Read this article today that got me thinking of my childhood. Being Asian, my parents were, at times, hypercritical by Western standards. They cautioned me more than praise me. They never helped me with my homework or projects while pushing me to excel in school. I felt a little cheated when I had to study or work on house projects during my summer vacation while all my friends went to the beach and played video games or sports with their buddies. Now when I'm all grown up, I understand all that unpleasantness really helped me be more resilient and self-reliant compared to my peers. And had I to do it all over again, I would probably study harder and paid more attention to Dad's lesson on how to spackle drywall.
How was everyone else's childhood? And our beautiful parents, how do you feel about this article?
THE belief that regular praise will improve the self-esteem of students has backfired, with educators urging over-anxious parents to let their children fail so they can learn from their mistakes. Parents were also doing too much for their children who were becoming less resilient and unable to cope with failure. Some were even too scared to put up their hand in class and risk giving the wrong answer. As new research shows that members of Generation Y are entering the workforce with an inflated sense of their abilities, principals are warning ''helicopter parents'' against putting too much pressure on children to be successful, which could discourage them from risking failure. Rod Kefford, the headmaster of Barker College, has warned: ''We are creating a generation of very fearful learners and the quality of our intellectual life will suffer as a result.'' Today's students are let down lightly by teachers and wrapped in cotton wool by some parents. But in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for teachers to tell students bluntly that they had given a wrong answer. ''Then someone invented the concept of self-esteem,'' Dr Kefford said. ''In some ways it has been the most damaging educational concept that has ever been conceived. ''We couldn't do anything that would upset or harm the self-esteem of students, which was very fragile, we were led to believe … That is when we stopped our proper work in the character formation in young people. If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail. It is only through our failings in the learning process that we learn anything.'' He said schools needed to give children the confidence to risk failure to encourage more creative thinking. ''[Through] this fear we have of ever allowing them to fail, we are selling them short as human beings and as future adults,'' he said. One of the first empirical studies on generational differences in work values shows Generation Y or the ''millennials'' (born between 1982 and 1999) are entering the workforce overconfident and with a sense of entitlement. The research, led by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University and published in the Journal of Management, shows this generation wants money and the status of a prestigious job without putting in long hours. When they do not get the marks they expect at university or rise quickly enough in their jobs, they turn into quitters. ''More and more students are reaching university not knowing how to do things for themselves. Parents think they are helping young people by doing things for them but they are actually making them less independent,'' Professor Twenge said. ''It is now common for parents and teachers to tell children, 'you are special' and 'you can be anything you want to be'.'' While such comments are meant to encourage students and raise their self-esteem, experts say they can inflate students' egos. ''Feeling special often means the expectation of special treatment,'' she said. ''Your parents might think you're special but the rest of the world might not. This can be a difficult adjustment.''
I don't have any kids of my own, so of course, I have *tons* of opinions.
Here's a related article:
The Power and Peril of Praising Your Kids
Amy
rectumdamnnearkilledem
I was a pretty serious slacker and every quarterly report card was met with "we know you can do better. Your teachers know you can do better. Your principal wants to know why you are not at the top of the class and pulling straight-As after seeing your standardized test scores." When I did well in a class instead of congratulations I was met with "OK, now we expect to see grades like that in all your classes."
It wasn't until college when I was paying for my education that I started to produce the sort of results that my parents told me I should be (though I still suck at Math, just not as much as I did in HS).
My brother graduated 2nd in his class and went on to earn his BS at Northwestern and later his MS at Illinois Institute of Technology. He was the brainiac, but I don't recall my parents really praising him. Their style was really more to acknowledge work well done and encouragement to keep at it.
My baby sister, on the other hand. They handled her a lot more gently. She was always petite and looked younger than her age by about 2 years, so even strangers treated her as a younger child. She was pampered and during sibling squabbles our parents would always come to her rescue...and she was never found at fault in any situation.
My parents definitely practiced more of a "helicopter parenting" style with her. She got into drugs, flunked-out of community college (on academic probation) and had 2 kids out of wedlock by her early 20s--the 2nd while she was living at home (and the placenta from baby #2 tested positive for barbituates and speed). It's only in the past couple of years that my parents have come to admit that maybe they were too easy on her...gee, ya' think?! They blew most of what little retirement savings they had on supporting her and her boys. This has hurt everyone involved.
Getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to
remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
~ Sarah Kay
A Saucy Wench
My kids are montessori which is the opposite of helicopter (which isnt to say there arent helicopter parents at our school, there definitely are, but the school itself teaches non-helicopter style)
Montessori does not believe in praise. You can show enthusiasm without praise. It's really hard NOT to praise and not something I am particularly good at. My instinct is to praise.
It's not being critical, its being neutral like instead of "Good job, your painting is so pretty" you say "I see you used a lot of colors today in your painting, can you tell me about your picture!" and letting them praise themselves. Or criticize themselves. That is the harder part. When dd comes home with a new job that she has never tried before and says "I didnt do it correctly, I made mistakes" it is so so so so hard not to say something like "Oh, that's ok, you did your best and I love it!" It is so exciting to me that she is doing math. The truth is seeing that she isn't upset by the mistakes, she isn't denigrating herself, she is saying that she knows she can do better if she keeps trying. And when she gets it right, THEN she praises herself and is very proud of her accomplishment.
I wasnt challenged enough. Success by good grades is all that was ever asked of me. Well, I could do that without much effort, so why go beyond. Why do more. To this day I really struggle with work ethic and challenges. Because I never was challenged I never really did the facing failure thing and I find it hard to take risks.
As for the doing things for you part. God it makes me cringe when I see kids entering college who cant function. I do need to get better about making my daughter do things for herself.
I have become Death, the destroyer of electronic gadgets
"When I got too tired to run anymore I just pretended I wasnt tired and kept running anyway" - dd, age 7
I really struggle with this. Both my kids are tiny for their age (Duh, I'm 5'4 and dh is 5'3) and OTHER people do this all the time. I have been in playgroups and other situations where other parents constantly make their kid defer to mine even when mine is being the brat because "they're just so little"
It also make strangers over-praise my son especially. They dont get that he is 3 1/2, they think he is barely 2 and are talking about how smart he is and how well he speaks all the time. And oh my god. He is potty trained.
Even the eye-doctor was just so impressed that my 6 year old daughter knew all her letters well enough to do the eye test. Enough that she blamed the mistakes she made on the 20/20 row on her age and not on her vision.
I was a pretty serious slacker and every quarterly report card was met with "we know you can do better. Your teachers know you can do better. Your principal wants to know why you are not at the top of the class and pulling straight-As after seeing your standardized test scores." When I did well in a class instead of congratulations I was met with "OK, now we expect to see grades like that in all your classes." It wasn't until college when I was paying for my education that I started to produce the sort of results that my parents told me I should be (though I still suck at Math, just not as much as I did in HS).
Zoom-Zoom, I'm sorry to hear about your sister. That sounds rough on everyone involved.
So, do you think it was just the fact that you were paying for your education that made you take it more seriously? Or did something else change?
The school Dane is at consistently ranks at the top of all schools in the state on standardized tests. It's a public charter school, so they aren't pure Montessori in some ways--traditionally Montessori only goes through Kindergarten. We have a charter Montessori school a little over an hour from us that goes through HS and I think is among the top 5 public schools in MI. We wish we could have Dane go there once he is in HS, since his school only goes through 8th grade. But the distance makes it impossible without moving.
Another thing that makes Montessori so "cool," is that the kids get a work-plan for each week. They know in advance that they need to complete as much as they can each day. They don't use a graded system, but pass/fail. No one is working for a specific grade, but they cannot move onto new levels in Math or Reading until they have completed the previous level. No one is competing with everyone else and they do a lot of small-group learning. The teachers don't hover, they simply act as a guide to help students when the students seek them out for assistance.
Students are encouraged to accomplish their goals in whatever fashion works best for them, rather than being tied to a desk and 45 minute class periods. I would have done very well in that environment, I think. It's worked perfectly with Dane's overly active tendencies. If he needs to get up and move around he can. Wiggly kids aren't a distraction or considered "problematic."
Like Ennay said, kids aren't so much praised as acknowledged. When they complete one activity they are encouraged to meet even greater challenges with the next activity and to apply and expand upon what they have already learned.
They are also responsible for keeping their classroom clean. Even toddlers in a Montessori school are responsible for sweeping, mopping, washing dishes, and tidying-up their work areas. That's another thing, in the Montessori setting they don't have assignments, they have "works." From the very beginning kids are taught that learning is work. And work can be a lot of fun, but it's still a job with a purpose. Learning is presented as something of great importance and not simply hurdles to be overcome and forgotten.
That was part of it, but I think I also really was eager to learn stuff that *I* wanted to learn, instead of taking classes because they were simply a requirement to graduate HS. In HS I always loved my electives, but really was not fond of the classes I HAD to take, KWIM? In college even required classes usually offer some choice. In college my lab Science course was Geology, which I flippin' loved. I had a great teacher, fun classmates, and got to study something I actually had interest in. For my non-lab Science course I was able to take an Anthro class. In HS my options were pretty much Bio and Chem. And I had no choice of instructors in a HS of ~200 students. There was only one instructor for each course.
I also think college was a much better environment for critical thinking and discussion. In HS everything is pretty much rote memorization and listening passively to lecture. Not nearly as much room for debate or active participation. In college I didn't enjoy lecture-based classes nearly as much as I did smaller discussion courses.
Ditto what Ennay said about Montessori (BTW, I don't think I knew you had your kids in Montessori school, too--cool! I think I remember you talking about considering that option a while back).
We've been in Montessori for 4 years with dd, since she was 2.5. I think the only debating I've been doing is if she is staying through 3rd or 6th grade. I was in Montessori as a kid, so I knew that's what I wanted even before having kids.
That is not true that traditionally Montessori only goes through kindergarten. There is Montessori through highschool although it is hard to find it past 8th grade in many places. There are MORE montessori preschools than there are elementary schools, but the curriculum goes the whole way.
Yes, but Maria Montessori originally developed her method of teaching for infants through primary and it's still relatively more common as a pre-primary institution. MM didn't directly develop a secondary ed. program, though they have been developed and implemented (like the k-12 Montessori school an hour from us). AFAIK there were no Montessori HSs before her death and all have been established since then. I guess I shouldn't have had said "traditionally," but it's definitely most common to find a Montessori school that only goes infant through K. It's relatively uncommon to find Montessori that goes beyond middle school.
Since Dane's school is publically funded they still have to follow some public school criteria, but mostly this is related to standardized testing. They still use Montessori teaching tools and classroom set-up. Teachers are addressed by their first names. As a result Dane has a hard time calling other adults Mr. and Mrs.
I know my school went through 8th grade. American montessori took off in the 70's. Some of the materials developed for the upper math stuff is incredible. I wanted to steal it when I was teaching GMAT.
Funny at our school the older teachers are Mr. & Mrs. Tarnowski and Mrs. Hudson and the aide is Mrs. Parker but the younger teachers are Miss Kristen and Miss Ashley.
Our school is totally private and the curriculum is worked in 3 year chunks. So if you sign on for first grade but decide to switch to public school without notice you could be putting your child in a pickle. Because all they work towards is that at the end of the 3rd year they will have covered all the material for 1st -3rd grade but in any given year the kid may have done 1st-3rd in math but hardly any reading. If you give them notice they'll catch them up.
Ahh...Dane's school is in 2 year groupings. They have 2 classrooms for each grade until middle school (though the grade level kids are still semi-separated within each classroom, so that helps keep the kids from lagging too far behind in any subject area). Those kids are in one big mass. AFAIK most kids who start there stay all the way through 8th, since it is such a wonderful, close-knit place. We're already dreading the day that Dane has to go to HS. He will likely know no one, since there are only 3 kids up this way who attend his school and one is 3 years older than him, while the other is 3 years younger. We wish we could find a way to enroll him at the HS near his current school without it being a big logistical PITA. That school is #1 in the state and is the district we'd be in had we not moved (which we regret all the time...DH works in that community).
My mom's group and dance means Samantha knows a fair number of other kids right now, but yeah, I have already seen that she doesnt get birthday invites from the neighborhood kids as often because they have their public school friends.
My concern is a little bit how SMALL the classes get. Seems backwards I know. Pre-K & K they have about 28 kids which is big, I think 1-3 is about 14 and 3-6 is 4-5 kids (but they just started the 3-6 program). Samantha is very very social so if it drops too small it could be too much like home schooling for her.
One of the parents who has her kids in the upper classroom takes her son to public school for 1st period phys ed. and then brings him 15 minutes late to montessori and that has helped a lot with him getting to know the peers in his neighborhood. Phys ed and computers are the two areas I think the montessori needs to upgrade. It really is time for me to get a new computer and set this one up for the kids.
Plus in a bizarre way I am concerned that she will be TOO sheltered. As much as I hate the exposure that kids have now to violence and sex and the like I think it is almost equally damaging to be the one totally innocent kid in a class of jaded pre-adolescents. I was that kid. I was still playing with barbies while my peers were watching MTV. Not a good time, still scarred.
One day at a time
Our son is going to go to a college 2,500 miles away from us. One reason is that I KNOW I am too controlling, so this way he will be on his own. He'll be in my hometown, though, so there will be plenty of family nearby if he runs into problems. I'm happy for him but will miss him terribly! I know he'll do great.