At this time of year, many families are traveling to visit other family members, or longing to spend time with faraway family, or overloading on time with local family. Check out last year’s posts on Building Relationships with Family Near and Far; Staying Connected with Family Long-Distance, and Resolving Differences with Extended Family.
Parents often ask one key questions of experts in child development: “How do I get my kid into Harvard?”
Now, I’m not talking parents of high school juniors or seniors who want the nitty gritty of college admissions (although I could write plenty about that, having gone through the process with my oldest three years ago, and with my middle child working on applications this month!) I’m talking about parents of toddlers or preschoolers who want to know they’re starting their journey on the right path. Who want to know: what is the most essential thing a parent needs to do to guarantee their child’s success in academics and hopefully in life.
All the child development experts have answers to the question, and some are based on good science. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, says “tell them to go play outside.” Erika Christakis, a preschool director, and her husband Nicholas, professor at Harvard, say to choose a play-based preschool, not academics-based. The president of Harvard said “Make your children interesting!” He recommended encouraging children to follow their passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. (There’s a nice article in this month’s Parent Map about helping kids find their passion.) John Medina, author of Brain Rules for Baby, has said to audience members: “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? Go home and love your wife.”
These all seem like valid advice to me.
But what’s my best advice for academic success, in whatever form that takes?
Nurture a love for learning, and the belief that school is a great environment in which to feed that passion.
If you observe any baby or toddler, you see that they are driven by curiosity, and a desperate desire to learn more about their world, and master the skills they need to accomplish the tasks that are important to them. Some lucky adults still have that love for learning, intact from childhood.
Unfortunately, many children have that love for learning stomped on at some point in their life. Often in the school setting. Some examples:
I feel pretty blessed that our children have had access to schools* that fostered their love of learning.
When I first looked at kindergartens for my oldest child, we looked at the one within walking distance of our house. It was called Montessori, which I had the vague impression was a good brand name for a school. But when we looked at it, I saw a room of 5 and 6 year old kids sitting at desks filling out worksheets. Sure, a few of them were working with Montessori style manipulables to help them… but the main goal was completing the worksheet. When I asked about their day, it sounded like the way they did individualized education was that each child could work at their own pace through the same workbooks. They had only 10 minutes of recess in the morning and 10 in the afternoon – which might have worked for my daughter, who was just as happy to sit and read as to run around, but I couldn’t imagine it for a more active child. In their library, they had only non-fiction books. When I asked about fiction, they basically sniffed and said kids could waste their time on story books at home. That’s when I knew this was NOT the school for us. (My daughter’s deepest passion from about age 1 to 21 (so far) is stories. And I believe fiction is a great tool for teaching academic literacy, cultural literacy, imagination, empathy, and more. This school would have stomped on her passion for learning through story.)
We kept looking for the right school. The one we found had an emergent curriculum – an example of emergent learning is: if you have a first grader, you want them to learn to read. But it really doesn’t matter what they read. So, instead of making all the kids read the same books, you let the dinosaur boys read about dinosaurs, and the girls who love puppies read about dogs. If a kid asks a question about the classroom pet, you show him how to look up the answer in a book, and he learns that books are the way to learn the new things he cares about learning. Again, nurture a love for learning, and the belief that school is a great place to feed that passion.
Our girls went on to have a great educational experience that kept that love for learning alive. Another key aspect of a good school is one that understands the difference between building a fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset, which “thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.” (Read more.)
My middle child is in her senior year of high school, and totally jazzed about her comparative government class – she can’t stop talking about economics, human rights, and governmental policies! When she had the opportunity to visit some college classes last week, she was looking through the list, and gushing with enthusiasm “oh wow, political sociology! Theory of cognitive linguistics! Biochemistry! How do I choose??” When she had a college admissions interview, she gushed at the interviewer about how much she loves her post-modern literature class. She takes free online college classes about nutrition and food science in her free time.
I love seeing in her what I hope to see in all kids. She TRULY loves to learn. She is really excited about new ideas. She sees school as a great venue for feeding that.
Now, my kid is an academic. Your child might not be an academic in quite the same way. College in general is not right for all kids, and getting into Harvard specifically is certainly not possible for many, and not the right match for some kids for whom it is possible.
But… whatever your child’s talents, whatever his or her passions, I have faith that the best way to help them reach their potential is to keep that toddler’s love for learning alive. Model for them your own excitement over learning new things. Support their passion for discovery. Seek out schools that support it. That’s how to get your kid into college…
photo credit: pcutler via photopin
As parents, part of our role is to teach children about the world. One of the things that we can do to support our child’s learning is to play sorting games with our kids: the ability to sort things is essential to lots of future learning, so we are justifiably proud when our young child can sort all the red toys into one pile and all the blues into another pile, or when they can find all the cows in a group of barn toys, or put a group of objects in order from largest to smallest. We are excited that they have learned to distinguish similarities and differences between things.
And yet, there’s a whole category of similarities and differences we’re kind of hoping they won’t notice. Most of us have a story of walking through the mall and hearing a child loudly blurt out “that man is really fat” or “hey, that lady only has one leg” or “look how dark that guy’s skin is.” And then the parent desperately shushes the child, hoping that no one has heard. They just drag them quickly down the hallway and into a store to distract them from the subject… and never come back to it.
Or, the more enlightened parents may try to speak to the child about it, but do it in an odd “code” which tries to validate the personhood of the person they’re talking about (which is good) but without really acknowledging the difference that the child noticed (which is confusing for the child). As Bronson and Merryman say in Nurture Shock, “every parent [in a study] was a welcoming multi-culturalist, embracing diversity. But… hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles in the home – like “everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us”… but they had almost never called attention to racial differences. They wanted their children to grow up color-blind.”
But our children are not color blind! Research tells us that, and so does our experience. I clearly remember a moment with my oldest when she was less than six months old… maybe even as young as 3 months. She was fussing in an Indian restaurant, and the owner picked her up to dance her around the room a little and show her the artworks on the wall. She never looked at the artwork. She gazed at his face. We are a very pale skinned family. He was very dark-skinned and the contrast between his skin and his white teeth and eyes fascinated her and all she did was stare at her face, obviously creating in her brain a whole new category of what people can look like.
Our kids notice differences. They ask ’embarrassing’ questions. They point to people on the bus. They blurt out their observations in malls. (They learn to stop doing that by age 5 or so.) And the parents shush them. The parents’ shushing sends the message of “Don’t talk about that! That’s a bad thing!” A young child is not sophisticated enough to get the message that the parents intend – something about not hurting the feelings of the person called out. When they do this, the message the child gets is that the difference they noticed (whether obesity, handicap, race, or whatever) is bad and shameful and not to be mentioned in polite company.
When parents don’t talk about race and other differences openly, our children are left to draw their own conclusions. So, amongst the parents who never talked about race, what impressions were their kids left with? “14% said outright, ‘no, my parents don’t like black people’ and 38% … answered ‘I don’t know [how my parents feel about black people.]'”
Bronson and Merryman tell the story of one of their own children. He was raised in a diverse neighborhood and school with parents who tried hard never to highlight the differences between people because they wanted a non-racist “color-blind” child. At almost five years old, he never mentioned skin color. They thought things were going perfectly.
“Then came Martin Luther King Jr. day at school… that weekend, [the son] started pointing at everyone, proudly announcing ‘That guy comes from Africa. And she comes from Africa too!’ Clearly he’d been taught to categorize skin color and he was enchanted with his skill at doing so. ‘People with brown skin are from Africa’, he’d repeat. He had not been taught the names for races – he had not heard the term ‘black’ and he called us ‘people with pinkish-whitish skin.’ … we started to overhear one of his white friends talking about the color of their skin. They still didn’t know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase ‘skin like ours.’ And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own.” Soon, children make broad sweeping generalizations about what ‘people like me’ do, and about what ‘people like them’ do.
This view of “us” vs. “them” increases. Amongst teenagers, the more diverse the school, the more likely that all their friends are the same race as they are. “The odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8%…. 85% of black kids’ best friends are also black.” (Bronson and Merryman)
Families of color are more likely to talk to their kids about race than white parents. They tend to do it in two very different contexts: one is ethnic pride, the other is preparing the child for future discrimination. In the case of preparation-for-bias, it appears that a little education helps the kids be resilient when they are faced with discrimination. However if the parents over-focused on discrimination, then the child was likely to blame his/her failures on other people – who they saw as biased against them. Ethnic pride coaching helps the child’s self-confidence and helps them be more engaged in school.
Although white kids are not usually coached in ethnic pride, Bronson and Merryman say “white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth and control in society.”
So, how do we talk with young children about race?
Think about the way we talk about gender as a model. We have no concerns at all with calling some kids boys and some girls, or asking how many girls were in their class, or telling them to hand something to ‘that man.’ It’s OK to also use language to label the racial differences that children notice and give them the vocabulary to talk about that. We tell kids ‘women can be doctors and men can be doctors.’ We can say just as nonchalantly ‘your doctor is Asian-American and your dentist is Black.’
We can choose to live in places or go to school in places with ethnically diverse populations, and encourage our children to make a variety of friends. We want to help our children see all that they have in common with diverse friends: “all three of you love dinosaurs” or “you both really like to play in the playground.” But we can also acknowledge and talk about the differences: “you live just with me, your friend lives with her parents and her grandparents from India” or “you have dark curly hair and you’ve noticed your friend’s hair is blond and soft” or “that woman wears a head scarf because that is what women of her religion wear.” We don’t want to say “all people are the same under the skin”, because that misses the beauty of our society’s diversity and also does not help your child understand their world.
We can read books, and watch movies, and look at artwork that represent a global array of people. When reading, watching movies, or people watching, talk about differences easily and openly. Note different skin colors, ages, gender expressions, weight, ability, clothing / hairstyles, and family compositions. Use descriptive words / labels they can use, like Asian, gay, deaf. We will, of course, help them understand as they grow older that no one can be defined by any one label. But, as they start to sort things out, talking about differences builds vocabulary and context for understanding the broader world.
As children get older, our discussions get more nuanced. With a toddler, we just teach vocabulary and we celebrate that everyone is different and we all have things in common too.
With our preschoolers: It’s not ideal to say “we’re all equal”, because sadly that’s not true in our society. We can say “we all have equal rights” and “we all deserve to be treated equally regardless of our race and religion.” We can teach our young children about respect for others and about justice and equality.
When these children reach elementary school, they will begin to notice inequities. They may talk about how someone has a bigger house with more toys, or they may notice that children eat subsidized breakfast at school, or they may notice that children get picked on for the color of their skin. Then we can begin discussions about racism and inequality. We’ve already given them the vocabulary to describe difference. We’ve given them the value of equal rights. Now, and as they get older, we can talk about our roles in moving our society toward that ideal of equal rights for all.
You might also like my post on Children’s Books as Mirrors and Windows, which includes links to LOTS of great children’s books you can use to lead into conversations about diversity, race, culture, gender, family compositions, disability, and more.
Are you looking for ideas to make sure your kids’ birthday parties are all fabulous occasions you look back on with fondness? I’ll share in this post my completely biased, non-research-based, experienced-mom’s opinion on birthday parties: Keep ’em small, keep ’em simple, personalize the party theme and activities to suit your unique child in that exact moment of time and let the kids play fun and simple party games they’ll enjoy.
This is a friends-of-the-family occasion. Invite your closest friends and family members for a low-key gathering, at a time of day your baby is likely to be awake and happy. (Sunday brunch is a much better bet than Friday at 7 pm). Let the baby play and do whatever she wants most of the time – when the time is convenient and she’s in a good mood, go ahead and give her some cake, and get the cake-smooshing pictures and sing the song so you have it all on video. Then go back to relaxing with your friends!
Guest list: My rule is “one guest per year old.” So, the two year old has two little friends and their families. The five year old has five guests, etc. When my girls got older, and wanted to do sleepovers, the rule for sleepovers became “one overnight guest for every two years old.” So, we had 6 guests for a 12th birthday sleepover.
If you want to host a party at the skating rink or the trampoline place, where you invite the whole class or the whole soccer team, go for it! But I wouldn’t do that for a birthday party. I would do it for “hey, it’s a teacher in-service day and there’s no school – let’s go skating!” That way, if your kid ends up having a bad day, you could leave early, which you can’t do from your own birthday party. And, you don’t have to be nagging your kid to “Make sure you talk to everyone who came, since it’s your birthday party.” And the parents of the guests don’t have to buy gifts, and don’t have to remind their kids whose birthday it is.
Parents stay or drop-off? Whichever you choose, be really clear about it in the invitation! Under 5, I assume you want me to stay with my kid, but as the children get older, it gets harder to guess. We often said: “Parents are welcome to stay if desired, or leave if they choose. If you leave, please be back by 1:00.” The parents who were also our friends would often stay and help out. The ones who didn’t know us well would typically drop-off. More comfortable for everyone involved.
Time of Day: Please pick the time of day when your child is at his best! Often parents pick a bad time because “it was the only time the party room was available. It’s my child’s nap time, but I thought it would be OK…” That never goes well.
Keep parties short. A party for a child under 5 should be scheduled for under 90 minutes – could even be less than an hour. If it’s all going well, people can stay and play longer, but no one feels compelled to stay if it’s not going well.
Theme and Activities: I never choose my theme months in advance just because I can get a good deal at the party store. Kids’ interests can change, and it’s really lame to have a My Little Pony party when you’ve moved on to more mature interests. I wait until one or two months before the party, and think about what my child is most interested in right then. Again, I want the birthday party to honor who they are in that exact moment of their life. And it’s often not a packaged theme anyone can buy in a party store: one of my daughters did a zodiac theme and one did a write-your-own-musical theme.
Activities are our big focus, but we’re not talking hired entertainers or rented bounce houses or pony rides. Just fun kids’ games which tie into the theme. (See below.)
Decorations. I try to be pretty environmentally conscious most of the time and use re-useable goods. But, I do like some bright and pretty decorations for a birthday. I try to think about how much waste I’ll create. So, paper plates and a paper banner? Reasonable. 8 foot long plastic tablecloth with matching plastic plates and color coordinated plastic forks that you use once and throw away? Not so reasonable.
Goodie Bags. Over the past 20 years or so, it seems like goodie bags have become required staples of birthday parties. Over the years, my kids have come home with bag after bag of candy (which they don’t need), decorative pencils and erasers (which we already have way too many of), tacky little plastic toys (that end up in the trash) and other junk from the dollar store. They’re junk. And even kids figure that out pretty soon. Yet, kids get so conditioned to expect them that I’ve seen kids be very disappointed when they don’t get one. I’m hoping my son’s friends opt out of this consumerism.
If you feel compelled to do a goodie bag style take-home item for every kid, you can do a balloon bouquet for decorations, then send one home with each child. Or choose something simple, small, and ecologically friendly.
Gifts. This one is tricky for me. We know families who opt out of gifts and say so on the invitation. We know others where the child has asked all guests to give donations to their favorite charity in lieu of gifts. And, of course, we know other families who invite 20 guests and get 20 gifts which their child may or may not want because the parents buying the gift often don’t know the child well enough to choose an appropriate gift.
When our girls were growing up, we had small parties of kids who knew them well and would buy well-suited gifts. And we bought very few toys for them and very few gifts. So, we did gifts at their parties. And they opened them in front of the person who gave them the gift so they could say thank yous directly. We haven’t really decided what the tradition will be for our boy.
Putt Putt goes to the Zoo – 3rd birthday. Our daughter loved this game by Humongous Entertainment, so we re-created the game with family members playing the baby animals who needed to be rescued.
Dinosaurs – 4th birthday. Fun photos: Asked Grandma in Wyoming to make dinosaur tails to tie on. Asked Grandpa in Seattle to make dinosaur head kids could wear. Asked big sister to do face paint. Dino Dig – bury toy dinos in shredded paper for kids to dig up.
Cats – 4th birthday: My daughters had cat costumes from the last Halloween. Other kids were given home-made tails to tie on, cat ear headbands, and we did face painted nose and whiskers. We played cat and mouse hide and seek games, chased balls of yarn around the room, and lapped up milk out of bowls with our cake.
My Little Pony – 5th birthday. We had a friend style all the guests’ hair into “pony tails” with braids and ribbons. We had some horse races, a horse beauty pageant, and so on. I’d found some old ponies on Ebay, and those were decorations and take-home gift.
Pet Store – 6th birthday. We played lots of animal games. We ended by designing a pet store, where each child played a type of animal. When parents arrived for pick up, we gave them pretend money, and they had to buy their child to take them home.
Astrology and Mythology – 7th birthday. We got from each guest’s parents the birth-date and time of day they were born. We prepped stickers for each child with their western zodiac symbol, Chinese zodiac, a poem about the day of the week (Monday’s child is fair of face…) the flower for their birth month, the meaning of their name, and so on. We played games to earn the stickers and each assembled a personalized book.
Warriors themed 8th birthday. Based on the Warriors books by Erin Hunter about a clan of cats. We played cat & mouse game (hide & seek), hunted for birds (we hid bird toys around the house), and did “barnyard noises” game with cats, mice, and bird noises. We made a cake decorated with plastic cats – the cats were take home gifts for the guests.
Magic- 9th birthday. We learned magic tricks and performed for each other, watched a video of some magic shows, and had a top-hat shaped pinata we had made.
Spy Kids – 10th birthday party. (Our daughter was into Spy Kids, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, and had recently watched her first James Bond movies.)The guests were “spies in training” and played card games to learn bluffing skills, traveled through a laser beam maze made of yarn, and did driving simulators on the X-box. They were then given a series of clues to solve to save a kidnapped agent.
Write your own musical – 11th birthday. Before the party, we made CD’s with 15 or 20 of my daughter’s favorite songs from musicals and gave those to the guests as invitations. In the evening, the guests created characters and a plot line and found a way to weave in many of the songs. They rehearsed multiple times. In the morning, all the guests’ parents were treated to a performance of the musical.
Rock Band – 12th birthday. Guests were invited to dress up like rock stars. We played Rock Band on the Xbox all evening and ate junk food.
Often on Facebook groups, blogs, and the playground, I hear parents asking/saying things like “We’re looking for the right venue for our one year old’s party.” “The party isn’t for six months, but I’ve already bought all these adorable Minnie Mouse decorations.” “What entertainer do you recommend for a three year old’s party?” “We’ve got 25 kids coming – and since they’re all 4 years old, that means all their parents too, and the room we rented only fits 20 people.” “My daughter’s sixth birthday party is coming, and I have to put 22 goodie bags together by tomorrow – so I’m going to hit the dollar store – they’ll have something I can toss in.” “We didn’t want to leave anyone out, so we invited the whole class, and we’re getting a bouncy house for the yard.”
I don’t want those parties for my own child. But I also dread it when my kids get invited to one of those parties! I can tell you that over the 21 years I’ve been parenting, I’ve been to parties where the over-tired toddler guest of honor was in total meltdown for much of the party. I’ve been in those over-crowded party rooms where all the parents are miserable and all the kids over-stimulated. I’ve come home with all those little bags of stupid little throwaway toys that no one cares about and more candy than my kids need in a week, And I’ve been at the bouncy house parties where there are so many kids there that none of them really remember or care whose birthday they are celebrating.
So, for your sake, your child’s sake, and your guests’ sake, try small, simple, personalized parties that everyone can enjoy!
We know it can work to increase compliance in the moment.
Parents who use physical punishment often experience that result. Their child misbehaves, then they spank, then the child stops misbehaving. It’s very effective in the short term, so the parents continue to use it. And some parents discover that a tiny swat on the butt is not always effective, but hitting hard enough to inflict pain is really good at eradicating behavior over the long run.
But, physical discipline can have other unintended effects in the long-run.
Of course many individuals who were spanked as children turn out just fine. However, research shows that on average, people who were spanked are more likely to be aggressive, less verbal, more likely to abuse substances, more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses, more likely to be obese and have cardiovascular disease, and more likely to abuse their spouse and children (they’ve learned big people can hurt smaller people). They have less gray matter development in their brains.
Read this excellent infographic / article on the Psychology of Spanking to learn more.
From studying brain development, we know: When children are happy and feel safe, they learn, grow, explore and their brains develop. When they are stressed or frightened, their brain goes into survival mode. They can definitely earn what not to do. (i.e. when I do this behavior, my parent hurts me, so I shouldn’t do that behavior again.) But they’re not learning much else. Like what TO DO. (Or how to read, how to throw a ball, how to eat neatly… whatever it is the parent hopes they will learn soon. The survival mode brain doesn’t care about any of those things) Daniel Siegel has written about this neurological effect in The Whole Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline. Watch a video about it here.
85% of parents say they would rather not spank if they had a discipline alternative they believe would work. You can read my take on positive discipline here, or advice from the CDC here, or follow the recommendations in the Psychology of Spanking article [excerpts below…]
1) Develop a positive, supportive, loving relationship between parent and child:
2) Use positive reinforcement strategies to increase desired behaviors…
3) Remove reinforcements or apply punishment to reduce or eliminate undesired behaviors.
Learn lots more options for discipline tools that help you to teach your child how to be a good person – which should be the final goal of disciplining a child – in the Discipline Toolbox.
More Good Days with Kids 