Bad Parent: The Overachiever
I flashcard my two-year-old.
by Elizabeth Heiselt
November 5, 2009
My son is two years old. He knows his alphabet in English and American Sign Language. He counts, relatively accurately, to eighteen. He can identify more than fifty words that I have been flashing at him from my homemade 4x6 cards for the past several months. He regularly wows strangers with his ability to count with the elevator as we go up and down the floors. "Smart kid," they'll say. "How old is he?" And I beam, of course. I thought I was being a good parent by encouraging such intellectual pursuits and helping him identify and interpret the world around him. But then I read Peggy Orenstein's "Kindergarten Cram" article in The New York Times Magazine and began to rethink my priorities.
Kids don't get to be kids for long enough, Ms. Orenstein wrote. Play is an essential part of any child's childhood, an indispensable tool to forming relationships and becoming socially and emotionally stable and there isn't enough of it in today's kindergartens. Drilling kids with flash cards pushes them to grow up before they are ready, robbing them of opportunities to learn necessary skills that will help them compete in our global society. Oops. I was robbing my child of his childhood. He probably wasn't "playing" nearly enough. As I read I imagined the track my bright little boy was on. He'd be the socially awkward, uncoordinated kid who never got invited to parties, acted out in strange ways and drew pitying looks from his classmates. He'd probably smell bad, too.
What had I been thinking? Let the kid grow up when he was ready. Sigh. I hadn't planned for things to be this way. I thought he'd be the rough-and-tumble little boy who roared at everything and bit the furniture as he stalked the house defending his territory. But when he showed interest in the letter "S" at twenty months on a cross-country flight, I snagged the opportunity to keep him quiet and contained. We looked for S's in the in-flight magazines calmly and intently for the rest of the flight. After that, his appetite for letters, numbers and words could not be satiated.
Did my child even know how to play?
I had assumed I was doing a good thing, feeding his interests, giving him hugs and kisses when he learned new things and generally making learning fun and exciting. I even skimmed through a book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read by Glenn Doman and Janet Doman. The Domans assured me that starting young would make it easier for the child to pick up on new words and learn to read. The older he was, even kindergarten age, the more difficult it would be. As I watched my child, still shy of his second birthday, learn to recognize nine words in one afternoon — with less than ten minutes of effort on my part — I became a believer. The few minutes I spent each day showing him new words and then testing him on them later in the week were going to save us from a world of frustration once he was actually "old enough" to learn to read.
©2009 Elizabeth Blackwell and Babble.com
About the Author
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Elizabeth Heiselt is a full-time mom, sometime-writer with an MA in Journalism from New York University. She and her husband live, work, play, and run with their two-year-old son in Brooklyn. |
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