Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 27, 2005 ALIGN HOME TO THE STATE STANDARDS?

Ah...remember when child psychologist guru, Dr. Spock, mocked and condemned the traditional rearing of children and advised parents to give their children "freedom"...to let them do what they want to do when they want to do it?

Couple of articles that point the finger at home life instead of teachers...

Edwatch by Julia Steiny: Dinner table's power

My youngest child, a college freshman, announced that coming home for Thanksgiving would just be way more trouble than it was worth, so he'd spare us the expense and bother by staying put in his dorm. Fire alarms went off in every cell in my being. I'm delighted to have the in-laws, friends and girlfriends at my candle-lit Thanksgiving dinner table, but my three sons and their dad are the core.

My siblings and I used to jeer mercilessly at my own mother for making such a to-do about having all her grownup kids home at the same time. To this day, she says it's the only time she feels completely safe, able to see with her own eyes that we're all right. Turns out this driving passion to have all the kids eating at the same table again afflicts many moms after the kids have left home. Who knew?

In truth, my kid's college is located such that getting home does require time- consuming contortions of public transportation. But failure was not an option. In the end, he had a pretty simple solution in his back pocket, and we concluded that he really just wanted to be begged to come home -- which I did.

After all, I'm finished now with the messy, much-resented labor of adjudicating nightly family meals and overseeing the cultivation of tolerable manners. I insist on enjoying the fruits of my labor. At this point the boys, now men, are quite civilized, indeed, there's no one else I'd rather have dinner with.

So, it was an unexpected joy to hear James Comer, the Yale psychiatrist, make a huge to-do about the family dinner table, declaring it central to building a child's education. Regular sit-down meals force the members of the household to teach one another how to make it a pleasant experience for all of them. Meals are the crucible for manners, conversation skills and family intimacy.

Speaking recently at a conference, Comer said: "It is not the test scores that allow you to be successful in life; it's the social skills that you learn at the dinner table: You come on time; you listen; you don't talk for too long; you learn to debate; you learn personal control; you learn personal expression. As for myself, I'd come home from school thinking about how to present my argument."

Comer's parents -- a steelworker and an entirely unschooled maid -- encouraged debate as an essential life skill, while forbidding actual fighting. You could win your argument with your ability to be persuasive and on the merits of your evidence -- Comer and his siblings often combed libraries and other sources for proofs that they were right -- but the sheer force of shouting was not tolerated. Comer credits dinner with giving him the tools to succeed at an education that in one generation popped him and his siblings from working class to professionals.

If Comer could have his way, all families would go back to eating dinner together -- no more fast food, no more excess of extra-curricular activities, no more I've-got-to-hang-with-my-friends, no more avoiding one another because it is so very inconvenient to teach kids how to be tolerable for the duration of a meal.

This duty definitely lies with the parents. Yes, I was loving the sight of Slater Middle School teachers eating lunch with the students, because those urban kids were getting a warm blast of attention and healthy interaction. But regular family sit-down meals -- with a green and no chips -- and daily reading to kids are the two requirements I wish every family would include in their good-parenting criteria.

Because the pay-off is immeasurable. The very maelstrom of regular family mealtime assures kids -- or should -- that someone is there for them, through thick and thin. Love, trust and resiliency grow, somehow, through the testiness of low-blood-sugar behavior, though the 4,000th reminder to put the napkin in your lap or get your elbow off the table, through please do spare us the sight of talking with your mouth full.

Of course for millennia, everyone sat down to eat a home-cooked meal because that was the only way to get food. Starting in the 1950s frozen and pre-packaged foods began appearing. In the 1960s Mom herself went to work. By the 1980's economics were such -- or the perception of what had become basic necessities was such -- that both Mom and Dad worked full-time jobs just to make ends meet. Instead of a task central to survival, making meals became a totally annoying extra hassle that came on top of the real work of the day, earning money somewhere beyond the home.

In a convenience-oriented society, families and especially kids are the very definition of inconvenient. Family meals are the most inconvenient of all.

So in many homes, sit-down meals became accepted casualties of the high-tech, on-the-go, hyper-busy modern world. Only throw-back moms like me still insisted on, say, at least five dinners a week together -- along with limiting TV, assigning household chores and other antique conventions of family life. But we found ourselves in on-going, pitched battles with our kids because the neighborhood's other parents gave their kids more "freedom," or as mine started to argue, more "respect." No wonder so many overwhelmed parents give up battling to discipline or train their children.

Getting along with each other is critical to all of our lives. Indeed, getting along with each other is, was and always will be the greatest challenge humans face individually and collectively. From divorce to war, failures to get along produce misery not just for the immediate participants, but often for all sorts of innocent bystanders.

In the age of accountability, we insist on measurable inputs with measurable pay- offs. But dinner-table skills can't really be measured. To improve learning in schools, pundits call for more tests, higher expenditures, harsher sanctions and drastic responses that promise to yield bigger numbers. James Comer and I would instead reach out to the families and find ways to help them learn to get along -- and cook -- and to model and teach their extended families how to behave in ways that are pleasant, effective and rewarding for all. Those immeasurable mealtime benefits will do more to boost your all-important test scores than virtually anything else. And they will produce other good besides.

Whatever the reality behind the story of Thanksgiving, the myth celebrates cooperation, peacefulness and getting along with one another by sharing a large, warm winter meal. We need more such meals. May your holiday season be less about commercial consumption and more about breaking bread gratefully, quietly, with intimates and new friends.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.

And, from today's New York Times...

Kids Gone Wild

By JUDITH WARNER

CHILDREN should be seen and not heard" may be due for a comeback. After decades of indulgence, American society seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as far as tolerance for wild and woolly kid behavior is concerned.

Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)

The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of "disruptive urchins" who "obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior," as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.

In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were "respectful toward adults," according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of "intolerable" student behavior.

Even Madonna - her "Papa Don't Preach" years long past - has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud "disciplinarian" in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: "If you leave your clothes on the floor, they're gone when you come home."

Jo Frost, ABC's superstar "Supernanny," would be proud.

Whether children are actually any worse behaved now than they ever have been before is, of course, debatable. Children have always been considered, basically, savages. The question, from the late 17th century onwards, has been whether they come by it naturally or are shaped by the brutality of society.

But what seems to have changed recently, according to childrearing experts, is parental behavior - particularly among the most status-conscious and ambitious - along with the kinds of behavior parents expect from their kids. The pressure to do well is up. The demand to do good is down, way down, particularly if it's the kind of do-gooding that doesn't show up on a college application.

Once upon a time, parenting was largely about training children to take their proper place in their community, which, in large measure, meant learning to play by the rules and cooperate, said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist and co-author, with Nicole Wise, of "The OverScheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyperparenting Trap."

"There was a time when there was a certain code of conduct by which you viewed the character of a person," he said, "and you needed that code of conduct to have your place in the community."

Rude behavior, particularly toward adults, was something for which children had to be chastised, even punished. That has also now changed, said Dan Kindlon, a Harvard University child psychologist and author of "Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age."

Most parents, Dr. Kindlon said, would like their children to be polite, considerate and well behaved. But they're too tired, worn down by work and personally needy to take up the task of teaching them proper behavior at home.

"We use kids like Prozac," he said. "People don't necessarily feel great about their spouse or their job but the kids are the bright spot in their day. They don't want to muck up that one moment by getting yelled at. They don't want to hurt. They don't want to feel bad. They want to get satisfaction from their kids. They're so precious to us - maybe more than to any generation previously. What gets thrown out the window is limits. It's a lot easier to pick their towel up off the floor than to get them away from the PlayStation to do it."

Parenting today is also largely about training children to compete - in school and on the soccer field - and the kinds of attributes they need to be competitive are precisely those that help break down society's civility.

Parents who want their children to succeed more than anything, Dr. Kindlon said, teach them to value and prioritize achievement above all else - including other people.

"We're insane about achievement," he said. "Schoolwork is up 50 percent since 1981, and we're so obsessed with our kids getting into the right school, getting the right grades, we let a lot of things slide. Kids don't do chores at home anymore because there isn't time."

And other adults, even those who should have authority, are afraid to get involved. "Nobody feels entitled to discipline other people's kids anymore," Dr. Kindlon said. "They don't feel they have the right if they see a kid doing something wrong to step in."

Educators feel helpless, too: Nearly 8 in 10 teachers, according to the 2004 Public Agenda report, said their students were quick to remind them that they had rights or that their parents could sue if they were too harshly disciplined. More than half said they ended up being soft on discipline "because they can't count on parents or schools to support them."

And that, Dr. Rosenfeld said, strikes at the heart of the problem. "Parents are out of control," he said. "We always want to blame the kids, but if there's something wrong with their incivility, it's the way their parents model for them."

There's also the chance, said Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist whose 2001 book, "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," has earned her a cult following, that when children are rude, obnoxious and outrageously behaved, they're trying to tell parents something - something they've got to shout in order for them to hear.

"These kids are so extremely stressed from the academic load they're carrying and how cloistered they are and how they have to live under the watchful eye of their parents," Dr. Mogel said. "They have no kid space."

Paradoxically, she said, parental over-involvement in their children's lives today often hides a very basic kind of indifference to their children's real need, simply to be kids. "There are all these blurry boundaries," she said. "They need to do fifth-grade-level math in third grade and have every pleasure and indulgence of adulthood in childhood and they act like kids and we get mad."

If stress and strain, self-centeredness and competition are the pathogens underlying the rash of rudeness perceived to be endemic among children in America today, then the cure, some experts said, has to be systemic and not topical. Stop blaming the children, they said. Stop focusing on the surface level of behavior and start curing instead the social, educational and parental ills that feed it.

This may mean less "quality" time with children and more time getting them to do things they don't want to do, like sitting for meals, making polite conversation and - Madonna was right - picking their clothes up off the floor.

Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." She is also the host of "The Judith Warner Show" on XM satellite radio.

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