You can have 3,000,000 books on being a successful parent or none at all and it won’t make a bit of difference if you are not putting in the time with your kid. I’m not talking about hanging out and playing games, hugging them, or praising them. I am talking about 1 or more hours a day of guided instruction to master the fundamentals and to teach them how to teach themselves. As a developmental educator, the thing i see most is students who don’t have the tools to learn. They expect to be spoonfed knowledge and rarely drift towards deeper understanding. this is the fault of schools in part, because the system is designed to test vs. teach. However, it is also the fault of parents who, for the most part, don’t have enough time in this fast-paced world to provide the focused instruction to equip their kids with understanding.
I speak from experience here. I coach football for two of my boys and baseball for one. This means I am practicing five days a week with games all day Saturday. Add in homework, and we are done with most of the night before I can sit down with the 3 yr old to do any focused learning. Worst still, I am too fatigued by then to have the patience to teach him. So he suffers from a certain level of academic neglect that, fortunately, I have the money to afford to correct. I can send him to a legit preschool or tutor to make sure he is advanced in his learning and moreover has the tools to learn. This is not true of every family. We are far from rich, but we can afford to educate our children.
What happens to those who have neither the cash nor time to do so?
Some Thoughts:
- Still having problems relegating talislegger.com to be the front page of the blog. Call it technical difficulties, because I cannot remember how I first set up the blog and all attempts to redirect have failed.
- Life is harder when your family is dripping with disdain for most everything you do, especially for the pace at which you do it. Just sayin.