Carl Honore: Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of

The Great Cathedral space which was childhood. – Virginia Woolf
Two thousand years ago, a schoolteacher named Lucius Orbilius Pupillus identified pushy parents as an occupational hazard in the classrooms of ancient Rome. Ie. Helicopter-parenting.
Micromanaging: People used to be happy leaving their kids with us for a week or two without hearing any news apart from maybe a postcard or the odd phone call. Now, we get parents freaking out if their kid doesn’t appear on the Web site every day. Or if he does appear and isn’t smiling.
Micromanaged children can end up struggling to stand on their own feet… Many simply cannot bear to leave behind a place where they are the center of the universe.
Children have become, more than ever before, an extension of the parental ego…It may also explain why we so often talk about what our offspring can do for us, rather than vice versa.
Keeping the kids busy also promises to keep them safe – another modern obsession.
Parenting manuals have a long history, but they took on a more prescriptive tone in the nineteenth century, with a new breed of bossy experts issuing commandments on feeding times, toilet training, bathing techniques, and sleep patterns. Today, the belief that parenting is a skill to teach, practice, and perfect sustains a global army of pundits who lay down the law through magazines, books, courses, Web sites, radio phone-ins, and television shows.
Over the last generation, this yearning to get the most out of our children has reached its ultimate conclusion: we no longer just want to supply the best childhood money can buy; we want to live it.
When adults lay claim to the trappings of childhood, the scope for rebellion narrows. The historical evidence suggests that children grow up healthier in societies that allow them a few years to experiment and even go off the rails.
As infant mortality fell and expectations soared, the emphasis gradually switched to getting babies off to a flying cognitive start. “baby is the world’s most powerful learning machine”
True play is spontaneous, uncertain – you never know where it will take you. It is not about winning or losing, or reaching a destination or milestone. It defies all the tools of out high-achieving culture: targets, time-tables, and measurable outcomes.
Free play is an essential part of growing up, and not just in humans.
Moments of frustration can actually be the first step to learning that being alone is not the end of the world and that things do not always go as planned. Being bored gives children the space to notice the details of the world around them – the fly buzzing at the bedroom window, the way the wind ruffles the curtains – and teaches them how to use and fill time.
You can relax a bit, knowing that moments when your child is not being enriched or basking in your attention, moments of boredom even, are a natural part of growing up. And that pouring all energy into reaching the next milestone as fast as possible is often a waste of time and may even be harmful.
Tapping into children’s natural curiosity and giving full rein to their impulse to express themselves.
The priority is to give the children space and time to do their own learning.
Too many screen hours can deny young children the real-life, hands-on interaction with people and objects that is essential for their development. It also eats into time for reflection and rest.
The new technology also reinforce the narcissism that can be a by-product of mircromanaged childhood.
Multitasking (Web surfing, and IMing) militate against the slower art of delving into a topic, staying with an argument long enough to unravel its nuances and complexities.
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned at school. – Albert Einstein.
Too much academic measuring can also suck the joy out of learning. The key to education is, says Plato, to get children to want to know what they have to know.
By the time a child reaches college age, what university she actually attends makes little difference in how she will come out after graduation…The main purpose of our education system, and our main aim as parents, should not be maneuver children into a chart-topping university. It should be to raise imaginative, disciplined, dynamic children with a lust for learning and life.
Penn State Professors: It almost seems as though the more homework a nation’s teachers assign the worse the nation’s students do…Many recommend a daily maximum of ten minutes per grade level. That means no more than forty minutes per night for a child in fourth grade and two hours for a high-school student.
Between the late 1970s and 1997, American children lost twelve hours a week of free time. Most of that was filled with sports and other pursuits organized by adults…One reason is the rise of the working mother. When moms stayed home, it was easier just to let the kids play around the house.
Children learn to talk, listen, reason, and compromise during meal time.
Many parents treat their children as commodities and investments. They feel it is owed to them – playing time, scholarships, and status. It’s competitive parenting lived out through our kids.
Self-confidence is an asset, but children who are over-praised can end up more worried about maintaining their image and more inclined to undermine their peers to do so, as well as more likely to look to parents and teachers for approval. In stead of making things happen, they sit around anxiously waiting for the world to fit their vision of how it should be.
Giving a child “the best of everything” robs her of the chance to learn how to make the best of what she has. This applies to every aspect of childhood, from education to sports, but especially to navigating the consumer culture. Later in life, the over-indulged child can grow into a financially incontinent adult who spends first and asks questions later.
Though our ancestors were less concerned about children being terrified by noises in the night, they did worry that they might be corrupted. Plato warned that the works of dramatic poets would pollute the minds of the young..This brings us to one of the most curious paradoxes of modern childhood: today, even as we fret about their loss of innocence, we allow, even encourage, children to dip their toes into the adult pool earlier and earlier. One reason for this is our urge to get closer to our kids, to cement that “best friend” status.
Making childhood a consumerism-free zone is impossible in a consumer culture. But the time has come to set limits. Not only are the health and happiness of our children at stake but also the future of the planet: mankind simply cannot go on consuming the way it does not.
The first step is to tune out the background hysteria and take a hard look at the facts which avoid over-protection.
1. The world is now a safer place for children than it has ever been.
2. Our Panic about stranger danger does not fit the statistics.
3. Keeping children locked up indoors or ferrying them around in the back of the car is not as safe as we think.
4. Children are a lot more resilient and robust than we give them credit for.
5. Children are often more sensible, competent, and able to manage risk than we imagine.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Conclusion:
Children need to feel safe and love; they need our time and attention, with no conditions attached; they need boundaries and limits; they need space to take risks and make mistakes; they need to spend time outdoors; they need to be ranked and measured less; they need healthy food; they need to aspire to something bigger than owning the next brand-name gizmo; they need room to be themselves.
Parenting is just part of the equation. Beyond the family, we need to rethink the rules that govern everything that touches children’s lives – school, advertising, toys, sports, technology, tafftic.