Take it slow... warning great kvetchy-ness ahead

I think it must be that the seasons are in transition, but once again there seems to be an inordinate amount of parents overly concerned with making sure their children are "caught up" or that they stay "caught up" and thus plan an incredibly ambitious summer program. ... As I was writing this, I realized that this might not just be seasonal, a homeschooling-thing, but a covid related issue for all parents. This idea of "caught up" or "behind" seems epidemic. I'll be honest with you. I don't get it. 

Where's the fire? What's the hurry? Why do so many people feel as though their children come with an expiration date? This has always baffled me, but as I get older and have taught a wide range of children for yet another year, it becomes increasingly nonsensical. Really, I'm genuinely asking, why does everyone feel as though they are under the clock?

Because, truly, there is no point to rushing childhood and the learning that happens during childhood. If you stop to think about, there is actually not that much learning (in terms of academics) to do. I actually really, truly believe that if you took a child, taught them to read, taught them what numbers are and what they stand for then did absolutely nothing else except read books and explore your world, that child in sixth grade could cover everything that is covered in grade school in that one year. Have you looked at a series of text books? Have you noticed how they spiral, in that there is 90% review and 10% new in each of them? (It's why I skip entire grades for math and grammar.) It doesn't actually add up to all that much that is new. Instead, things that could wait are introduced in lower grades where they are more difficult to learn and take more time, along the way convincing a whole host of children that they are stupid and can't do the work. (If you hear a lot of disdain in the tone of that sentence, you aren't imagining it.) I've always figured it's just a lot easier to wait until a child is actually ready and then conquer that particular item in short order. I realize my sample is small, but it's worked so far.

There is just so much rushing in the world. Parents wanting their children to join classes at ages 2, 3, or 4 that used to be reserved for 7, 8, or 9 year olds. I can tell you that as a piano teacher, if you steadfastly refuse to do traditional piano lessons for children under six, you will soon have no studio left. I finally wrote out my reasoning for refusing to teach younger children so that I could just cut and paste it, thus saving me some time. I became the queen of refusing students. It is not developmentally appropriate and I won't play. (Now, I realize I'm sounding like a curmudgeon, which I probably am.)

The whole thing definitely starts to feel as though I'm tilting at windmills, though I have some walking proof of my less-than-traditional educational ideas. I think that's why I'm so excited by the book I'm currently reading. (And for those of you who grow weary by my continual book reports, my apologies. Given the size of my to be read stack of books at the moment, I don't see it getting better anytime soon.)

I'm currently reading Kids Beyond Limits by Anat Baniel. It has been on my list for a very long time, but has only now risen to the top. It is the Feldenkrais method being accomodated for children with special needs. I first did reading about Feldenkrais in one of my odder brain books a year or two ago, and have wanted to research it more. I'm realizing that all of his ideas fit in extremely well with current brain science and all of my EFL learning I have been doing. Anyway, I really think the nine essentials to helping children shouldn't just be limited to children with challenges. They form a strong basis for any child to develop a strong and capable scaffolding for future life and learning. I'm strongly tempted to share all of them with you, but for time's sake, I'll stick with the idea of slowness since it relates to the topic of this post. I'll start with a few quotes.

"The slowing down of human development [as opposed to any other animal] allows for an extended and extensive process of differentiation and increased complexity in the structures of the brain from which the unique human skills can arise. This slowing down of the human development takes advantage of the bigger brain that will develop over a period of many years, even decades.

Research shows that efforts to accelerate early development in the healthy baby do not make a meaningful difference in the overall speed of development. There is no evidence that such efforts ensure better performance later in life -- and there is a very real possibility that early efforts at acceleration of development can be detrimental.

...

We humans, whether with special needs or not, are built so we do not close the deal too soon or too fast, do not commit to a final set of patterns in our movements -- thoughts, feelings, actions -- that could get grooved in too quickly. That is how we reach the highest levels of development and performance. By slowing down and not closing the deal too soon, we leave the time needed for incredibly complex sets of skills to develop and to be able to continue developing more and more, with new and greater skills throughout our lifetimes." (pp. 86-87)

What she is talking about her in regards to 'closing the deal too soon' is the process of neural connections, neural pruning, and myelination. Myelination is where the neural synapses create hardened pathways in the brain where connections are routinely made, allowing the signals to move faster. It is the repetition of something that causes the myelination to start. Why take the chance of poor connections being cemented in our children's brains because we forced too early, inappropriate learning on them, forcing their brains to create maladaptive connections, and then with the inevitable endless repetition of school cement those maladaptive connections in? This is the cost of too early academics, sports, music, etc. It doesn't create prodigies, it creates brains that could have done better with more time.

So stop it! Let your children be children. Let them play and move and explore and listen to stories and discover things on their own. Let them take all the time they need to learn something. There is no race, no rush, no prize at the end. There are no parental awards for having driven to the most activities, hiring the most tutors, or starting toddlers in, well, anything. And yet our society acts as if there is a race, there is a prize, there is a rush. And parents are so ill-equipped that they mistakenly believe that it's the things they do for their children that matter instead of the connections and relationships that they invest in. 

And as far as the idea of being "caught up"? It's a crock and you've been sold a bill of goods. Any standardized list of where a child should be at any given time is pretty much made up based on the idea of a standardized child, who doesn't actually exist. In reality, children (and adults for that matter) are all over the board in terms of abilities, interests, how they learn, the speed at which they learn, etc. There is nothing standardized about any human being and we show great disrespect to individuals when we assume they must all be the same. So, no, you're child won't ever be "caught up", but conversely, they won't be "behind", either. Your child is exactly where they need to be at this very moment in time, and it actually doesn't say anything about their future, either. Development is jagged and you just don't know when something will fall into place and suddenly make sense... assuming that is, their brains weren't hardened prematurely into something that will find it difficult to develop.