How can I help my child? It’s the most natural impulse and question for a parent. I am a mother. I move through every day trying to make my children’s life happy and complete. I question, struggle and muddle through the ins and outs of parenting every day, and I have been doing so for the last eleven years with my two happy, talented, intelligent sons. I am very aware that today’s children are growing up in a world that is full of a different kind of experience than the one we went through. We passed notes in class, watched One Day at a Time, Little House on the Prairie, and The Brady Bunch. We rode our bikes far from our homes without thinking much about safety and we played with our neighborhood friends in our yards and made meeting places for our parents to pick us up because there were no phones where we were going to be. This is not the world our children are growing up in. Their world is different and as parents we need to not just think wistfully about what was, but ask ourselves what we need to know in order to parent our children in this changed world.
I am a mother, but I am also a teacher, a teacher of young children. I have taught children as young as three and as old as 8 and in my twenty year career I have seen the evolution of a new kind of childhood. Children are growing more distracted, less aware of appropriate boundaries with authority and perhaps most disturbingly, less comfortable being asked to think deeply about things. Is it an effect of too much screen time from a young age, children being raised by parents who are rarely home because both parents need to be working, too much emphasis on where are we headed and how do we quickly get there, increasing expectations on the parts of federal and state governments? I am not an expert on why things are changing as rapidly and significantly as they are. But given my experiences over two decades of early childhood teaching experiences, I am very aware of the fact that fewer and fewer children are coming to school ready to learn.
There are big conversations to be had and a great need for reflection into our ways of parenting and teaching. As the popularity and success of movies like Race to Nowhere will attest, many communities are ready to be having those conversations. It is important that as parents and teachers, we not let those conversations and debates end when the lights come up in the theater. But we are also ultimately responsible for our own children and we have to acknowledge that change of systems can be slow. Even in the best case scenarios, in which a community decides together to make steps toward change, results are not immediate and we, as parents, are left with the question of how to prepare our young children for the world of school and life that they will be living in.
And yet this is not a question of workbooks and flashcards and computer games that teach math facts. What this generation of children needs, desperately, is to think creatively. When we look at the road ahead for our children, it is becoming increasingly obvious that higher education will be necessary to get most jobs, that most jobs will be hiring people not just on their record of achievement, but on their ability to think outside the box, and that students need opportunities to practice this kind of in-depth thinking frequently.
In large part, schools are responding to this challenge with an analysis of curriculum, teaching methods, questioning techniques, and assessments. But teachers, especially at the elementary level, are fighting an uphill battle because students are coming to school with fewer of the experiences that prepare them for learning and provide the background knowledge necessary for students to make sense and meaning of these open, inventive and in depth experiences.
As parents of young children, and I’m specifically addressing the parents of three to six year olds here, there are things you can do. If these efforts are taken seriously and made a genuine part of your child’s life experience, they will in fact create a child who enters school ready to learn, prepared to think, and who can reach higher because the emphasis in their life will be on learning and thinking, not getting the “right” answer.
