Do not think of raising mythical children

Get good grades regularly, be polite and clean, and do not make mistakes. Numerous studies that have examined this extreme method of care and education are not happy with it.

Finally, dinner is served and the child is sent to the kitchen to be cared for by a celestial person. The house is shaking with the sound of baby carts. After dinner, Hazrat Agha returns with a sharper tongue than before. His parents ask him how he is feeling, it is ten o’clock, is he tired? Says no. But unlike him, you are very weak. You walk in the door, swear never to have children, or if you have already had children, swear that you will never bother to visit your grandchildren. You give yourself a heart that you only send them money.

In the past, such behaviors were known as “loosening”, but today, with titles such as “guardianship training”, “helicopter training”, “greenhouse training” or “control and lethal training” 4 of them Learn. The term has changed because patterns of behavior have changed. “Guardianship training” is still associated with lust: Buy a toy world for a child and do not set any rules. But two other complex factors have been added.

 One of these factors is anxiety: “Will my baby be forever affected by the fate of his hamster?” Or “Did he touch the hamster’s body and his hand became germicidal?” Another factor that has added to these behaviors in addition to heartbreak and anxiety is the joy of success: the grave of the child’s emotional father is scheduled for an interview to enter kindergarten tomorrow. Is it accepted? If not, can it be accepted at a good university at all? The training of guardians has been the subject of many books recently, and all of these books have condemned it in the strongest possible terms.

 

Most of us have heard of people playing Mozart in their children’s rooms. In the book of the landless country; High Costs of Aggressive Training 5 (Broadway Publishing) Haras Stroof Marano, Todd 6’s senior secretary of psychology, writes that Baby Einstein, a Walt Disney Company affiliate, has recently become more than just Baby Mozart CDs. It also sells “Baby Beethoven”. Both CDs are available in DVD format and the music is accompanied by puppet shows and other images.

According to Baby Einstein, these DVDs are designed for the age group of three months and older. Since the baby is unable to sit at three months of age, parents should keep him in front of the monitor, and since these babies have even recently acquired ocular concentration skills, it is very difficult to guess what will be captured by this material. “Nothing will catch them,” said Susan Lane, a Harvard Medical School psychologist; she told the Chicago Tribune, “The video game industry is a pure scam.”

 

These DVDs, for example, are supposed to be the latest discovery. Provide academic front lines. But the problem does not end here, another problem is the problem of environmental pollution. Marano says parents who flutter around their children’s heads see deadly bacteria on all surfaces.

To get rid of these bacteria in the supermarket, you can buy a buggy bag, a protective bag that you put in the shopping cart, and then put the baby in the cart. According to Buggy Bag ads, using this product will help you avoid the “viruses, bacteria and body fluids” left in the shopping cart. In a survey conducted by Marano, one-third of parents reported sending their children to school with antibacterial hand gels. Who else trusts soap?

 

As soon as the child goes to kindergarten, the academic pressure begins. What is missing is the opportunity to play with finger puppets. Marano says even preschoolers have replaced playing with math and reading at the same time.

The further a child goes, the heavier the burden of education becomes, and his ability to bear this burden is now gradually being measured by standardized tests. The responsibility for these tests lies with the Action Plan for the Prevention of Childhood Deficiency in 2001. The test results are presented quantitatively so that the results of each child can be compared with the average, the ideal limit, and the neighbor child.

Ambitious parents may start hiring a tutor from kindergarten. According to Marano, the private tutoring industry in the United States is currently valued at $ 4 billion, with much of it spent on elementary school children.

(Some tutors sent home by the Princeton Review Institute, a private tutoring organization, receive a salary of about $ 400 an hour.) If a tutor can’t do magic, then ambitious parents can Bargain at school and claim that their children have special needs, and because of these special needs, their standardized tests must be done without regard to time.

According to a 2005 report by Slate magazine in Washington, D.C., seven to nine percent of students who took the S.I. The T7 was given extra time and were on average better off than the others. The scores of these students were sent to the universities without considering this exemption and alongside the students who had to take the exam despite the time factor.

 

Children who have been trained by a guardian often face not only a very heavy curriculum, but also extracurricular activities: tennis, Mandarin, ballet, and so on. It is widely believed that extracurricular activities affect university admissions. On the one hand, these activities keep children off the streets (in the words of one book, “At the head of a lacrosse sports class, you can not smoke marijuana or find a debauched friend”).

When summer comes, kids are often sent to a specialty skill camp. Extracurricular activities and camps are areas that foster a sense of parental competition, which is actually the main culprit. How do you explain to another mother that while her baby spent the summer at the Marine Biology Camp examining mollusks, your baby was in an old, ordinary camp, spinning nuts and eating creamy biscuits?

 

Finally, there is the final judgment: applying to university. Admissions officials say they do not know what to think about admission application forms these days; Many of these forms are clearly filled out personally by the applicant himself/herself. If parents do not feel like doing this, they can turn to Ivy Wise, a service that offers a course that costs students about $ 3,000 to $ 40,000 to teach students how to get into college. Slowly

Ivy Wise services include: “Application Training Camp” on how to fill out forms and “Simplification Workshop” on how to turn our application form into a “desirable admission template”. However, cautious parents do not even wait until they apply for admission.

Ivy Wise also advises freshmen and sophomores on what units to take or what extracurricular activities to choose. Thus, after two or three years, when the admission process begins, students will not suddenly experience the painful discovery that they have spent their time in classes and clubs that are not to the liking of the admissions committee. Future.

Normally, when a student goes to college, it is time to end custody training, but many parents or their staff correct children ‘s semester papers via email. Many parents give their children cell phones equipped with GPS control to control their activities. According to Marano, the mobile phone – which allows children to consult with their parents on any subject, any decision, and any “spark of experience” – has in fact become the technological assistant of parental training.

Marano says some parents do not even agree to call. They buy another house in the city where their child is studying. According to a new report on the issue, published in the Times, children are likely to protest only at the beginning; A student at the University of Colorado told the Times that when he found out that his parents, who live in Maryland, had bought a four-bedroom house a quarter of a mile from his university, he thought to himself, “Did you touch me?” “Are you following me around the country?” But then little by little, he likes it: “Once I saw that I became such that I would not wash my clothes until my mother came here.” I ask myself, did he really wash his own clothes?

 

Students who benefit from such benefits may study more diligently and pursue excellent careers after graduation, but they are also likely to join the “Boomerang Kids” Jirga: Kids who are a straightforward The university returns home. Fifty-five percent of American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and forty-five percent of American men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four live with their parents, according to a new study. High rental costs, fierce competition for good jobs, and the heavy burden of repaying student loans were among the reasons given.

But another reason for this may be a pure habit and even personal desire. Marano et al. Believe that while anxious parents claim that their goal is to prepare the child for a successful encounter with the world, their true motivation lies deeper: their true motivation lies in blind dependence, in an attempt to convey Their own identity is rooted in their child.

Marano says that one of the reasons for the formation of the guardianship process is the working mothers. This claim seems paradoxical: if the mother is in the office, how can she clap around the child? The answer is: Well, he can slap the baby around at night or on the weekends. The rest of the time he can hire someone else to do the important thing. It can also secretly install a nanny cam 8 (one of the models of these cameras can also act as a smoke detector) to make sure that things are done right. However, Marano believes that the risk of raising a guardian is higher for women who leave their jobs because of a full-time mother.

Such women experience a sharp drop in income when their children are young: According to one source, on average, something like $ 1 million in a woman’s entire career. Therefore, it is not surprising that these women are interested in raising a child as a project worth such self-sacrifice.

Another reason for guardianship training, which Marano emphasizes, among other reasons, is the growing insecurity of the global economy. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 – the world’s first unmanned spacecraft that was not ours – the American school curriculum dramatically shifted to mathematics and the basic sciences.

People were asking themselves, “How do we really want to defeat Russia?” Moreover, Marano believes that the phenomenon of guardianship training began in the 1970s in response to inflation accompanied by the recession and the oil crisis, and has since been fueled by the rise of the global economy. The slogan of preventing children’s educational backwardness remains a description of democratic aspiration. More than a democratic aspiration, however, it is the product of an economic aspiration: the aspiration that the United States should not lag behind India and China.

Marano et al. Believe that the third development that led people to guardianship training was the results of a study on “brain flexibility” published in 1990. According to the study, a baby’s brain is partly a product of genes, but genetic talent is like clay mud that shapes the baby’s experiences and the amount of motivation it receives, especially in the first three years of life. These findings led to the development of many programs aimed at motivating infants who were likely to be ignored by their mothers for whatever reason (often poverty).

Social activists went to high-risk homes to play with newborns. But upper-middle-class parents and marketers who were interested in them also read about the findings of research on “brain flexibility.” They concluded that if a little motivation is good, more motivation is better. (This is where Baby Einstein comes into play.) But later research did not support this idea. Overall, the end result was that the environment in which most children live provides all the motivation a child needs.

Marano thinks the baby’s insane motivation was a scandal. He accepts the idea of ​​the flexibility of the brain but thinks that the process of shaping the baby’s brain actually continues for many years after infancy and that when the baby enters the real world, his main field of action must change, and Become self-motivated. Instead of driving the baby crazy by repeating the story of this little pig thousand times, mothers should let him play with himself.

Marano is assembling a bank of neurological research, a collection that will no doubt scare worried parents to death. Marano says that as children discover their own environment, make their own decisions and take risks, and adapt to the frustration and anxiety of these actions, their neurological devices become increasingly sensitive and complex. Be. Thus “dendrites grow and synapses are formed.” In other words, if children are deprived of learning by trial and error, their nervous systems “literally collapse.”

 

According to Marano, this decline may not be recognizable in the early years of life, when the custodial parents do what the child has to do for him or her. But when a child goes to university, the damage is just apparent.

“One of the stereotypical scenes we see in dormitories is a group of counselors striking in the middle of the night with crises such as insane behavior or self-harm,” Marano said. “They are controlling the students and only then should they calm down the rest of the dormitory residents.” Marano believes that students who have been trained as guardians are still harmed, even when they survive a nervous breakdown at university. These people are pessimistic and risk-free.

They have been taught that the world is a storehouse of danger. (Marano writes: “Stealing children’s positive perceptions of the future may be the worst violence parents can commit against them.”) They will come.

Finally, Marano reiterates that their robotic behavior will be a threat to “American leadership in the global market.” This was the factor that led parents to worry, and now parents have been depriving their children of many virtues, such as courage, agility, and out-of-frame thinking, virtues that the new economic system is strongly opposed to. needs.

The book under pressure; A New Movement That Encourages Us to Relax, Trust Our Instincts, and Enjoy Our Children 10 (Harper One) by Carl Anoura, a “quiet movement” fighter, is also in line with Marano’s ideas.

The goal of the quiet movement is to persuade us to abandon the fast track. Anwar is not from the United States, grew up in Canada, and lives in London, so she looks beyond her national boundaries. You may have thought that the United States, for all its sensitivity to parenting styles, is worse off than other countries in terms of parenting. But Anwar has a different belief. Anura says look at East Asia, where education has become a form of religion.

On a global scale, he says, East Asian teens “get near the highest scores in math and science, yet they are almost in the last place in terms of the pleasure they get from these subjects.” According to Agoura, test-driven education has recently led to a wave of fraud, which is now easier with Internet access: “Nearly three-quarters of undergraduate students in Canada have recently admitted that when they were in high school “They have committed serious fraud in carrying out their written assignments.” University admissions say that in 2007, five percent of applicants to Oxford and Cambridge universities filed application forms with data taken from the web.

Two hundred and thirty-four students applying to study chemistry, explaining why they want to study in this field, have given the same example verbatim as a defining experience: “At the age of eight, they pierce their pajamas with chemicals. ».

More makes an undeniably controversial suggestion for children’s health: to stop eating. “Young people have two options: either die or adapt,” he quotes Samuel Butler. Allergy rates among children are currently on the rise around the industrialized world.

“Just look at what happened in Germany,” Agoura blames the hygienic environment. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, allergy rates were much higher in West Germany, although the eastern and communist parts were both more polluted and had more children living on the farm. “After the reunification of the two countries, East Germany was cleansed and urbanized, and its allergy rate skyrocketed.”

Finally, Agoura turns to family psychology, specifically referring to the birth of the Self-Esteem Movement in the 1970s. According to him and other writers who write about guardianship training, the issue is disgusting. “All the wandering ends in front of the refrigerator door,” he says. According to the research he is doing, enlarging the ego 12 has no benefit. A review of thousands of studies has shown that high self-esteem in children does not increase grades, improve their job prospects, or even resist alcoholism.

However, if I am not mistaken, the self-esteem movement has something in it that shakes Anoura to a deeper level than simply asking about our children’s worthiness. Marano’s most important concern, as the title of his book tells us, is that we are building a nation of idiots: people who are not going to “get things done.” Anwar’s concern is that the children of the sheep, who are the product of the guardianship training, will finally be able to do the work and turn the world into a violent, ruthless, and boring place.

He is not the only one who thinks this way. Sooner or later, all critics of guardianship education will turn to the moral dilemma of the problem, that is, the pure selfishness of these parents and their children. Even pragmatic Maranoi points out this.

Does he ask why parents who have “fortified” their children do not want these benefits for all children? Why do they only care about their own children? Why does it not bother them at all that the extra help they provide for their children, from college admissions to private tutoring, is actually unfair competition? Parental selfishness, as most of these books acknowledge, is unique to upper-middle-class parents.

These people want their children to be as successful as they are, the grave of the father of justice. Madeleine Levine pays special attention to social economics in her 2006 book, The Price of Facilities 13 (Harper). Levin is a clinical psychologist in Marin County, California who specializes in adolescent therapy. In other words, he spends his time helping wealthy children, many of whom suffer from ambitious parents who have cast a heavy shadow over them. Levin recalls with horror and despair the lack of “conscience and magnanimity” in his patients.

A book from a boy to a man; The Formation of the New Immaturity 14 (Colombia), by Gary Cross, specifically on the contemporary generation of young men and their comparison with the young men of the post-World War II era (Cross’s father generation) and the young men of the sixties (his own generation) ) it is focused.

According to Cross statistics, the new generation takes longer to find a job, get married, and have children – jobs that, by Cross’s definition, are the same as growing up – longer than previous generations. This is how the “baby men” 15 address them, cross, blink with their friends and play video games instead of growing up. Cross says the men no longer even have girlfriends and are content with casual dating and overnight relationships. Cross has done a lot of research as a professor of history at Penn State University.

He seems to have seen all the episodes of “Daddy Knows Better” 16 and “Seinfeld” 17. His conclusion is disappointing: that yesterday’s fathers really knew the best or the best, or that, after all, patriarchy was not so bad. But we must also point out that what he admires most about old fathers is not that they knew how to exercise power while caring for others, a tendency that is apparently not so common among the male child community.

 

Concerns about the altruism of these books probably stem in part from positive psychology, a new movement that emphasizes satisfaction and attachment as fundamental tools of mental health. But the moral emphasis, like positivist psychology, clearly goes back to the values ​​of the 1960s and early 1970s, a world we left behind in the heat of the 1980s. The authors of these books are shocked by the materialism of the new generation.

(You should hear Anoura talk about today’s luxury birthday party). Another point that these writers have realized with fear and apprehension is the growing indifference of this generation to idealism. Levine describes a study conducted in 1998 at UCLU. Done:

When students were asked why they went to college during the 1960s and early 1970s, the majority of students attached the greatest importance to “becoming an educated person” or “finding a personal philosophy for life,” and only a minority. Students were cited as “gaining enormous wealth” as the main reason for going to university. But in the early 1990s, most students said that “gaining enormous wealth” was the most important reason for them to go to college, both for the above reasons and for other reasons, such as “becoming an expert in my field.” And goes beyond “helping people in need.”

 

These writers advocate a return to the values ​​of the sixties, but strangely do not show interest in quoting the thinkers of that period. You can read most of these books without realizing that something called the Leading School Movement was in the fifties or sixties, or that R.D. Ling spoke of a lack of originality and Abraham Maslow of a more priority need.

 

On the other hand, there are writers who refer to the sixties and give it a poor grade. “My generation’s obsession with youth is part of the history of human emptiness,” Cross writes. According to Cross, young men and modern-day Lash are heirs to his generation.

Another book that challenges the sixties, this time from a different perspective, is Discipline in School; The Crisis of Moral Authority (2003) is the work of Richard Orum, Professor of Sociology and Education at New York University. Orum says the student rights movement first began in the 1960s, trying to protect minority students from unfair treatment. The movement’s lawsuits paid off, and all children threatened with deportation or, in some cases, the suspension was eventually granted due process.

Orum says granting this right led to a new kind of unfair treatment of minority students, which was worse. The right to a fair trial frightened teachers and discouraged them from discipline. The students went wild.

In addition, school principals became fat and soft morsel for aggressive parents who wanted to discriminate between their children and others. In one of the sources that Orum referred to, there is a quote from one of the teachers who talk about discipline: “It all depends on what kind of apprenticeship you take. Choose idiots; They do not know what to do wrong. “Never take a child to a lawyer.” There is no doubt that those who do not know what to do or whose parents do not know what to do are poorer children.

 

The results of Arum are the result of long research, but other works that deal with the relationship between the sixties and the upbringing of children in the present age have reached conclusions that often seem conservative. A good example of such a work is an article entitled “Childhood” 19, which was recently published by conservative critic Joseph Epstein in Standard Week 20. “My mother never sings for me, and my father never takes me to any baseball games,” Epstein writes.

They did not take any pictures of him and did not express any love to him. Epstein says that in his 1940s and 1950s, his childhood years, this was the general approach to parenting, and children benefited from this approach: they became ordinary people and “went to work in this world.”.

The selfless devotion shown by the parents of the next generations led to the upbringing of two groups of people: arrogant puppies full of “anger at abstract enemies such as System 21” and unscrupulous and confident people (because Their parents had told them) it’s far from every single one of their thoughts. Epstein says that when he was a teacher, he was often tempted to write on a student’s sheet: As Epstein’s article shows, critics of custodial education have political concerns in addition to moral concerns.

However, there are political concerns on both sides: conservatives are worried that we will turn our children into idiots (who are Democrats), and liberals are worried that we will turn our children into robots. We train selfish and authoritarian people (who are Republicans).

The literature on parenting education leaves a lot to be desired, such as is it really wrong to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented? Agoura goes on to argue that her seven-year-old son’s art teacher told her that the child was really talented in art. So the next day, Anwar suggests to her son that he go to art class after school, and the answer that follows is: “I do not want to go to class and have a teacher above me to tell me what to do, I just want To paint. “Why does your grandfather want to take everything from you?” Agoura, embarrassed, backs away from what she now considers opportunistic. If Mozart’s father or the Williams sisters had reacted similarly, the history of human achievement would have been different.

Another worrying issue in these books is that feminism contributes to the folly of parenting today. According to Gary Cross, one of the reasons young men refuse to grow up is that the women’s movement has withheld all the rewards they received for growing up. Men were accustomed to being both at home and in the boss’s office, instead of wearing suits and going to work every morning. This is no longer the case.

So what is the reason for growing up? However, Cross emphasizes that patriarchy or laziness are not the only options available. As Cross points out, some people believe that by rejecting sexism, our society can create a new kind of man, a man who “raises children and expresses his feelings,” a man who “has the old patriarchal advantage.” “It abandons itself and welcomes equality in private and public roles.” However, Cross does not seek such changes: “How many men (or women) can distinguish this approach from the usual absurdity?” I can, but let’s skip it, because we have other issues that we need to address.

Marano, for example, claims that if a woman has a high-level job before having children, she is more likely to train as a caregiver, whether she leaves her job to stay at home with her children or not. I’m sure Marano disagrees with the idea that sensitive jobs should not be left to women who want to start a family. I’m not sure about Cross’s opinion, but if what Marano says is true, it raises the old dilemma again. When you upgrade some elements of the system, other elements may fail in response to this change; You adjust the carburetor, and the gear stops.

The final question that may arise is: Is it really as necessary to address the process of guardianship training as these writers claim? The prevailing context in popular psychology textbooks is that the author often forgets to talk about something that is largely true of only a minority of people in society. (Recent research shows that the level of charitable and voluntary services available to adolescents today is unprecedented since the 1940s.) These works are very self-confident.

Marano’s book is full of endless repetitions: you can read one of all three paragraphs and not miss a thing. What about the hotchpotch of books? Is the situation really such that a group of shock therapists rushes to the dormitories in the middle of the night? Anoureh constantly inserts the same things into our brains. He does this in almost every season:

1. Enumerates dangerous currents: standard tests, over-practiced sports 22 and things like that;

2. Informs us that there are already brave people swimming against the course of the river;

3. He goes to one of the places where these people do their revisionist activity, for example, an experimental school or the backyard of a house where they play ball;

4. It shows us how children grow up and are proud of this new diet. In one of the progressive schools he visits, “there is an atmosphere of pure joy and vivacity.” Kuban students go to class. They tell Anoura that they love their homework. In all these pasteurized environments, there is never a child who starts a fight or puts his hand in his nose.

For an overview of the issue, take a look at Huckleberry Finn’s Trick: American Child History 23 (2004) by Columbia University history professor Steven Mintz. Mintz’s story begins with the formation of the United States and thus describes the lives of children who have greater problems than raising a guardian: boys sent to coal mines and girls sent to textile mills.

As we think about the prevalence of current concerns about young people, Mintz reminds us that the United States is preoccupied with many horrors, such as the main concerns in the 1950s: screaming during dangerous driving, teen sex, and rock. They were rolling.

However, even in the 1950s, campaigns were launched against the guardianship and motherhood education of guardianship or mammonism, as the guardian mother was called. Mammalian was thought to cause boys to become homosexual. Mintz writes that parenting in the United States has always been overshadowed by a “crisis discourse” over the past three decades, yet young Americans today are, on average, “better, richer, more educated, and healthier than ever in American history.” ». However, there have been setbacks. White-haired middle-class boys are far behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are much better off.

According to Mintz, we are overly concerned about the wrong things. Despite the general economic boom, at least until recently, the percentage of poor American children has been higher than at any time in the last thirty years. One in six children is at risk of poverty. Mintz says this is the problem if you are looking for an emergency.