My kid is better than your kid!
July 9th 2008 15:26
Competition is a beautiful thing in most cases. When it comes to the free market or a hockey game, I’m all up for competition thriving like crazy. With my kids, its another story.
I could sit here and tell you how smart my little ones are. I could brag about how my 3 year old is starting calculus, my 16 month old has discovered a new star, and my 7 week old is already quoting Shakespeare. I mean, these are my kids after all- they should be doing amazing things right?
On a bulletin board I frequent, I saw a new group for gifted toddlers and preschoolers. I was curious, because like most parent I consider my children to be the smartest in the world. What I found was a bunch of self-thanking people who were asking questions of each other more to show off their kids talents than to actually get any real answer. There was a woman who had asked if anyone thought that their preschool would be able to accommodate their child’s gift and what she should do about it if they couldn’t. Along with the post, she posted pictures that the child, barely three, had drawn. I was frankly amazed at how good the pictures were. Where most three year olds are drawing large circles heads with crooked smiles and arms and legs coming out of the head, this child had drawn a real bird with feathers and everything. Does this mean that I think this child should be in art school a few days a week to hone their abilities? Absolutely not.
Kids can only handle the world in tiny bites, so as preschoolers they tend to obsess over things. Some kids will obsess over drawing- making faces and trees and flowers day and night until they find some other new trick to occupy their time. As parents, it is certainly our responsibility to encourage them and allow them to grow. The operative word there is to ALLOW.
We have to allow for them to be smart, we have to allow for them to be behind, for them to love music one day and hate it the next. We have to allow them to expand their interests and move from one to the next in order to have full exposure to the world around them. We can’t push them into a mold of who we think they should be or to use whatever talents we see in them. Encourage them when they do well, and when they might not be the best at something, encourage them anyway.
My parents were always super-encouraging. They sat through basketball games when I never touched the ball, through volleyball games where I missed every shot, music solos where I screached away on my clarinet, uncoordinated cheerleader routines from their daughter who was so obviously not cheerleader material… I enjoyed trying new things and they let me do it. If, as a child, they had pushed me in one direction or another instead of letting me experiment, I may not have found my own strengths which later led me to the music and literature that I chose to study- decisions which have shaped who I am as an adult.
Besides the personality issues that can occur from pressuring a child in one direction or another, we also have to consider what can occur if we put too much academic pressure on toddlers. Before the age of five, kids thrive on play. They learn key social interaction skills that will benefit them immensely in the future. If we change that natural inclination and try to reprogram their little brains to sit and learn instead of play, it sets them up for behavioral problems in the future.
If a child WANTS to sit and learn something, that is absolutely fine. I’ve seen children who genuinely want to sit and practice letters, and in that case I certainly wouldn’t stop them. As a preschool teacher, I continually wondered if I was truly helping kids when I forced them to sit and write because that it what was expected from the parents.
It is a constant struggle as a parent to try to decide what it right for our kids. Allowing growth is perhaps the most important thing we can do for them. My son really enjoys trying to write letters right now, but compared to the interests of some children I have seen, my son's primary interest is not on a particularly scholarly arc right now. He is currently having a serious obsession with Spider-Man, which has led to an obsession with super-heroes in general. I sometimes get a little overwhelmed with all of the fun. He has sticker books and early reader books, which we all have memorized because he makes me read them every night. He has a memory matching game with Spider-Man and Friends and quizzes me on the names of the characters on the cards- from Storm and Cyclops to Scorpion and Doctor Octopus, or the Thing and Rhino. He knows who Mary Jane is and tells me every day that Uncle Ben got killed by a burglar. He knows that Wolverine is a friend, as well as Captain America and Daredevil. If a super-hero movie of any kind is on FX, you can be sure that it is on at our house. His “good boy” chart currently earns him quarters for a weekly trip to play on old Spider-Man video game at the local farmers market. He teaches me 12 times a day how to shoot webs from my wrists and we have pretend web battles daily. This is the slice of life my 3-year-old has chosen to enjoy for now. I couldn’t be more proud.
I could sit here and tell you how smart my little ones are. I could brag about how my 3 year old is starting calculus, my 16 month old has discovered a new star, and my 7 week old is already quoting Shakespeare. I mean, these are my kids after all- they should be doing amazing things right?
On a bulletin board I frequent, I saw a new group for gifted toddlers and preschoolers. I was curious, because like most parent I consider my children to be the smartest in the world. What I found was a bunch of self-thanking people who were asking questions of each other more to show off their kids talents than to actually get any real answer. There was a woman who had asked if anyone thought that their preschool would be able to accommodate their child’s gift and what she should do about it if they couldn’t. Along with the post, she posted pictures that the child, barely three, had drawn. I was frankly amazed at how good the pictures were. Where most three year olds are drawing large circles heads with crooked smiles and arms and legs coming out of the head, this child had drawn a real bird with feathers and everything. Does this mean that I think this child should be in art school a few days a week to hone their abilities? Absolutely not.
Kids can only handle the world in tiny bites, so as preschoolers they tend to obsess over things. Some kids will obsess over drawing- making faces and trees and flowers day and night until they find some other new trick to occupy their time. As parents, it is certainly our responsibility to encourage them and allow them to grow. The operative word there is to ALLOW.
We have to allow for them to be smart, we have to allow for them to be behind, for them to love music one day and hate it the next. We have to allow them to expand their interests and move from one to the next in order to have full exposure to the world around them. We can’t push them into a mold of who we think they should be or to use whatever talents we see in them. Encourage them when they do well, and when they might not be the best at something, encourage them anyway.
My parents were always super-encouraging. They sat through basketball games when I never touched the ball, through volleyball games where I missed every shot, music solos where I screached away on my clarinet, uncoordinated cheerleader routines from their daughter who was so obviously not cheerleader material… I enjoyed trying new things and they let me do it. If, as a child, they had pushed me in one direction or another instead of letting me experiment, I may not have found my own strengths which later led me to the music and literature that I chose to study- decisions which have shaped who I am as an adult.
Besides the personality issues that can occur from pressuring a child in one direction or another, we also have to consider what can occur if we put too much academic pressure on toddlers. Before the age of five, kids thrive on play. They learn key social interaction skills that will benefit them immensely in the future. If we change that natural inclination and try to reprogram their little brains to sit and learn instead of play, it sets them up for behavioral problems in the future.
If a child WANTS to sit and learn something, that is absolutely fine. I’ve seen children who genuinely want to sit and practice letters, and in that case I certainly wouldn’t stop them. As a preschool teacher, I continually wondered if I was truly helping kids when I forced them to sit and write because that it what was expected from the parents.
It is a constant struggle as a parent to try to decide what it right for our kids. Allowing growth is perhaps the most important thing we can do for them. My son really enjoys trying to write letters right now, but compared to the interests of some children I have seen, my son's primary interest is not on a particularly scholarly arc right now. He is currently having a serious obsession with Spider-Man, which has led to an obsession with super-heroes in general. I sometimes get a little overwhelmed with all of the fun. He has sticker books and early reader books, which we all have memorized because he makes me read them every night. He has a memory matching game with Spider-Man and Friends and quizzes me on the names of the characters on the cards- from Storm and Cyclops to Scorpion and Doctor Octopus, or the Thing and Rhino. He knows who Mary Jane is and tells me every day that Uncle Ben got killed by a burglar. He knows that Wolverine is a friend, as well as Captain America and Daredevil. If a super-hero movie of any kind is on FX, you can be sure that it is on at our house. His “good boy” chart currently earns him quarters for a weekly trip to play on old Spider-Man video game at the local farmers market. He teaches me 12 times a day how to shoot webs from my wrists and we have pretend web battles daily. This is the slice of life my 3-year-old has chosen to enjoy for now. I couldn’t be more proud.
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