Two recent articles in the New York Times made me hear helicopter parents in the distance:
A perfect combination. This week, as classes started, I’ve seen parents escorting their children around campus. Some, like me, were taking their under-5s to preschool. Some were… err, I’m not sure what they were doing. Meaning well, I think, but probably not helping. First-year college students have a lot in common with kindergarteners. Both are dealing with a new institution for the first time, making a huge move away from parents, facing a new and quite stiff intellectual challenge, and likely dealing with a new set of friends. No wonder the parental response is similar. And similarly misguided. Both kindergarteners and first-year college students need, badly, for their parents to step away. I can’t understand the obsession with protecting kids from, well, anything short of unmitigated success:
Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”
I hope Ms. Finke doesn’t think that kindergarten won’t be the last time Benjamin has to deal with bigger, smarter, or just plain different kids. Though it’s no fun to watch your children get bullied, intimidated, or overshadowed by others, stepping in to make five-year-old Benjamin feel a little better won’t help him learn how to deal with this problem when he’s fifteen–or twenty-five, for that matter.
I don’t mean to belittle the parents in these articles, particularly in the second one. I’m thinking about the same issues, too, given that Madelyn reads very well, uses our Mac proficiently, does some addition and subtraction, and is getting more and more creative. Will she be bored to distraction (literally) when she hits kindergarten, at five years and nine months? Will she be upset about being separated from her friends? Then what? Will Erin and I be dealing with the principal weekly? And then again with Amelia? Even if we didn’t have that worry–I totally hear the argument that American schools start too early. Some of those four year olds whose earnest parents put them in kindergarten early will be the seventeen or eighteen year olds who are one-and-done in college because they are just too immature to handle the freedom which often makes the first year more beer and circus than books and classes.
But for everything Madelyn does well, there are things she does rather poorly. Her fine motor control isn’t very good, and she’s impatient. When combined, that makes quite a few tasks very hard. Like writing: Madelyn flat out doesn’t like it, and does very little beyond signing her name. She prefers to type. I don’t want to say Madelyn isn’t well-developed emotionally, but she’s certainly quicker to cry or get angry than most of her peers. That’s changing quickly; just this morning she waited out a problem with her seat belt instead of crying about it. But still.
Which is to say that Madelyn, and Amelia, all the children mentioned in the articles above, could be considered ahead, behind, gifted, challenged, blessed, deficient, talented, and under-achieving… in some way. Fixing too much on ratings and rankings, especially at age two or four or five, is a fine way to get unnecessarily worried about kids who will be dealing with all kinds of expectations soon enough. Yes, let’s identify and deal with genuine developmental problems. But for heaven’s sake, let’s wait a moment to see how our kids respond to broken toys, difficult homework, or agonistic schoolmates before jumping up to handle those things for them.