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Education in Crisis; The Parents, Part 3
I changed my mind.
I was going to write about teachers in this post but I have the cart before the horse. We first need to look at Parenting skills in our country. After all, parents are every child’s first model; they come to the parents first, and to the teachers second. Some children, or maybe most nowadays, are deposited with baby sitters, day care centers, or other care givers as they work their way to the teachers. Maybe teachers are their last stop in a country where we have traded parenting in for profit. Michael Douglas said, as his son faces 10 years for meth trafficking, “I did what my father did and put career first”. We don’t have to do what our parents did. We can learn from them and reinvent ourselves.
We are a nation of ethnic diversity. We all come from somewhere else. All our children come together into the same educational system. Teachers inherit the children we have parented. If our parenting is not done well it is the teachers who must deal with the ‘crushed spirits’ of those whose parents were deficient in their responsibilities to their children. It all begins at the beginning, BIRTH.
Definition: Disable (v) – Crushed Spirit; to withdraw hope, to deflate curiosity, to promote an inability to see beauty, to deprive imagination, to make abject. (Mullins New Thesaurus: 2009 Edition)
Parents instill values. Children are innocent when they reach us. They only know what we teach and demonstrate to them from birth through their early years. “Peek-A-Boo, I See You!” discusses signals that children send us. They are curious, imaginative, adaptive, and energetic when they arrive. We have the ability to encourage or ‘crush’ these wonderful innocent qualities they bring with them. It is inexcusable to say “I did what my father did…” What kind of an excuse is that? Did we not learn from our own experiences what we craved from our parents and what went missing? Did this not make an impression on us? Is Michael Douglas telling us he accepted his childhood and so he duplicated it for his children? Sooooo, he is sorry and apologetic as his son faces the possibility of 10 years in jail. I knew what was missing from my childhood and vowed that if I had children they would not miss it. I would give to them what was not given to me. Please do not say you are sorry, that really doesn’t fly in the face of parental actions and the havoc they wreak on children.
With the state of technology today we have more help through blogs, internet, media, and friends to raise our children in an environment rich in love and activity. When children fail they are telling you I need love and attention. I want you to see me. No one wants to fail. Children see daily the rewards of success through education. They want to succeed because they seek approval, just as you do when you do something your boss recognizes. We all seek approval and want to be successful and happy.
Parenting begins with bonding at birth, baby care, cuddling, holding, responding, and giving. This builds security and comfort within babies. Children do not need video games and television. They need parents who are involved in their curiosity and imagination and who take them into the world to explore these curiosities. They need parents who teach them how to be civilized, respectful, and compassionate. They need lessons in healthy eating, discipline, determination, family values, and the importance of achieving. They do not need parents who make excuses for their failure.
It is common sense! What is it about parenting that people do not understand? Maybe we should have courses in high school on childbirth and parental responsibilities in child rearing. The three most important investments a person makes in their life is who they marry, how many children they have, and which house they buy to raise their family. We do not teach any skills in our educational system that relate to these decisions and they are decisions that live with us for the rest of our lives.
Are teachers our baby sitters? Do we expect them to teach family values? Do we expect them to discipline our out-of-control children? Do we expect teachers to raise our children in the hours they have them? I am not making a case for teachers. I am asking parents, whose crushed children enter our educational system, what it is they expect these teachers to accomplish with these broken humans we abandoned for profit?
The educational system will improve when our parental responsibilities improve. It is then we can point a finger at teachers who do not teach. We will remove their excuses for not taking responsibility for their profession, if it is indeed a profession at this point in time. Professionals have a code of ethics. Professionals do not accept the low percentage of student proficiency, 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading, with a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math.
We have to begin at the beginning. First, raise them well then turn them over to teachers to teach them well. We will then stop our children’s foreboding slide into mediocrity as other nations bolt ahead and into the future leaving our children behind to be the worker bees.
Deferred Gratification – OR- The Marshmellow Test
DEFINITION:
Deferred gratification or delayed gratification is the ability to wait in order to obtain something that one wants. In formal terms, an individual should be able to calculate the net present value of future rewards and defer near-term rewards of lesser value. Animals don’t do this. This challenge is fundamental to human nature.
EXPERIMENT:
In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.
OBSERVATIONS:
Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. Most struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About thirty per cent of the children successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist.
GOAL OF EXPERIMENT:
The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered and how this influenced behavior. What they discovered is that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
QUESTION:
Psychologists assumed from their observations that the children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”
CONCLUSIONS:
In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. For example, when Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.
Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”
According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”
Mischel found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is give them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”
This information was taken from the following site where you can read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer?printable=true¤tPage=6#ixzz0fXCrbwh9
MY CONCLUSIONS:
Teaching Deferred Gratification to infants and toddlers gives them a promotion into their future. It prepares them for a lifetime of choices that determines their success. We cannot always have what we want when we want it. As Parents we have the advantage of teaching our sons and daughters character, focus, and self determination. If you want to see what happens to our children when we do not parent responsibly, go to your local mall any day after school. Sit down on a bench and observe the “wandering herd”, who all look alike because they lack character and have failed to delay their choices.
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Peek-A-Boo, I See You! Parenting From Your Child's Point of View by Sandra Gunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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