My family was in Paris. We were on our way to see a friend, who’d rented an apartment there on Forest Ave. (As it goes in dreams, all the street names were borrowed from Palo Alto!) My family and I were going there, but somehow we got separated and I was alone. Everyone around me was a tourist; no one knew anything. I tried to use my Google, but it kept sending me around in circles. “I know,” I thought. “I’ll call Abe!” I tried to use my phone, but it wouldn’t work.
“Oh, no,” I lamented, “I’ve lost my Abe!”
I woke up.
My favorite lil’ guy photo.
Not surprisingly, this dream happened in the early morning hours on the day that we were taking our firstborn to college. It’s a happy day, but it’s also the saddest: we’ve finished the job, and our son is leaving our house.
True: I know all the things you’re thinking. He’ll be back soon enough. He’s not going far away. This is just a natural part of life.
All true. But it’s also the official break with his childhood. It’s the official start of his adult life. It’s the very real experience of not having anyone to call on to take the garbage out.
My husband and I would jokingly call him “the man upstairs” in the last year. His bedroom was upstairs, and if we needed anything done, we’d text “the man upstairs” to get it done. It was great to have another adult in the house, but it was also clear that it was time for him to strike out on his own.
This is the sweet-n-sour taste of a job well done. When we send our kids off into the world, we feel good about it. We know that they will do the best they have with what they’ve got to start with (same as we did). We know that we’ve given all we could possibly give.
But we also know it’s an end. They’re going off to their own lives. The cycle starts again, and we think, misty-eyed, about our own college experiences.
I read the article “Science Fairs Aren’t So Fair” (The Atlantic) with some interest, given that my kids are longtime participants in our local and state science fairs. As a parent who hasn’t fallen into the helicopter-parent trap that the writer describes, I thought I’d enjoy her little exposé.
Only two kinds of science fair parents, really?
Families enjoying each other’s board during our local science fair’s public hours.
As a short recap, the article starts with the premise that there are two kinds of parents: the parents who dread the science fair because it asks students to do something they aren’t prepared to do, and other parents who basically do the work for their kids and compete with each other. I don’t disagree that these two groups of parents exist, but at least in my experience, they don’t make up the majority of science fair parents. More importantly, I can’t agree with her conclusion that it’s the kids of the pushy parents who end up winning.
It depends on how you define winning.
Our science fair experiences have included both sets of parents described above. The hovering helicopter parents are certainly annoying—they create gorgeous boards for their kids, write their reports for them, and then train their kids to answer the judges’ questions like performing animals. Sometimes their kids win at their school and county levels—but are they really winning?
The article goes on to quote Google’s first science fair winner, who says that those helicopter parents started turning up in elementary school. She describes standing next to another kid whose project had clearly been completed by an over-involved professor-dad.
But here’s what she doesn’t point out:
She won the Google Science Fair. Not the kids whose parents let them use million-dollar equipment. Not the kids whose parents coached them and created beautiful boards. She won. She doesn’t say why, but I bet I can guess.
But kids can’t do science!
Here’s a quote from the writer of the article, who falls into the “science fair dreaders” camp:
“Much of the parental anger seems to stem from the fact that the bulk of science fairs ask children to produce something, in some cases competitively, that is well beyond their abilities,” she writes.
These parents who act put-upon about being asked to support their kids in inquiry learning outside of school are closer to the helicopter parents than they want to believe. Inquiry-based science isn’t a mystery—it’s something that preschoolers do every day. But we train our kids to think is “hard” and “serious” once they enter elementary school.
It seems to me that the put-upon parents are acting just as competitively as the helicopter parents, except they’re choosing to be the slackers on campus rather than the geeks.
Finding a middle ground
Yucky moldy bananas in my kitchen. It must be science fair time!
So how should parents who want their kids to succeed in the science fair offer support? Well, first of all, if your kid isn’t into it, that’s totally fine. If your 10-year-old needs to do inquiry-based science at home for an assignment, find one of the basic, fun, and yes, hardly original experiments that they can do. Put some fruit out on a tray and take photos of it as it gets moldy. Create three kinds of paper airplanes and hypothesize about which one will fly the furthest. It really doesn’t matter what you do—the main point is to have fun and let your child know that anyone can do this.
Science is not a mystery—babies practice it every day.
If your child is into it, however, you are not required to be a helicopter parent. In fact, you won’t be helping if you do all the work. Let your child struggle; let him make mistakes; let her go in a wrong direction and document it. That’s science. That’s learning. On the other hand, don’t let your child drown in service of your wish not to be a helicopter parent. Offer all the support you can, and if you can’t support your child, find another adult who can help out. The key is that it’s your child’s goal, not yours, that you are supporting.
How to avoid hovering
My son, for the record, does all his science without any help from me. After the first few sentences of his report on the programming language he invented, all I’m doing is scanning for typos. His knowledge is more advanced than mine and I know it. However, he does need support in a few areas. One is scheduling: I know that it helps him to put the various stages of preparation on the calendar with reminders, so once the dates are announced we do that together. Another area he asks for help with is, yes, the board. But the sort of help I give—cutting, pasting things on straight, and comments like “I think that font should be bigger”—are support, not “doing it for him.” (In fact, I would love to design cool boards for him, but he complains if I make even the smallest decision about the visual design. So much for my attempts to live through my children!)
Why do we work this way? First, early on I was attracted to the “I’ve got your back” theory of parenting. This came from a mom who was describing to me why she couldn’t go with behavioralist style parenting techniques that make the parent the enforcer. She said, “If nothing else, I want my kids to know that I’m there for them. When they’re having trouble, I want them to know that I’ve got their back.”
Second, research into child behavior, learning, and brain development is all pointing the same way: Kids who are supported and feel comfortable learn more easily, but kids who struggle in their learning learn more deeply and go further. So in preparing for the science fair—and in parenting in general—I hope to hit the sweet spot between raising kids who know that their parents love and support them, and raising kids who learn the value of struggling through something hard to reach a goal that they set themselves. I suspect that the parents of kids who excel at the top levels of science fairs, such as Google’s, have parents who have hit the sweet spot particularly well.
Why do so many parents go to extremes?
Any kid can do fun experiments in the density of different liquids. You don’t have to do cutting edge research to have fun and learn.
Let’s face it:
It’s easy to be that complaining parent who says that their eight-year-old isn’t capable of inquiry learning.
And it’s very tempting to live through our kids and make sure that they succeed at all costs.
But that sweet spot is like balancing in the middle of a seesaw. It’s not simple, and it never stops being a challenge. However, when parents support their children in a goals they set, they always see success—even when their children don’t win awards. To see our children striving, learning, and growing should be all the success we’re looking for.
This morning at breakfast my daughter sadly eyed the book I’d gotten her for Chanukah, Alice in Quantumland. This is the sort of nerdy, unusual book I love to buy—once we’re done with it we’ll donate it to our library and hopefully they’ll make it available to other nerdy unusual kids in our community.
But why was she sad?
A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?
When you have kids who are avid readers, they run into different obstacles than the general public understands. Our children’s publishing industry is focused on “hi-lo” books—high interest, low readability. In other words, books that are very similar to the type of kids’ movies that Hollywood puts out. The producers of these books assume that:
Kids don’t like to read
Kids have to be enticed into reading by high concept stories
Kids are terrified to come across a word they don’t understand
Kids will refuse to pick up any book that’s heftier than their iPad
Problem is, there are tons of kids who don’t fit this model, but because they are “doing fine,” no one is paying them much attention.
In the past, I’ve written about two periods of childhood in which avid readers run into roadblocks (pre-K/K and tween) and also how hard it is for science-minded girls to see themselves in kids’ literature (here).
Our daughter, now that she’s doing 7th grade in school, has run into another avid reader roadblock: Accelerated Reader.
In concept, AR sounds great. Kids read books on their own, log into AR at school, take a quiz about the book*, and get credit for reading time. At the beginning of each year, teachers set AR goals for all their students. Not having much of an idea who these kids are**, they set a low goal for the semester and kids like my daughter blow through that goal in a couple of months.
You can guess what happens next: The teacher doesn’t say, wow, this child has mastered everything she needs to in the area of reading, so I’m just going to encourage her to keep reading things she loves and stop worrying about proving that she’s reading certain, approved books. Instead, the teacher says, oh, no, this child reached the goal so early, I’m going to have to set a much higher goal.
So kids like my daughter learn a lesson that perhaps the teacher didn’t mean to teach: If you enjoy something that school cares about, make sure to hide it and pretend you’re just like everyone else. If you don’t, you’ll be punished with more busywork that will keep you from doing the things you want to do.
Here’s why my daughter was sad this morning. She clearly wants to read Alice in Quantumland. But she has to meet this new, high AR goal her teacher set soon after winter break has ended.
And Alice in Quantumlandis not listed in AR. That means she can’t take a quiz to prove she read it. That means if she reads it, in her words, “I’ll be reading it for no reason since I won’t get credit.”
Oh, no! Reading for no reason! This terrible impulse must be quashed!
I can never get over the irony of being someone who understands how our education system works while listening to politicians and concerned community members talking about education. They want kids to read (mine does), be inspired (mine is), and learn (can’t stop mine from doing that). Yet they push our system for more and more “accountability,” which ends up quashing any interest in reading, any inspiration the teachers might be able to uncover in their students, and any real, deep learning that can’t be proven on a standardized test.
My daughter’s at school only because she wants to be. She knows that when she complains about AR, it’s not my problem. She could be homeschooling right now like her brother is, determining her own curriculum, reading books that inspire and excite her whether or not AR thinks they’re worth reading.
But for some reason, she’s continuing on this social science experiment that she started last year. I still stand firmly behind my reasons for letting her go to school: If I believe in child-led learning, then I have to let her see this through.
But when I saw her lovingly and sadly flipping through her new book, it gave me pause. It’s the last day of school before winter break. I could just say, “Come on, let’s be homeschoolers today.” But she had her celebratory cupcakes for her Humanities class party, and she was ready to go.
“Well,” I suggested. “Perhaps you will have time during vacation to finish your AR goals and then get to this book.”
And then we went to school.
* They take the quiz to prove they actually read the book—I won’t start on my rant about how unnecessary this is if educators were given the time to really work with and get to know their students…
** Another homeschooler rant here: If teachers had fewer students, if there were more continuity in our public schools from year to year so teachers didn’t have to depend on assembly-line teaching to try to serve their students’ needs, if we didn’t think we had to have “accountability” for each and every smidgeon of learning our kids do…
Before we had children, my husband and I thought that the G-word (“gifted”) was funny at best, elitist and misguided at worst.
Then we had kids.
Anyone who has a developmentally disabled child knows that their child is different, sometimes from the day that child is born. Other people know, it, too. While the parents learn to reset their expectations and raise the child they got with love and compassion, the people around them get a quick education in valuing individual human lives. Every decent person learns to accept, at the least, and hopefully cherish the child for his or her own self. Though parents sometimes grumble about other parents wanting “special privileges” for their developmentally disabled children, in general we all abide by the rule of not criticizing the parents for the child they got.
Not so when it comes to gifted children, however.
Parents of gifted kids hear all manner of nasty things, including (but not limited to):
Your kid isn’t that smart
You’re just saying that to pump up your own ego
You’re just pushing him – let him have a “normal” childhood
You’re an elitist
You think your kid is better than mine
There is very little understanding out in the wider community of families that those of us with kids like this just got the kids we got. It’s not our fault, nor can we take credit for it. And just as parents of developmentally disabled kids got a package that they need to accept whole and raise as best they can, parents of gifted kids have to accept and raise their children to the best of their ability.
I’m not going to debate the ill-chosen word “gifted” here – given that I refer to it as if it’s a swear word, I suspect you know what I think of it. (And if you don’t, read about it here and here.)
What I do want to point out is that no matter what word you use, when you have a child who is different from the norm, you need to raise the child you got to the best of your ability. And sometimes that means that you do, in fact, ask for “special privileges” for your child.
No one argues that kids with athletic ability should not be allowed to play on more competitive teams in order to maximize their learning of their sport.
No one argues that talented musicians should be stuck in orchestras with beginners until they hit the age of 18.
Yet many people argue that kids who have mastered a subject at school should be educated exactly the same as the other children. Not only do people argue this with a straight face, but they tell parents who are looking for an appropriate education for their children that there is something wrong with trying to provide an appropriate education.
Research shows that the United States, never a very comfortable place to be a “smart kid,” is slipping behind in educating our top students. Though in some ways students as a whole are performing better, our top students’ scores are stagnant or falling. I believe this is a direct result of our cultural distaste for separating students based on “intelligence.” As budgets were cut during the recession, gifted programs were the first to feel the ax.
The parents of children with advanced academic abilities are loathe to speak up when their children’s needs aren’t served because of the backlash they feel from other parents as well as teachers and administrators. When money is tight, the argument goes, why should your kids get “special” treatment? So gifted education suffers, few teachers are trained in how to differentiate for their brightest students in the classroom, and families choose from one of the short list of options: homeschool, pay for a private school, or just grit their teeth and bear it. The latter option is the most common, given that most families can’t homeschool and private schools are not necessarily more likely to serve their children’s needs.
I don’t believe that changing the word we use for these students will change attitudes (though I do advocate for changing the word – scroll down in this pdf to find my article). I believe that what we need is a fundamental change in the way our culture looks at intellectual ability. I believe we need to embrace it the way we embrace other qualities in our children. To do this doesn’t require us to believe that gifted children are better in any way – all children are precious, each as an individual human. All that’s required is that we accept that humans come in a range of colors, sizes, personalities, and abilities, and that we need to meet each child where he or she is in order to serve the child’s needs.
Until we make this shift in our culture, I fear that nothing fundamental can be done to insure that we are serving the needs – academic, social, and emotional – of high ability learners. You can’t help someone go the right direction if you refuse to pick them out of the crowd and show them the way.
This blog is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page inaugural Blog Hop on The “G” Word (“Gifted”). To read more blogs in this hop, visit this Blog Hop at www.hoagiesgifted.org/blog_hop_the_g_word.htm
Until recently, pretty much every mention I found of homeschooling in the mainstream press looked nothing like what we do at our house. Or nothing like people I know do at their houses. And definitely not like what the homeschoolers I know do when they’re out of the house, which is in general a significant piece of their time. According to the popular press, we were separatist religious fanatics or hippies raising our children like wolves.
Recently, however, I’ve seen a few pinpoints of light out there in the dismal mainstream world. Two of them come from Quinn Cummings, who is apparently famous as a child actor (since I ignore popular culture her name was meaningless to me!). Her message, however, was the one I’d been hoping to see in the popular press: Homeschoolers are choosing a valid form of education that is different from school, but most of us are neither separatist religious fanatics nor hippies raising our children like wolves.
Cummings has put out a book, which I haven’t read, and in the process of publicizing it she has made us rather invisible homeschoolers more visible. In the Wall Street Journal, she not only presents her own reason for homeschooling but also gives people a sense of what is a much more important thing in homeschooling: the hybrid ways of learning that most of our kids are involved in. On the Diane Rehm Show, she necessarily had to stay more personal, but she pushed back nice and hard against the really yawn-inducing questions (as far as homeschoolers are concerned) of socialization and how well former homeschoolers integrate with other kids.
Today EdWeek, an education industry publication, published “Hybrid Homeschools Gaining Traction,” a story about homeschooling that is much more familiar to me and the other homeschoolers I know. Though Cummings mentioned “outschooling” as an option in homeschooling, she still answered questions like “how can you teach your daughter math when you are math-phobic?” with traditional homeschooling solutions—in that case, her husband does the teaching.
Of course, sharing the responsibilities of homeschooling happens all the time in homeschools, and it’s a great part of why one of our local homeschooling programs is called Alternative Family Education. Homeschoolers are all about making learning a family affair.
But the reality for most of the families I know is that what we call “home”schooling would be better called—as people I know do—”custom schooling” or “a la carte schooling” or “cooperative learning.” The EdWeek article hits this nail right on the head, and also the article’s very existence is noteworthy: The only “related story” they could find on EdWeek was published in 2008! If that’s not proof that the education establishment has been ignoring a tidal wave, I don’t know what is.
This is not the sort of tidal wave that is going to gather everything into it and destroy everything else in its path. This is the sort of slow-moving wave that is already changing education, though most of the people in the educational establishment are “blissfully” ignorant.
I use the quotes because they only think they’re blissful. They have been ignoring us and it’s been serving them just fine, or so they think. We are educated parents, people who often went to public schools ourselves. We are people who support the concept of education for everyone. But we are people who know that it’s being done all wrong. And we have found that we can’t vote at the ballot box—Republicans and Democrats are largely unified in their ignorance over what public education should be.
So we’ve taken the vote to the streets. We are leaving schools—both public and private—and looking for something else. We’re looking for an educational world in which, when a teacher doesn’t mesh with a particular learner, you simply find a different teacher. We are looking for an educational world in which a kid who studies algebra at the age of 9 is just as comfortable as a kid who’s not ready for algebra till 16. We’re looking for an educational world in which knitting, map-making, and storytelling are as respectable to study as math and science.
And—EdWeek readers will be surprised to hear this—we have found that world. It’s homeschooling, and whatever we don’t find out there for our kids we are busy creating. It’s a tidal wave because there is no way that our experiences are not going to create fundamental change in education. The blissful establishment has been put on notice by one of their own publications that people are starting to notice what we’re doing.
Outschooling, custom schooling, a la carte schooling, unschooling, cooperative learning, family education, life learning… Whatever you call it, that’s what we’re doing.
Our kids are learning, they’re doing great on standardized tests (though we don’t really care about that), and best of all, they’re doing great at life, which is what we care about most of all.
