I hate math, postscript

Actual conversation on this Memorial Day:

C. (studying for teacher exam): I hate geometry.

Me: Then you should probably do some geometry. It's good for your brain.

C.: I hate geometry.

Me: I don't care if you hate geometry. You should do some more.

C.: I hate triangles.

Me: You know I don't care if you hate triangles. You remember I'm a person who doesn't care, right?

C.: I do.

This exchange was more fun than it sounds. Lots more fun, in fact.

C. is actually enjoying himself (though he's not enjoying geometry). He's told me, several times now, "I like algebra."

I'm sitting in the kitchen, C. in the dining room, and I'm hearing "I got it right!"

"I got it right!"

That's fun!

(News flash: he just got a tennis ball versus basketball volume problem right. Progress.)

I remember, pretty distinctly, back when I was reteaching the entire middle-school math curriculum to C., that anything to do with geometry -- especially any angle-array-type image -- was a challenge. I think that's because C. is so verbal. When I was writing one of the Temple books, I found research showing that the verbal "masks" the visual. (The technical term for this may be "verbal overshadowing," but I could be misremembering.)

Here's another funny thing.

C. asked me to help him with the triangle problems. I said I would.

Then I didn't. He helped himself.

Consciously, I intended to help, but .... I didn't get to it.

This is yet another case where I think parental instincts work well and ought to be respected.

Throughout C's middle school years I was a helicopter mom. A helicopter mom and a direct instructivist. I had the t-shirt. (I still do.)

Then, when C. went to high school, I bowed out. Of course, the reason I could bow out was that we had pulled him out of our public school district and sent him to a Jesuit high school. The one and only time we had a significant problem there, with one particular teacher, Ed handled it.

My mother was sick at the time, and I was flying back and forth across the country, so I don't know what I would have done if that hadn't been the case. Nevertheless, the point remains: I was a helicopter parent up through 8th grade, then I wasn't.

C. graduated from NYU last week and starts his NYC Teaching Fellows program mid-June. He takes the teacher test this Thursday.

Today, when he asked for help with triangle problems, my cognitive unconscious apparently decided he didn't need help. And he didn't. So now I'm a hands-off parent and a constructivist.

This is the correct trajectory!

The correct, time-honored trajectory, may I add.

Treat children like children, treat grown-ups like grown-ups. An 11-year old doesn't need to teach himself, and shouldn't. A 22-year old does need to teach himself and must. And the best way to become a self-teaching 22-year old is to have teachers and parents who directly teach you when you're 11. People have known this for hundreds of years--thousands of years--and yet our public schools have somehow forgotten.

Another thing: all the give-your-child-the-gift-of-failure advice bestowed upon parents of middle school children is wrong.

Failure isn't a gift.

Knowledge is a gift. Teaching your child reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, literature: that's the gift.

While I'm on the subject, grit is wrong, too. Give your child the gift of failure, then he'll have grit --- no!

C. is now 22 and guess what? He has grit. At least, he has as much grit as any other 22 year old, which is as much as he needs at this point. Today C. is responsible, he's independent, he's a serious person, and he's launched. He's exactly where he should be at 22.

C's friends are all in good shape, too, and none of them was ever "given" the gift of failure. When they experienced failure, the "gift" came from bad curriculum and bad teaching, and the parents responded with private tutors and personal reteaching at home. All of the parents we know protected and taught their children, and today those children are brand-new adults in good standing.

This brings me back to my long-time view that schools and governments and ed reformers and all the rest of the merry band should spend more time listening to parents and less time listening to themselves. We parents may not always know what we're doing, but we're on the ground, and we're not crazy. And we care. We don't just want to get it right, we have to get it right. Our kids' lives are our lives.

One of my favorite KTM lines, from Steve H, was (from memory): "Parents make mistakes, but it takes an ed school bureaucrat to really screw things up."

Anyway, I must get back to revisions and packing.

I just want to say, to all parents who find themselves at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy:

Ed and I did everything the authorities told us not to do, and our son is a terrific young man as a direct result. 

............................................

P.S. Just to be clear, I actually do care whether C. likes geometry. I would like him to like geometry. I don't care that he doesn't like studying geometry for a certification test. As a matter of fact, I'm glad he has to study geometry for a certification test, whether he likes it or not.

I felt the same way about the SAT.

P.P.S. Side issue: is it good to be 'rounded'? If you're a verbal person, not a visual person, is it good to do some geometry (or drawing)? If you're an academic type, is it good to play sports as well? I can't tell, and I've read research supporting building up your weak skills as well as research supporting focusing on your strengths and not building weak skills (because inside the brain, skills compete). Intuitively, I always feel that you don't want to be completely one thing and not another, but I have no idea whether that's right.

Maybe I'll develop a bona fide attachment to a baseball team one of these days, as opposed to the weak-kneed attachment I currently have to the Chicago Cubs. It's never too late.

Helicopter parents of the world, unite!

Last night we all drove in to Manhattan for dinner at Debbie Stier's, where we finally met V. and her son R.

V. has been a frequent visitor to Kitchen Table Math, and has become a friend of Debbie's, so we were long overdue to meet in person.

Fun!

There was a wonderful moment at the end of the evening that I'm posting because I think it will resonate with a lot of you.

V. had volunteered to drive us back to Westchester, sparking yet another a what-is-the-matter-with-us? moment. Why on Earth are we ferrying two autistic sons on the train, on the Shuttle, and on the subway when we could be driving instead? 

No common sense-y.

Anyway, V. had volunteered to drive us all home, and was out getting her car while the rest of us walked to the elevator.

Chris & R. were walking behind us, and Chris brought up something to do with whether or not R. was going to be spending the near future preparing for the SAT.

I heard R. say confidentially to Chris (my college-age son, for passers-by): "You saw my mom."

Meaning: "my mom is intensely on my case about everything to do with academic achievement, so the answer is 'yes.'"

He said this in a tone of .... was it pride?

Admiration?

I think it was both, and Chris obviously thought so, too, because he instantly tried to top R's story.

"I spent my whole childhood hiding from my mom because if she saw me she made me do math," he said. Then he repeated himself a couple of times for good measure.

He was defending my honor.

He'd done the same thing earlier in the evening when Ethan delivered a hilarious monologue about forcing his mother to "un-RSVP" him to an event he had no interest in attending and hadn't been consulted on before Debbie said 'yes' on his behalf. Ethan said he gets emails out of the blue telling him when he has to be somewhere his mother has decided he's going.

Chris said, "I never get emails like that."

"I never get emails telling me I'm going someplace I don't know about and don't want to go to."

Later on, I realized the boys were swapping war stories about their mothers. 

War stories and tall tales. My parents' generation told their kids stories about walking 5 miles to school. Apparently Chris & Ethan & R.'s generation, a certain segment of it, is going to tell their kids stories about their mother making them do math.

Why does no one ever seem to notice this aspect of helicopter parenting?

We hear that helicopter parents are terrible parents, destructive to their children and debilitating in every way.

From time to time we also hear a grudging concession that some helicopter parents seem to produce reasonably accomplished kids who are none the worse for wear.

But we never hear, at least I have never heard, that helicopter parents are fun.

We never hear that the family math wars and the SAT battles and the (occasional) shouting matches that are such a vivid part of life with a helicopter parent are moments their children are going to remember and cherish.

Remember, cherish, and tell their own children about.

seeking Tiger Mom

At the WSJ (not sure whether it's behind a pay wall): "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" by Suzy Lee Weiss.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

What could I have done differently over the past years?

[snip]

Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?

This girl is a fabulous writer!

parents v. schools, Victorian edition

Have stumbled upon a brief history of discipline in British schools. Apparently parents have long been held in low regard by the public servants hired to teach their children:

In the early part of 1890 a teachers’ newspaper, The Schoolmistress, complained that its urban readers were under the constant threat of violence. It noted that the ‘rough language and violence heaped on teachers in some of the low and rough neighbourhoods of London and other large towns can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed it’. The image that the paper put forward was of a school system in a state of siege, with teachers fearing that they could be attacked at any time by the parents of their pupils. Though the lurid descriptions that appeared in The Schoolmistress were undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect, they reflected a very real problem that afflicted schools at the time, which was a severe and ongoing hostility between parents and teachers.

The underlying issue in these conflicts was school discipline. By 1890 many parents were objecting to what they saw as the cruel and arbitrary use of corporal punishment then endemic within the school system. Children were not only caned but also subjected to many other forms of physical punishment, from being struck across the knuckles with slates, to receiving blows to the head with metal classroom pointers. In one case the disciplinary regime of a particular school involved a teacher stalking round the classroom, threatening children with a large knife. Parents generally thought that such forms of behaviour were inappropriate and that their children should be protected from such treatment.

Any sense of outrage felt by parents was reinforced by the fact that most of the punishment that occurred in schools was unlawful.

[snip]

The common perception of Victorian schools is that they were primitive and brutal institutions in which children were subjected to violent discipline. Though there is a certain amount of truth in this, it fails to acknowledge the general unpopularity of corporal punishment among parents as well as pupils. Even in the 19th century this type of punishment was seen as an archaic and outmoded disciplinary tool. The negative image was supported by popular literature, such as Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and by real-life events, including the infamous Eastbourne Manslaughter of 1860 in which a school boy was beaten to death by his teacher. By this date opposition to corporal punishment was at its height and it was generally believed that the demise of the practice was fast approaching.

Yet the use of corporal punishment persisted. Teachers felt it had value as a disciplinary tool, believing that it was a quick and simple means by which order could be imposed on a class. Meanwhile many politicians and judges educated at public schools saw corporal punishment as a normal and natural part of childhood and had little sympathy with the objections of parents. Collectively their efforts helped to preserve its use as an educational tool and to institutionalise it as a standard disciplinary measure within schools. From the early 1890s onwards a number of administrative and legal measures were brought into effect that protected the rights of those teachers who wished to strike children. Classroom teachers were permitted to use corporal punishment and the rights of head teachers to inflict punishment were extended considerably. By the time of the First World War the parental protests against disciplinary excesses had been suppressed and corporal punishment was established as a normal and expected form of discipline. The practice was only banned in British state schools in 1987.

Spare the Rod
By Jacob Milddleton History Today | Volume: 62 Issue: 11 2012

So...it took 150 years, give or take, for parents to drive corporal punishment out of the schools.

Successive generations of U.S. parents have been agitating for phonics and a knowledge-based education in the liberal arts for -- is it 110 years now?

Give it another 40, and maybe we'll see some action.

Tiger Mom

Debbie's been telling me for ages how wonderful Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom is, and I finally bought the book.

She's right. It's incredible.

Here is the first page:

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It’s also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin, and how we made it to Carnegie Hall.

This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

A lot of parents whose kids are heading off to college will find the book moving, especially parents who've been part of kitchen table math. All the things you wanted to do, and tried to do, and failed to do because your kids had other ideas....your kids and your schools and your culture: all the things you didn't manage to do because no one thought it was a really good idea to spend 4 years of your child's life reteaching math (and spelling) at home so he could be on par with his peers in Europe and Asia.

Hard to sort it all out.

That's what the book is about, though for Amy Chua's kids the contested territory was music, not math.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is the memoir of a Chinese afterschooler.

Amy Chua in the NY Times

In interviews, she comes off as unresolved. “I think I pulled back at the right time,” she said. “I do not think there was anything abusive in my house.” Yet, she added, “I stand by a lot of my critiques of Western parenting. I think there’s a lot of questions about how you instill true self-esteem.”

Her real crime, she said, may have been telling the truth. “I sort of feel like people are not that honest about their own parenting,” she said. “Take any teenage household, tell me there is not yelling and conflict.”

Yelling and conflict in the teenage household.

Check.

Initially, Ms. Chua said, she wrote large chunks about her husband and their conflicts overchild rearing. But she gave him approval on every page, and when he kept insisting she was putting words in his mouth, it became easier to leave him out.

“It’s more my story,” she said. “I was the one that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids. My husband was much more typical. He had a lot of anxiety, he didn’t think he knew all the right choices.” And, she said, “I was the one willing to put in the hours.”

In my family, I've had the over-the-top Amy-Chua role.

I had it with Jimmy, and I had it with C. (Not with Andrew.)

At one point, the entire household - Ed, M. (nanny), Christian (aide for Jimmy & Andrew & unofficial son) - were lined up in opposition to my four-year quest to teach C. math.

Today everyone's glad I did what I did.

Ms. Chua wrote most of the book in eight weeks, yet struggled with the end, she said, reflecting the East-West tug on her parenting. “It’s a work in progress,” she said. “On bad days I would say this method is terrible. I just need to give them freedom and choice. On good days, when Lulu would say: ‘I’m so glad you made me write that second draft of my essay. My teacher read it out loud,’ I think, I’ve got to stick to my guns.”

Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: January 14, 2011

That's where Amy Chua and I are different.

I am torn over not doing enough.

Not doing enough with C., and certainly not enough with Andrew.

And, heck, while I'm at it -- Jimmy could have used a couple more efforts to teach him to read, too!

extreme parenting

The New York Times has a group of responses to Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."

I thought two were interesting:

The Power of Conviction

Defining Success for Myself

Amazingly, no one has thought to ask Laurence Steinberg what he thinks. At this point, we have 50 years of research into what type of parenting produces great kids, but no one mentions it over at the Times.

multiple choice:

a) authoritarian
b) permissive
c) authoritative
d) disengaged

The answer is C.

Chinese moms, part 4

C. and I saw this a while back & he's been quoting it to me ever since.

I'm printing out a copy of the Chinese mom story for him to read now ---

Chinese moms, part 2

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
JANUARY 8, 2011
By Amy Chua

So true!

Love it!

And I say that as a Real American who thinks learning should be fun, or at least interesting, as often as possible.

Ed hadn't heard about the article, and when he read it over the breakfast table this morning, he laughed all the way through. He guffawed when he got to this part:

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Ed said, "That's pretty much how I feel about C. throwing shot put."

Back story:

This winter C. decided to join the track team & throw the shot put. He has never thrown the shot put before, and he's not good at throwing the shot put. But he's on the team.

Being on the team means getting up at 5am to catch the train to his school for practice -- this during junior year, when "grades count," AND in the wake of a slide in his grades last fall.^*

C's original idea, naturally, was that either Ed or I would rise with him at 5am and drive him to the Bronx. Who wants to walk to the station at 5am in the winter?

Hah.

I may be an abject failure as a Chinese mom, but I am not a fool.

Ed, on the other hand, after returning from 2 1/2 weeks in Paris, during which time I had full responsibility for the morning wrestling match with Andrew, told C. he would drive him to school, leaving me to carry on shouldering full responsibility for the morning wrestling match with Andrew.

I put the kibosh on that one.


unconditional support

Like all American teenagers, it seems, C. is well aware of his right to unconditional parental support in all things. At some point while Ed was away, C. gave me a reproachful look and said: "I feel bad that you and Daddy don't support me throwing the shot put."

"Too bad," I said. "I have no interest in shot put."

C.: "But you supported me playing tennis."

Me: "I have no interest in tennis, either."^**

C.: "That's true."

At this point, where school and school activities are concerned, I am interested in one thing.

Two things, actually.

Good grades and high SAT scores.


^* His grades have now come back up. If they hadn't, he wouldn't be throwing the shot put.
^** By which I mean to say I have no interest in C. winning tennis matches, although I spent years forcing him to take tennis lessons. I am sooooo not a Chinese mom. A Chinese mom forces her kids to do stuff so they can excel. I forced my kid to take tennis because "a boy needs a sport" and "you can play tennis when you're old."

as a Chinese mom, I am an abject failure

Fabulous article in the WSJ today - !

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
JANUARY 8, 2011
By AMY CHUA

helicoptering done well

Glory Road - My Son Harry Can Movies & TV SPIKE.com

another helicopter mom

[Michael] Steele once told me a story that speaks volumes about his determination to succeed: Steele attended college at Johns Hopkins University. In his freshman year, Steele said, his grades were so bad that the dean of students told him he would not be invited to return. His mother forced him to go back to the dean and insist he was prepared to do anything to continue his studies. The dean said "no," but Steele's mother made him confront the dean again. This went on for weeks until the dean, in desperation, agreed to readmit Steele with the proviso that any bad grades would end in his dismissal, mother or no mother. Steele went on to graduate near the top of his class at Johns Hopkins and was elected student body president.

Democrats: Beware of Michael Steel
by Bob Beckel
February 06, 2009
realclearpolitics

She sounds like a real pistol, that one.

I like that in a mother.

helicopter parents of the world

I am behind.

I am horribly behind.

I am so behind that, for me, it isn't today, it's still yesterday, or possibly the day before.^*

......................

For the time being, here's something fun:

A 1983 study conducted by McClelland and Pilon backs up the link between achievement drive and performance. These researchers conducted achievement tests on thirty-one year old adults whose mothers had been extensively interviewed twenty-five years earlier by Sears, Maccoby and Lewin (1957) regarding their child rearing practices. This study reveals that the highest correlate to achievement drive is clearly the mother’s belief that it is very important for her child to perform well in school. This was true across all socio-economic strata, with the highest effect among the children of white collar workers.

How to Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence by Carmen McGuinness & Geoffrey McGuinness, pp. 5-6

I'm going to have to finally get around to writing my Richard Elmore posts on the subject of wealthy suburban schools.


^* comma splice intentional

eduwonkette makes my day

Savvy New York City parents have long suspected that high achieving kids are losing out in the push to boost the achievement of the lowest performing students. But those suspicions are often cast aside by public officials as helicopter parent whining or muted class warfare.

Are New York Schools Shortchanging High Achieving Students?

This is the first time I've seen anyone other than a parent (well, other than the folks around here) use the term "helicopter parent" to indicate coded language administrators & educators use to fend off parents & evade accountability.

This spring the Health teacher actually taught the term "helicopter parents" to her 8th grade class.

The subject was stress, and the teacher had asked the kids what things stressed them out. One kid said his parents stressed him out because they were pressuring him to do well in school.^*

"That's called helicopter parenting," the teacher explained.

I managed not to write an email about that one, although I wanted to.

If I had, I would have explained to the teacher that a helicopter parent isn't a parent who pressures his kid.

A helicopter parent is a parent who pressures the school.


^* I gather no one said that ineffective classroom instruction or indecipherable grading rubrics stresses them out. A missed opportunity!

Eureka

Ed had a blinding revelation yesterday morning.

I'd gotten out Laurence Steinberg's Beyond the Classroom, which I hadn't looked at in several years, and was reading his descriptions of authoritative versus permissive parents of teens. That section hadn't left much of an impression on me 4 years ago. More on that anon.


Authoritative parents are:

• High on warmth and acceptance

• High on firmness: Parents who are high on this dimension have clearly articulated the rules that the child is expected to follow, and they make demands on the child to behave in a mature and responsible fashion. Children raised in this way know what their parents expect of them and know that there are consequences for violating their expectations. (p. 107)

• High on "autonomy support": Parents who are high in support for psychological autonomy solicit their child’s opinions, encourage their child to express himself or herself, and, in adolescence, enjoy watching their child develop into a separate and autonomous individual. Children who grow up with parents who are high in autonomy support feel that self-expression is a valued trait, that their parents’ love and respect for them is not contingent on their having the same opinions and ideas as their parents, and that it is important for a person to speak up for what he or she believes. (p. 107)

Permissive parents are:

• High on warmth & acceptance
• Low on firmness
• High on autonomy support

When you put these things together you get a familiar pattern.

Permissive parents ... view their main responsibility as [1] making sure that their child is happy and that his or her needs are gratified.... [P]ermissive parents believe that children are basically good, and that parents should support children in their natural inclinations. Permissive parents are not there to control the child, but to [2] facilitate growth by staying out of the way as much as possible. In fact, these parents [3] worry about the risk of excessive control—that the child’s creativity, curiosity, and inquisitiveness will be stifled by too much emphasis on authority. The acknowledge that children can make bad choices, but [4] they believe that the beneficial learning that takes place as a result of making mistakes outweighs the negative consequences of these errors. [numbers added] (p. 113)

Ed listened to that paragraph and said, "That's the schools."

It is.

Permissive parenting = discovery learning in the home.

The permissive parent focuses on emotion, facilitates growth by staying out of the way, frowns on parent "over-involvement," and believes that children need to make their own decisions and discover the consequences. This includes decisions about whether to drink, use drugs, and do homework.

The authoritative parent thinks all of this is hooey.
The authoritative parent thinks all of this is hooey because the authoritative parent believes in instruction. The authoritative parent is a natural-born instructivist; he (or she) possesses knowledge he intends to spend his parenting years conveying to his children.

What the authoritative parent does not believe in is allowing his child to learn hard lessons via trial and error (hands-on!). You will never hear an authoritative parent suggest that it's good for children to be allowed to make bad decisions so they can discover that bad decisions are bad by living with the results.

This is why the reading wars and the math wars and the edu-wars in general are about so much "more" than just a reading war or a math war or an edu-war in general. The schools are in loco parentis, but the parenting "style" in so many of them is wildly wrong for authoritative parents (not to mention authoritarian parents, but that's another story). If you're an authoritative parent sending a child to a school led by permissive and/or authoritarian educators -- we've experienced both -- you're going to feel that not only is your child being badly taught, he's being badly parented, too.

Meanwhile, permissive white parents^* believe the same things progressive educators do:

• Learning is personal and emotional
• Learning is "growth"
• Learning is natural; the grownup's role is to facilitate by staying out of the way
• Parental over-involvement is common and destructive
• Parents shouldn't run interference with the school on their children's behalf; parents should allow their children to "self-advocate"

And so on.

There's no way to reconcile these positions. Authoritative parents want authoritative teachers. Permissive parents want progressive educators. Never the twain shall meet.

Of course, given the reality of the standards movement and No Child Left Behind, it seems likely that neither group is getting what they want.


It's not relative....

Since the late 1950s, literally hundreds of studies have been conducted that examine acceptance, firmness, and autonomy support and their consequences for the child’s development. The gist of these studies has been remarkably consistent: children develop in more healthy ways when their parents are relatively more accepting, relatively firmer, and relatively more supportive of the child’s developing sense of autonomy.

[snip]

The consistency with which findings on the benefits to children of acceptance, firmness, and autonomy support have appeared in research studies is really quite remarkable, especially since scientists have used all sorts of methods and sources of information. More important, the consistency of this research argues against the widely held notion that good parenting is all relative. In the past four decades of concerted, scientific study, no research has ever suggested that children fare better when their parents are aloof than when they are accepting, when their parents are lenient rather than firm, or when their parents are psychologically controlling rather than supportive of their psychological autonomy. p. 106-110

Instructivist parents

…teenagers who had been raised in authoritative homes—homes in which parents are accepting, firm, and supportive of their child’s psychological autonomy—fare significantly better than their peers from other types of households. Psychologically, authoritatively reared adolescents are more confident, more poised, more persistent, more self-reliant, and more responsible. They are less likely to use or abuse drugs or alcohol, and less likely to be involved in delinquency or in more minor forms of misbehavior, such as cheating on school tests or cutting classes. Adolescents from authoritative homes report less anxiety, less depression, and fewer psychosomatic problems, such as insomnia or problems controlling their appetite. And not surprisingly, adolescents from authoritative homes do best in school, as measured by their grades, their attitudes toward schoolwork, and the time they invest in their studies. (p. 116-117)

^*see In Low-Income Schools, Parents Want Teachers Who Teach
Romancing the Child by E.D. Hirsch


in which I swear off permissive parenting

how to grow an athlete

I still haven't read this story, but this paragraph caught my eye:

If I gave in to the uncontrollable Ericssonian urge to put Spartak's success into a formula, it would read something like:

Intense Parents + Young Kids + Rigorous Technique + Toughness = Talent

How to Grow a Super-Athlete
by Daniel Coyle
NY Times Magazine
March 4, 2007

I should probably go post that in the Comments on Concerned Parent's blog.


the "naturals"

Speaking of how to grow an athlete, I learned yesterday, while spending FOUR HOURS out on in a CVS out on Long Island trying to get Andrew's prescription medications labeled in compliance with state law for autistic kids attending 7 days of summer camp for the first time EVER, that there's a fellow in Switzerland who may be able to distinguish between the "naturals" and the "works hards." (You can get a lot of magazines read waiting 4 hours in a CVS.)

I wish to heck Psych Today had the print story posted online. The neuroscientist was an aspiring chess grandmaster who worked his tucchus off, was sent to special schools, etc. He finally gave up when he was beaten by an amateur player who "just liked to play."

Here's the blurb they do have posted.

The difference he's seeing has to do with memory, but I haven't figured it out yet.

pushy parents and the real world

The Race Between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz is one of the most important books ever written about U.S. education.

Two Tales of the Twentieth Century: A Summary

The history of inequality during the twentieth century is a tale in two parts. The first was punctuated by episodes of declining inequality, some quite sudden and rapid. Stable or slowly rising inequality marked other parts of the period. On the whole, the first three-quarters of the century were years of greatly diminished inequality and lowered returns to education. Americans grew together as economic growth was shared throughout the income distribution during much of the period.

Everything came to a halt in the 1970s. America started to grow more slowly and Americans began to grow apart. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century have been distinguished by exploding inequality, chiefly at the upper end of the income distribution. Returns to education, particularly college, markedly increased. Economic growth slowed or was stagnant until the mid-1990s. Whatever growth occurred was unequally shared. With low or no growth and soaring inequality, the lower end often lost out altogether while the economic elites prospered.

We saw in Chapter 1 that the history of educational attainment in the United States is also a tale in two parts. For a long time cohorts of the American population an workforce increased their educational attainment rapidly relative to previous cohorts. But that trend halted and has remained on hold with the entering labor force cohorts of the late 1970s.

We are left with several questions. What accounts for narrowing inequality trends during the first part of the twentieth century and what could explain the possible failure of these trends during the second part. Did technology change accelerate between the first and the second parts of the twentieth century? Was the culprit the computer revolution? Alternatively, or in conjunction, did the supply of educated and skilled workers change? We turn to these issues in Chapter 3.


Chapter 3 Skill-Biased Technological Change

Economic inequality since 1980 increased greatly, as we have just seen. The earnings of college graduates rose at a far greater clip than did the earnings of those who stopped at high school graduation. The incomes of top managers and professionals increased at a much faster rate than did those of ordinary workers.

The increase in inequality was more all-encompassing than a widening between different education levels or occupational groups. The expanding gap also occurred within groups, even within educational levels. Among college graduates, for example, those with degrees from institutions with higher standards for admissions earned relatively more over time. Those who went to more prestigious law schools did better relative to other law school graduates. The widening occurred within virtually all groups in a manner that is not easily explained by the usual observable factors such as years of schooling. At almost all educational and experience levels, for example, the earnings for those near the top of the distribution increased considerably relative to those near the bottom.

The point that we made in the previous chapter was that widening inequality during the past 25 years has affected practically all Americans. Few groups, by education, occupation, geography, and so forth, have been untouched. Some have gained, relatively, but far more have lost, at times in absolute terms. Widening inequality has been pervasive as well as rapid.

The Race Between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
pp. 87-90

The thesis of the book is that education is the engine. I haven't finished reading, but I assume that the explanation for rising within-group inequality is going to be rising within-group inequality in education.

This is precisely the understanding of the world that drives "pushy parents." At least, it is the understanding of the world that drives me. We parents live in the real world, most of the time; we notice that the returns to education are high. We notice, too, or we suspect, that the returns to a superb education are higher than the returns to a good education, the returns to a good education higher than those to an education that is only so-so. Which is the best our schools of education have to offer these days.

I would profoundly value a superb liberal education regardless of the economic returns.

Nevertheless, given the fact that my lone typical child will have two autistic siblings to look after when he is grown, I want his chances of earning a very good living to be high.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

Fighting Back Against "The World Is Soooo Dangerous Now": Free Range Kids

Lenore Skenazy let her son Izzy make his own way home from Bloomingdale's in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about the experience in the New York Sun. It was a man-bites-dog story, as Izzy is only nine--. Lenore wrote another column for the Huffington Post:

Last week I wrote a column for my newspaper, The New York Sun, titled, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway." It basically said that I let him do this because he wanted to take a trip solo, he knew how to read the map, and I had every confidence that he could find his way home.

Two days later, said son and I found ourselves on the Today Show, MSNBC and FoxNews, trying to convince anchor after anchor after anchor that:

1) This was not a crazy idea - as they could see from the fact the kid was sitting there, grinning. And

2) I am not a crazy mom, as they could see from...

Well, that's the point. Not all of them could see. The mere fact that I'd let my son out of my sight made me seem nuts to more than a few people, who wondered why didn't I follow him, or keep checking in with a cell phone, or wait until he was 34 and balding before I let him go out on his own.

Skenazy is looking to give her son "a longer leash."

But here's what I've learned from all the folks who don't want to do that, and send bile-filled notes instead: For some reason we live in a society that sees little difference between letting a child frolic in the front yard and letting a child frolic in front of a firing squad. It's impossible for people to calculate the difference between real and remote risks.

So she's started a blog, Free Range Kids, to counter the coddling and hypervigilance -- even countering the helicopter parenting phenomenon.

At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.

Go and tell your story of raising Free Range Kids.

(will be cross-posted at I Speak of Dreams)

from the TIMES

Love this comment on the TIMES article about parents causing teacher burnout:

69.
What this article is NOT saying is that students are not being prepared to go into college courses. I graduated at the top of my high school class in 2003 and had to take 2 remedial math courses before I was able to get up to college level algebra. What were my teachers teaching me that I couldn’t place into college level math? They were teaching me the bare minimum. Don’t get me wrong, teachers have the hardest jobs of all, but when they become cynical because of criticism, then they need to get out of the business. I paid for my remedial courses, how about my high school teachers reimburse me for it? Parents should be involved, my parents assumed that I was getting a good education at a good high school, they were wrong. Parents need to start attending school board meetings, addressing the issues that need to be addressed. If teachers don’t want to deal with parents, then get a new job, because kids and just that, they are kids, and they need their parents to speak up for them.

Unfortunately, attending school board meetings & addressing issues that need to be addressed does not result in one's school taking responsibility for teaching math.

helicopter parents: survey

Education News links to a reasonably incoherent article on helicopter parents that opens the way, by law, all feature stories must open:

College administrators grumble about the rise of "helicopter parents," moms and dads who keep hovering over the lives of their children even after they leave for college.

But helicopter parents aren't just hovering. They're swooping down in attack mode.

Having established the rising horror of helicopter parents (when I wrote for New Woman I always had to say that whatever I was writing about was "skyrocketing"), the article goes on to report survey data that directly contradicts the lead (I never did that, of course):

There's an upside to intervening parents. Their children are more engaged in college life, happier and reporting getting more from the experience.

"We speculate maybe these students are persisting and taking advantage of a lot of opportunities in college, when they might not have done that if their parents weren't prodding," Kuh said.

It sounds as if "helicopter parenting" in college happens for the same reason it does in K-12, which is students not doing well:

"We speculate maybe these students are persisting and taking advantage of a lot of opportunities in college, when they might not have done that if their parents weren't prodding," Kuh said. However, those students do get lower grades.

Barbara Hofer, a psychologist at Middlebury College in Vermont, said the results are similar to data she has gathered but not yet published on students at Middlebury and the University of Michigan.

[snip]

Like the NSSE survey, Hofer has also discovered communication stays constant through college (about 13 times per week, by phone and electronically, for both freshmen and seniors), and that students who are more independent about academics had higher GPAs. However, it's unclear whether that's cause or effect: Does laissez-faire parenting produce smarter students, or do students who struggle academically draw in their parents for help?

source:
Survey eyes hovering college parents by Judith Pope

Seeing as how we have years of research on the question of what parenting style produces the most successful students (hint: not laissez faire) this is not a burning question for me.

Interestingly, while I've read Steinberg's book, I hadn't remembered that parental involvement in the schools works only for "authoritative" parents, not permissive parents.

Abstract

This article examines the impact of authoritative parenting, parental involvement in schooling, and parental encouragement to succeed on adolescent school achievement in an ethnically and socio-economically heterogeneous sample of approximately 6,400 American 14-18-year-olds.

[snip]

Authoritative parenting (high acceptance, supervision, and psychological autonomy granting) leads to better adolescent school performance and stronger school engagement. The positive impact of authoritative parenting on adolescent achievement, however, is mediated by the positive effect of authoritativeness on parental involvement in schooling. In addition, nonauthoritativeness attenuates the beneficial impact of parental involvement in schooling on adolescent achievement. Parental involvement is much more likely to promote adolescent school success when it occurs in the context of an authoritative home environment.

This makes me chuckle.

All along I've had the sense that hammering your school doesn't do any good if you aren't also hammering your kid -- and research proves it!