When parenting intuition is wrong, part 1

Let's start with this quote:

"Psychologist Suzanne Gaskins has studied Mayan villages for decades and told NPR that Mayan parents give their kids a tremendous amount of freedom. 'Rather than having the mom set the goal -- and then having to offer enticements and rewards to reach that goal -- the child is setting the goal. Then the parents support that goal however they can,' Gaskin said. Mayan parents 'feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want that goal can be achieved only when the child wants it.'

Most formal schooling in America and similar industrialized countries, on the other hand, is the antithesis of a place where kids have the autonomy to make their own choices. According to Rugoff [Barbara Rugoff, professor at UC Santa Cruz], 'It may be the case that children give up control of their attention when it's always managed by an adult.' In other words, kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention and become highly distractible as a result.

Ryan's [Richard Ryan, researcher of human behavior] research reveals exactly where we lose kids' attention. 'Whenever children enter middle school, whenever they start leaving home-based classrooms and go into the more police-state style of schools, where bells are ringing, detentions are happening, punishment is occurring, they're learning right then that this is not an intrinsically motivating environment,' he says. Robert Epstein, the researcher who wrote, 'The Myth of the Teen Brain' in Scientific American, has a similar conclusion. 'Surveys I have conducted show that teens in the U.S. are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.'" (pp. 192-3, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal)

I don't know about you, but I find these paragraphs compelling. To give a little context, the reason Mayan villages are mentioned is that earlier, a study is cited where two children were brought into a room where an adult taught one of them as task. The focus of the study was to see what the child who was not being taught did in that situation. The study was conducted in both the U.S. and in Guatemala. The U.S. children generally were not engaged. Researchers saw feet shuffling, staring into space, general disinterest in some and outright disruptive behaviors in others. In contrast, the Mayan children concentrated on what the other child was learning with a focus that was twice as long as the U.S. children. Many of these children from Guatemala had overall less exposure to formal education than the children from the U.S. 

There seems to be a common belief that children won't learn to sit still, pay attention, work hard, stand in line, take tests, and generally be an educated and competent adult if they do not do extensive practice of these things as children. This is the reason often given for homework, long school days, a decline in recess and lunch hours, and highly managed time. Yet, multiple researchers have learned that these things actually do the opposite. Instead of developing attention spans, curiosity, and self-control, current practices do exactly the opposite. We give our incarcerated adults more self-volition than we do our teens. 

Self-control and attention can only come from within the child; it is not something that an adult can force into being. The only way they develop is through the child having free time and self-volition to figure things out for themselves. Oh, and a hefty dose of time to play as well.

"Spending time with peers has always been a formative part of growing up. For kids, much of the opportunity to develop social skills centers around chances to play with others. In today's world, however, teens increasingly experience social interactions in virtual environments because doing so in the real world is inconvenient or off limits.

The very nature of play is rapidly changing. Remember playing pickup games at the basketball court, hanging out at the mall on weekends, or simply roaming around the neighborhood until you found a friend? Sadly, spontaneous socializing simply isn't happening as much as it used to.

As Peter Gray, who has studied the decline of play in America, wrote in American Journal of Play, 'It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing uniforms and following the directions of coaches.'

Whereas previous generations were allowed to simply play after school and form close social bonds, many children today are raised by parents who restrict outdoor play because of 'child predators, road traffic, and bullies,' according to a survey of parents in an Atlantic article. These concerns were mentioned even though kids today are statistically the safest generation in American history." (p. 195)

We make a mistake when we believe that children need to be directed and monitored and scheduled in order to give them the tools they need to be an adult. Instead, all that does is create children who cannot learn these skills because they have checked out due to lack of self-volition and then we wonder why our young adults are aimless and incapable. As I talk with parents over the past ten years of so, they are increasingly afraid of free time and not asking their child to do enough. I am convinced fear is really at the root of this. Parents do love their children and want the best for them, yet they have lost the ability to correctly evaluate genuine risk as well as buying into the whole prison-like school system, which is definitely marketed to them with scare tactics. (And once again, I am not opposed to individual teachers. There are some truly fantastic teachers out there who are a gift to the children who have them. But in general, they, too, are stuck in a punitive prison-like system.) 

Our system and much of our current society is broken. It can be difficult to see beyond the current school system and intense micro-managing parenting if you have been raised in it. But, I think many parent's intuition about how children learn and grow and mature is wrong. Parenting doesn't have to be as difficult and intense as we have been led to believe. The best recipe? Connection with loving adults where a child feels safe, exposure to a wide range of experiences and ideas, and enough non-directed time to make sense of it all.