot like my life. Piano, guitar, karate, tai chi, basketball, soccer, quantum mechanics...the list goes on. Stuff that initially interested me but that I let go or settled on being mediocre at because it was hard.



I find myself falling into the same trap with the kid already. Hopefully this article will help with that.

Technorati Tags: education, development, praise

ASL for infants

I have always been somewhat skeptical of training infants to use sign language. Not that I don't think it works; I had seen it with friends kids. Rather I always figured that it wasn't worth the effort. Yesterday, when I was playing with the kid, he spontaneously made the sign for "more" and now my whole perspective has changed. For those interested, here is a free (as in beer) site from Michigan State University's Communication Technology Lab that hosts a very thorough ASL video dictionary.



AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE BROWSER





Technorati Tags: ASL, sign langauge for babies, philosopherdad

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