Optimal Child-rearing debate

Great Debates
21

So parents that post on parenting boards are not capable of intellengent debate :confused:

I am still sort of confused on what you want to debate.

The “procedure” of raising ones children is far to vast for a “am I doing this right?” debate.

From your OP…

What I want to know is what should I be doing?

Instead of pointing out things in a “that is a bird” sort of way. You might form it as a question. “Darcy do you see the white bird? That bird is called a seagull”

By forming it as a question you make sure you have his attention and while you have it for that split second you have told him the name of the bird.

I also say encouraging affirmations to him like ‘Darcy is a good boy’; ‘Darcy is a happy boy’; ‘Darcy is a prosperous boy’; ‘Darcy is an intelligent boy’.

Do you actually say it like that? I am sorry but it sounds like you are talking to a dog.

Perhaps waiting until Darcy is actually doing something intellegent, putting the round peg in the round hole, might be the time to make a statement like “Wow, Darcy you are such a smart little boy, Mommy/Daddy is so proud of you”

What is the optimal thing do be doing?

Are you asking just about the park visit and the re-enforcement that Darcy is so wonderful or on child raising as a whole because again the question is to vast for anything other than opinions and what is working or has worked for other parents.

22

This confused me as well. Especially the part about Darcy being a prosperous boy - does he know what that means? That just seems like a weird thing to say to a kid, but that’s just my opinion.

I worry a lot about parents overpraising their kids. I think cheering children on and praising them occasionally is a good idea; however, it seems like overdoing it results in a kid doing things for praise or assuming they’re awesome just because mommy or daddy said so. I’d rather my kid do stuff because it makes him proud of himself or feel good about himself or for the simple joy of learning to do something new instead of getting praise from me. Not to say that I don’t praise my almost-two-year old - I just try not to overdo it and I try to tie it to an actual action, as noted above, instead of telling him he’s great just because.

So I try to say, “Wow, that’s great! That must feel so good to draw like that,” or “You must be really proud to use the potty by yourself for the first time! Good job.” And after a while, you just have to stop praising an action. I mean, certain things ought to be expected. Like putting toys away. I made a big deal out of it at first, but it’s also something that I fully expect him to continue doing no matter what I say. It’s part of living in my house - everyone picks up their crap. So now it’s just part of our routine. I say thank you when he’s done and make it a point to encourage politeness, but him picking up his own things isn’t the revelation it once was.

And another thing, as Marienee noted, parenting changes as your kid changes. It’s horrible, but until they get to a certain age, it’s a lot like having a really demanding pet. The differences include that you can’t give them away and you talk to them a lot more. (Okay, there are a lot more differences, but still…)

I still struggle with the idea that my kid is another person now with his own likes and dislikes and far more complicated emotions than ever before. Where I used to ask his opinion on what he wanted for dinner just for expediency (whole wheat pasta or chicken curry?) and to make sure he’d eat something, now I actually have to take somewhat into consideration his likes and dislikes when planning meals for the week. I have to afford him some measure of respect because he’s another person, not only because it makes life easier.

What really stinks is having to set an example. I have to eat healthier if I expect him to make good choices. I have to pick my crap up if I tell him to. Sometimes it really sucks. But at least our house is cleaner and I’ve lost 20 pounds.

23

Now that’s something to argue over! IMO parents should not tell their kids that they’re smart. That can give rise to all sorts of problems; kid thinks “I’m smart, therefore things should be easy. If it’s not easy, then I’m dumb. If I’m dumb I’m no good. So I won’t try anything I don’t already know how to do!”

It’s much more important to work hard and try things out. Also, a kid who thinks she’s smarter than other kids --and that it’s important-- is going to have problems. My kid is pretty bright (though not incredibly gifted or anything) and I don’t tell her so. She has lots of friends of varying abilities and we talk about how people have different talents and are good at different things. I try to comment on her work on a project and on putting in the effort, rather than praising her for being clever.

In college, I knew too many people who coasted through high school, thinking that they were the best and that smarts would get them anywhere. When they got to a place where everyone was just as smart as they were and suddenly it was work habits that made the difference, a lot of them crashed and burned. (In a way, I was lucky; I knew quite well that I was not as smart as most of them, and that I would have to work hard to keep up. I didn’t get a zillion A’s, but that didn’t bother me because I was happy to be passing, whereas my friends would freak out over A-'s.)

24

I agree with this, but you shouldn’t downplay kids’ achievements. Telling a kid who got a 95 on a test that they should have gotten 100 is just as damaging as telling a kid who got a 70 he did well.

I saw a lot of this in college. Those of us who didn’t have the very highest grades in high school, who weren’t valedictorians, worked harder and did better than most of those who were. My roommate one year had some of the highest math scores in Texas, and was looked at in awe by his high school teachers. (I went home with him and saw this directly.) He didn’t do particularly well, and is now in a blah job. On the other hand I knew some people smart enough to breeze through MIT without working very hard. The worst thing was that they were nice too.

25

I am an ardent proponent of reading to your child and surrounding her with books. Hearing and responding to stories read from books is probably the most important literacy experience a child can have. Most parents whose children have a high level of literacy development before starting school did not teach their kids in organized, directed lessons but encouraged literacy experiences in a meaningful context. Children make the solid connection between print and meaning when it occurs naturally. When Story time is a bedtime routine, it establishes a meaningful literacy experience and good memories.

Now, ten books a day is putting a measurement on an activity that should be natural and spontaneous.

26

But do you think this may have more to do with underachievement than parental praise. I agree with the notion that false praise is not good and kids know when praise isn’t deserved. It is not uncommon to witness extremely bright people go through life as underachievers.

27

Goodness no. Pressuring kids for achievement is just the opposite of what I think parents should do. IMO it should be a parent’s job to say “Do your best, be pleased with what you accomplish when you do your best, you’re responsible for what you decide to do.” Ideally a kid should be working for herself and her own satisfaction, not for her parents’ approval. And a child should know, bone-deep, that her parents love her for who she is, not for who they want her to be or for what grades she gets.

It’s something of a fine line, but you shouldn’t downplay or be over-fulsome. Praise is tricky stuff in itself, and I think we’re all too addicted to it (for lack of a better term). I think it’s better to find other ways to interact with our kids, but it’s terribly difficult because we’re all so used to it. Overlyverbose gives a couple of examples of what I mean.

28

Doesn’t necessarily have to do with excessive praise. Often it is because if you are reasonably intelligent, you can simply get by without much effort. Lord knows I did throughout high school and university. :wink:

Example: sitting bored and stoned at the back of the class in calculus, physics, functions & relations etc., working on doodlings and other projects … and then learning the course the night before the test and getting an “A”. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Later: taking essay courses, writing the typical 10 page essay per term in a couple of days, spend the rest of the time partying.

Problem is this sort of thing can only go so far, eventually one must develop actual good work habits or go under. What did it for me was law school. I went to a relatively good school in Canada (U of T), because once again it was easy to do well on the LSAT and my Uni marks were high - only to discover it was a whole new world, in that every single person there was someone who either worked really, really hard, or was of the sort that could coast on ability, and quite often both. Coasting no longer worked. Fortunately, I was able to figure this out before crashing and burning … but it was close.

BTW I do not in the least blame my parents for my bad habits. I think it was just too easy to fall into them, and being intelligent isn’t any defense against being lazy … one just works out better ways to procrastinate.

Now that I’m older and a parent myself of a 2 year old boy, I guess my approach has been to praise wanted behaviour highly and to assure the little fellow that I both love and like him (not exactly the same thing) … which isn’t hard to do as it is true.

29

This was MIT, so I don’t think any of us could be classified as underachievers. I think it was a lot more overachieving in high school without having to stretch, and then forgetting how.

30

I think what saved me was that I suck at languages, so Spanish in school was always a struggle. I did fine but I had to work hard, unlike any of the other classes. My roommate is a lot smarter than me, inherently, but he didn’t have a certain hunger. I always went to class, since I never assumed I was smart enough to pick up the information otherwise.

31

Well, the idea that it was MIT which exemplifies achievement was also my immediate thought, but achievement is relative to ability. Having the ability to achieve in a school like MIT but not realizing the potential is still underachievement.

32

Ability can only reach its potential with hard work. I certainly don’t disagree with this point. It is important to academically challenge students with high ability or they do not learn the importance of determination and effort. Students who don’t want to work will not achieve. Simple but true.

33

I’d take the issue in a different direction… If you keep repeating the same thing to your kid, it will lose its meaning. You have to change it up, and, better yet, be strategic. If you reaffirm him where he did do a good job, he’ll believe it wholeheartedly and feel even better. Not to mention, you’ll be nudging him in the right directions: teaching him, not just egging him on. The trick is to make sure that, overall, the balance of how you act to him is positive and reasoned. Trying to put him into a constant high, however, is futile and counter-productive.

34

This is so unfair to the dedicated writer of that article, but I couldn’t help laughing at this bit…

Insidious, that “praising for acheivement”, isn’t it?

I first encountered ideas about the Perils of Praise reading the work of Alfie Kohn who takes this very far indeed - he’s against any rewards (or at least “non-intrinsic” rewards) for desired behaviour at all, on the grounds that a) it’s manipulative and b) it doesn’t work past the short term (that’s the Cliffs Notes version - he really deserves to be read fully, but I’m not going to simply regurgitate his website here). His thesis is that we simply need to be what we want our kids to be - lead by example and not by punishment and rewards.

Which is a fine old theory in the long term but as you find out when you’re actually ‘at the coal face’ is that it’s not much help when your two-year-old whacks their playmate on the head and steals their toy - at that point you pretty much have to do SOMETHING, and it’s probably going to have a reward or a punishment in there somewhere.

At the meta-level, though, this is what I think about “Optimal child-rearing” - ain’t no such animal.

Try this little experiment. Think about the one person in the world you admire the most. Could be anyone - Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, the Pope - it doesn’t matter. Now - go find out what that person’s childhood was like. Was it “optimal”? I’m betting not. What about the next-most admired three or four people? Were their childhoods “optimal”? Were they even at all like each others? I doubt it.

And, you know, I prefer it like that. Because the alternative is that children are (given the raw material which you don’t have much control over) completely programmed (consciously or not) by their parents/caretakers. Want an “optimal” child (whatever that is)? Simply plug in the optimal child-rearing, and away you go. Or alternatively, if you’re a fucked-up individual with no parenting skills and you (by accident or design) do the exact opposite of the right thing - well then, the kid’s got absolutely no chance at all. And I don’t believe that either.

Your child is going to be different - like everyone else. The reason why parenting discussions are generally chock full of “in my opinion” and “well what worked for us…” is because that’s what parenting is like - there isn’t one program that you can learn and that’s going to give you the answer to everything. There’s just this enourmous grab-bag of “stuff other parents did in situations that are kinda like situation X that you’re in”, and some of those things worked, and some didn’t, and sometimes people think stuff worked or didn’t and then ten years later they find out they were completely wrong.

This parenting lark is scary shit. We’re all nuts really, I mostly think :wink:

35

Now that’s the “you got a 95? Why not 100” attitude that dangermom so rightly objects to. MIT when I was there didn’t have an honor roll or valedictorians or any of that stuff, just to discourage excessive tooling - the term for studying. When you hit my age you realize that none of us live up to our potential, no matter how long we live, since there aren’t enough hours in the day. To get back to the thread topic, this just shows that it isn’t easy to steer a course between not enough encouragement and too much. What makes it even worse are kids who push themselves twice as hard as you ever push them. Plus, you as a parent are by nature a stake in the ground. If you have had any sort of success, they’ll want to exceed it, even if their talents lie in a different direction. None of this is easy.

36

My comment about “you are so smart” was really an example but I can see where dangermom is coming from.

You also have to look at the child and their personality. Encouragement or praise may need to be individualized.

If a child is struggling with school work then small leaps may require extra praise for encouragement to work harder while that same type of praise is not required for a child that breezes right through it all but they still deserve acknowledgement.

Children do not come with manuals and even if they did there are so many different model numbers that the library would be enormous. It would be nice though to ride into Google and download your kids PDF file.

37

Yup.

Next issue, and for me the hardest since I don’t know any surefire answer - how does one inculcate into a child the desire to work hard and achieve? And work hard and achieve at what? To what extent should we be encouraging children to develop their own goals (even if we do not approve of them, or know they are very unlikely to work out)?

For adult children I have seen two equal-but-opposite sources of resentment:

  1. “My parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do, but I really didn’t know what I wanted. I ended up taking courses in art theory, because I sorta liked art, but had no real passion for it; I was in a half-assed garage band, but had no real talent; I thought about writing a novel, but didn’t have a story to tell. Now I work at a menial job - and I’m miserable”; vs

  2. “My parents always emphasized to me the importance of success, hard work and determination. I went through university grasping for every brass ring I could. Now I’m a partner at a major law firm, I earn a huge salary - and I’m miserable”.

There has to be some sort of middle course, a give-and-take of directions/life experience and freedom to choose.

38

I like the idea of mandating that a child chose one brain hobby (cooking class, chemistry club, art museum tours, whatever) and one body hobby (dance lessons, karate, soccer, swimming, etc.) per year, with a year long dedication to that hobby. After a year is up, they may stick with it or switch to something else. Maybe for little ones, six months.

I’ve never tried this, mind you, but it sounds good in theory! :smiley:

39

Heh not bad. :wink: I want to at least teach him swimming as a safety thing.

We have our two year old in baby music class and he loves it. Mind you, he has an excellent teacher. If anyone reading this lives in Toronto, I’d recommend her:

http://www.kingswayconservatory.ca/HTML/faculty.php?id=T-Olkha

She really has a way with children.

Last night, he did the cutest thing - he wanted to dance to music. So I started to drum on the sofa with a pair of hollow plastic tubes. He would happily dance around in a circle until tired, when he would yell “stop!”. Then he would say “one, two, three - start music … now!” and raise his hands in the air - and I’d start the drumming again, and he’d start dancing.

40

I heard a really interesting story on NPR on my way to work this morning that discusses education and the importance of free play. Here’s an article that sums it up.

The gist is that, in order to be successful, kids need (among other things obviously) the opportunity to play by themselves and use their imaginations instead of playing with toys that have a predetermined purpose. According to the article, this type of play helps children learn to self regulate. They cited a test that was performed sixty years ago, then again recently where they had children of ages 3, 5 and 7 hold still. Sixty years ago, the kids age 3 couldn’t perform the task; at the same time, kids age 5 could hold still for a few minutes; still in the same era, kids age 7 could hold still as long as they were instructed to do so.

However, when the same test was performed recently (I think last year), the three year olds still couldn’t hold still, the five year olds performed at a three year old level and the seven year olds performed at a significantly lower level as well.

The story indicated that kids who were allowed to participate in non-regulated imaginative play had more of an opportunity for inner dialogue, creating rules for themselves in play. That inner dialogue they developed was apparently something that they continued to use as adults, which, according to the study, was a much better indicator of success than IQ or intelligence.

I thought about this thread and another I was participating in in IMHO where the OP asked when people realized they were smarter than their peers.

Anyway, I’d like to know more about the study - can’t take it as gospel (or even base practices on it before you know more about it) - but when I think about it, it does make sense that kids who are provided an opportunity to think for themselves and set rules for themselves are more likely to be successful later on because they can use that to build on the discpline their parents have to offer in order to manage time, focus on study, reduce negative impulsive behavior, etc.

I’d love to get others’ opinions on this.

For the record, I remember when I was younger we had a lot of opportunity for this type of play. I can’t say whether it really helped me because I have trouble looking at my own history from a non-biased point of view, but it makes sense to me that it would have and I’d like to give my kid the same freedoms I enjoyed when I was young.