Psychology Today Blogs - David Elkind, Ph.D.

The Price of Hurrying Children

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:08:08 -0700

The Price of Hurrying Children

When I published The Hurried Child in 1981, I was labeled a Pop psychologist and the book was not even reviewed iContemporary Psychology, the prestigious monthly book review journal of the American Psychological Association. Over the last decade or so however, a truckload of books and articles have been documenting the long and short term effects of pressuring children to grow up too fast too soon. The titles tell the story: The Over-Scheduled Child, Pressured Parents: Stressed Out Kids, Parenting Inc., Consuming Kids, So Sexy So Soon, Less Stress for Success, The Price of Privilege, These books, and many more, attest to the fact that what I observed a quarter of century ago was real phenomena and, that if anything,e it has now become the norm.

Hurrying children is a problem that has always been with us. It was recognized and commented on by our most gifted educational theorists. In response to hurrying they have all returned to the same fundamental principle, namely, that childrearing and education should be adapted to the growing needs interests and abilities of children. In his classic Emile Jean Jacques Rousseau ascribed all the defects of body and soul in pupils is due to "The desire to make men of them before their time." Freidrich Froebel, inventor of the kindergarten, wrote, "The, child, the boy, the man should know no other endeavor, but to be at every stage of development, what that stage calls for." Famed Italian Educator, Maria Montessori said, "The Child's work is to create the man that is to be. The adult will be a fully harmonious individual only if he has been able, at each preceding stage, to live as nature intended him to."

The irony is that no one believes in hurrying children. No parent, educator, or legislator I ever spoke to believes in pressuring children to do things well beyond what they are capable of doing. . "I don't believe in hurrying children but," And there is always a but. A parent says, "I don't believe in hurrying but if I don't put my child in soccer, he will have no one to play with and won't make the team. And the educator says I don't believe in hurrying but the curriculum says I have to teach reading in kindergarten. The legislator says she does not believe in hurrying but that is what her constituents want. If we want healthy, happy children who can compete in an increasingly global economy we have to get beyond the But. We have to use what we know about healthy childrearing and education.

Are Young Children Cruel?

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:01:14 -0700

Are Young Children Cruel?

On a recent walk through our development on Cape Cod with my grandniece, we found a dead turtle lying on its back. The head was a bit bloated. She looked at it for a moment and then said, "I want to step on his head." A little taken aback, I replied, "Why would you want to do that." "I think it will be fun she replied." After a moment I said, "Yes, the turtle is dead and you won't hurt it, but stepping on his head is not a very nice thing to do." With a determined look she came back, "I don't care, I want to step on it." At this point, I thought it best to distract her and pointed to a big hole in a nearby tree, "I think I saw a big squirrel jump in that hole, let's go look." So we walked over to the tree and the turtle was forgotten, but not completely. On the way back she said, "I really wanted to step on that turtle's head."

I have witnessed other instances of like behavior. One child, who was about to step on some ants, was told that they were "God's creatures" and shouldn't be harmed. Shortly after I saw the same child stepping on the ants and shouting gleefully, "God's little creatures." Squish! Squish! Is this evidence of deliberate cruelty on the child's part? We have to be careful not to rush to judgment. First of all young children, prior to the age of eight or nine, really do not understand the concepts of life and death. These are biological concepts which presuppose an understanding of internal biological processes like respiration, blood flow and digestion. Likewise, young children up until the age of five or six or unable to put themselves in another's position when it is different from their own.

From the child's perspective the impulse to step on the dead turtle's head or to squish the ants, did not arise out of disrespect for the dead or out of a desire to hurt or to do injury. Rather each child was being curious, eager to discover what would happen if it took a particular action. They were really unable to shift perspectives and the animal's point of view. At the same time, even young children will show empathy for another child if he or she gives visible signs of distress like crying. Had the turtle or the ants given signs of distress, they might have elicited a quite different reaction. It is also true that are some truly cruel children (fortunately a very small minority). But it is never entirely clear whether such cruelty is innate or in response to harsh, abusive upbringing. For the most part, however, young children's apparently cruel behaviors grow out of curiosity, and not out of malice.

Origins of Religion in the Child

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:17:02 -0700

I attended a Catholic funeral over the weekend. As I observed the symbols and rituals and listened to the Bible readings I was struck, as a behavioral scientist, by the parallel between the four basic elements of every religion and the stages of intellectual growth of the child. Every religion has a God concept, someone who is immortal and eternal.

Secondly every religion has its own symbols, whether it be the wine and the bread, the Torah, head coverings or totems. And every religion has a set of rituals, kneeling or standing during prayer for example, and including taking Communion and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. Finally every religion has a theology, a recorded history of its founding along with an organized set of beliefs that unites the other elements into a unitary whole.

If we look at child development there is a striking parallel. At the end to the first year the child attains the concept of a permanent object, the belief in the existence of people or things that are no longer present to its senses. In religion the conservation of the object is extended to the permanent conservation of the deity across all time and all space. At about the age of two the child gives evidence of having attained the symbolic function, the ability to create, understand and employ symbols. To be sure children now use words, but they also create a variety of their own symbols, for example anything that floats becomes a toy boat. In a like manner the symbols of religion are created and serve to represent various facets of the belief system.

When children reach the age of reason, usually around the age of six or seven, they are able to create, and to follow, rules. And it is rule making and breaking that is the forerunner of all ritual. Children, of course, create their own rituals and pass them along through oral tradition. "Step on a crack and break your back" is but one example. Religious rituals are also rule based. There are rituals for a Mass, for opening and closing the Ark holding the Torah, and for prayer at a Mosque.

Finally, in adolescence, young people attain a new level of mental ability that allows them think in abstractions and to create ideals and contrary to fact propositions. It is the idealism of youth, their ability to think of the possibility of a world without war, poverty, or prejudice that accounts for the rebelliousness of youth. Likewise, all theologies are idealistic and urge their adherents to live according to the highest moral standards, the Ten Commandments are a case in point.

In outlining this parallel, I am no way trying to reduce religion to cognitive development which would ignore history and fail to account for the variety of religions. What I think can be said, is that our developmental modes of thought provide the predisposition for understanding the four basic elements of religion. They also provide the predispositions for the understanding the four basic elements of science: conservation, symbolism, ritual or experimentation, and theory. From this perspective, religion and science are simply alternative, neither wrong nor right, ways of realizing, and putting into practice, our four basic modes of thought.

The Full Day Kindergarten

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:31:45 -0700

The Full Day Kindergarten

On the front page of the May 25 Boston Globe was an article on the full Day kindergarten. Putting the article on the front page of the Sunday paper attests to the importance of this issue for parents. Over the past few years I have had e-mails from concerned parents all across the country whose school systems were moving to full day kindergarten. As I read the article and reflected on the many e-mails I have received, it seemed to me that three different issues were being confounded and needed to be separated if any resolutions was to be had.

There are, first of all, the parenting issues. On the one hand are those families in which at least one parent is home full time. Most of these parents are the ones who are opposed to full day kindergarten. Some argue that a full day is too much for a five-year-old, while others argue that the program is too academic and inappropriate for young children. Another group of parents are very much in favor of the full day kindergarten. Most of these parents are from two parent working families. They have had trouble finding quality, affordable and accessible child care. For them full day kindergarten, and hopefully an extended day, gives them the security of knowing their child is in safe place where professionals are in charge. Both groups of parents have legitimate arguments.

Secondly, there is the child development issue. What sort of program is most appropriate for five-year-old children? I think the majority of pediatricians, child psychologists and early childhood educators, would agree that testing and workbooks have no place in a kindergarten classroom. The same professionals would also agree that's a program which is given over to play oriented learning in the morning and quiet activities(taking naps, listening to stories or quiet music) in the is best suited to this age group. From this perspective it is not the full day kindergarten that is potentially harmful, but only one that includes, testing, workbooks and full day of academic activities.

The third issue is the educational one which is confounded with financial considerations. Full day kindergartens cost money including teacher's salaries and the space needed for these classrooms. Most school budgets are pretty tight. I believe that the pressure for full day kindergarten comes mainly from two parent working families. Legislators, however, are reluctant to fund what they would regard as child care. To sell the programs and to get the funding, educational administrators are forced to employ an educational rationale-namely that full day kindergarten better prepares children for first grade than does a half day kindergarten. The evidence for this is tenuous at best and just wrong at worst.

Perhaps the best solution, and one taken in some communities, is to offer both full and half day programs and to insure that the full day programs are of the kind that are most in keeping with five-year-old's levels of ability and of energy.

Kindergarten Retention

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:59:38 -0700

Across our country, from 10 to 30 percent of kindergarten children are retained in kindergarten or placed in "transitional" classes. These children are failing kindergarten because they are presumably not ready for the rigors of first grade. Yet the early years of schooling are crucial in determining the child's long-term attitudes towards self, teachers and learning. A child who emerges from the early years feeling good about himself or herself, respecting teachers and enjoying learning, will regard education as exciting and as a positive challenge. Contrariwise, a child who leaves the early years of schooling feeling badly about himself or herself, with a low regard for teachers, and turned off to learning will find lunch the most interesting part of the school day.

Kindergarten retention totally ignores what we know about child development. Early childhood is a period of very rapid intellectual growth. Some young children attain the age of reason, the ability to engage in syllogistic reasoning (All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal) at five, some at six, some at seven. All children, with the exception of the extremely retarded, get these new abilities, but they get them at different ages. Syllogistic reasoning allows children to follow rules and to appreciate that one thing can have more than one defining trait (Socrates is both man and mortal). These two abilities are critical for learning the tool skills of reading and math. Formal education should not begin until the majority of children in the class have attained these reasoning abilities. That is why, in the Scandinavian countries and in Russia, formal instruction does not begin until the age of seven.

If you ask first grade teachers what children need to succeed in first grade they say children must be able to:

a) follow adult instructions

b) start a task and bring it to completion on their own and

c) work cooperatively with other children--take turns, stand in line etc.

With these social skills in hand, once children attain the age of reason, they will easily master the tool skills.

At the heart of this mistaken and destructive retention policy is the assumption that education is a race and that the earlier you start, the earlier and the better you will finish. But education is not a race; it is a journey that takes us through all of the stages along life's way. How we school our young children will very much determine the kind of lifetime learners they will be.

Generational Kinship

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:27:46 -0700

Generational Kinship

I have observed an interesting phenomenon as my hair has gone white and my neck skin has gone south. When I am at the drugstore or at the market or at a restaurant I find that others, who share the same characteristics of advanced maturity, are especially friendly and civil to me as I am to them. When I smile at a white haired woman and she smiles back, it is free of any sexual innuendo. And between we men the smiles and the courtesy are genuine and lack the undercurrent of competitiveness, over wealth and social status,
that might have been present at an earlier age. There is thus a camaraderie amongst we seniors that stems from being at the same stage of life, freed from many of our earlier anxieties, and faced with new ones that we share in common. There is great comfort and support in knowing that others are going through the same scary changes with strength and good humor. It is one form of generational kinship.

But we are not alone, as in many psychological domains; there are parallels between those at either end of the life cycle. I have observed the same phenomenon of generational kinship when my preschool grandchildren meet children of about the same size and age at the beach or the playground. They immediately play with one another and enjoy each others company even though have never seen one another before and may not even speak the same language. Like we seniors, they sense the sameness of their position, relatively small, relatively powerless, and in need of the kind of reassurance that only age mates can provide-namely-that we are in the same boat and are surviving.

We are social beings, and the truth of that is never more obvious than at beginning and towards the end of life. For it is at those points, perhaps more that at any other, that we need reassurance about our common humanness.

Ruminations on the IQ and Virtue

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:17:53 -0700

Ruminations on the IQ and Virtue

Psychologists have long assumed that measures of infant intelligence are of little value in predicting later mental ability. This makes sense because intelligence tests are heavily verbal while the language skills of infants and young children are not well developed. New research, however, suggests that measures of curiosity and of selective attention in infants and young children do indeed predict later mental test scores. I anticipate that these findings will lead many companies to create kits for assessing and raising young children's IQs. Such kits will simply add to the current overemphasis on the IQ, and upon tests of academic achievement. This overemphasis has already led to an epidemic of cheating at all levels of education and to undue pressure on teachers to give good grades.

These reflections brought about my ruminations on the IQ. Individuals vary in their levels of brightness, their ability to adapt to new situations. Brightness is determined in part by heredity and in part by the environment and is generally constant across the life span. Individuals also differ in particular areas of mental functioning. I, for example, have absolutely no sense of direction while my wife is just the opposite and always knows just where we are. Another important consideration is that intellectual ability is not highly correlated with creativity. Many of our most gifted writers, musicians, and painters would probably not be admitted to a Mensa meeting.

It seems to me that the contemporary overemphasis on the IQ, and academic success, misses a very important corollary of high mental ability. In the broadest sense intelligence is a form of freedom. It affords one the ability to evaluate and make choices. The brighter the individual, the greater the freedom of choice. But freedom is necessarily linked to virtue, the ability to make moral choices. An emphasis upon intellectual achievement and academic success without an equal emphasis on virtue is one-sided and can work against the common good. Those who crafted the multi leveraged credit schemes that led to the current mortgage crises were ingenious. But they were lacking in virtue.

This is not to say that we should not value intellectual ability and academic achievement. It is only to say that high intelligence carries with it a moral imperative. As parents we need to ensure that our children appreciate not only the choices, but moral responsibility, that goes with superior mental ability.

My Brain and I

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:44:55 -0700

I was correcting a student's paper recently, and I found the phrase, "the brains ability." Without thinking I wrote in the margin "brains don't have abilities but people do." That in turn started a whole series of reflections. The current explosion in brain research has had many powerful and beneficial effects. But it has also been used to justify early intellectual stimulation in infants and young children. The argument is that the brain is growing so fast during the first years of life that we need to capitalize on that growth and load infants and young children down with cognitive stimulation in increase their intelligence. I am a gardener and this argument never made sense to me. One of the first lessons I learned was that you don't prune during the growing season. Loading young children with stimulation is a form of pruning. Another fallacy of that argument is that it is not the number of neurons but their interrelation which is correlated emerging ability. In any case, there is a lot of synaptic pruning going on so that older children have fewer neurons than younger ones.

But the issue raised by my student is more profound than that and goes to the heart of contemporary discussions about the brain. Let me put it simply, do I tell my brain I want pizza, or does my brain tell me that I want it. That is to say we are looking at two quite different levels of phenomena, electrochemical processes on the one hand, and conscious experience on the other. Brain research has given us a much better sense of the connection, but certainly it is far from explaining my ideas, my feelings, my desires, my personality my free will.

It raises questions like: Where does the I reside? I tend to locate ideas in my head and sensory experiences in my body, but my thoughts and experiences are not electro-chemical. I certainly have no use for the mystical explanation of a spirit world that can be reached by séances and wedge boards. I simply remained mystified and awed by my conscious experience. I realize that it is an epiphenomena but that really doesn't take me very far.

The aim of this rumination is simply to make us a bit more careful and a bit more awed about the brain and our conscious experience and behavior. They are very different levels of phenomena, and while they are necessarily correlated, they are far from being identical. The brain doesn't have abilities, values, beliefs and prejudices, people do.

Too Young to Be Sexy?

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:06:24 -0700

In their book So Sexy So Soon, Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne document the many ways in which young children in our society are being sexualized by the media. In their language, clothing styles, and actions even young children are aping their TV and music idols. The furor over the sexy photos of Miley Cyrus, star of the Disney Hannah/Montana show and role model for the 5- to 12-year-old girl contingent is a case in point. The author's argue that young children are learning sexual behavior, sexualization, before they understand true sexuality and sexual relationships. This leads to distorted attitudes both towards themselves and the opposite sex and can have long term consequences for later healthy sexual adjustment. Levin and Kilbourne offer parents many helpful suggestions and strategies for minimizing the damage to their children from too early sexualization.

It does not take away from the value and usefulness of this book to point out that there is another contributor to early sexualization over and above the media. More of our young children are in child care than ever before. More than 80 percent of our young children are non parental care part or full time. What this means is that children are being socialized to age mates earlier than ever before. With two-year-olds in a child-care center, one can already observe patterns of social hierarchy, leadership and follower ship. As a consequence children are being introduced to peer pressure, and the need to conform and compete, at ever earlier ages. Even 4-year-olds now show concern over the logos on their sneakers, jeans and shirts.

This preschool peer socialization appears in other ways as well. Many of the behaviors we once saw among older children, such as relationship bullying (social exclusion) are now appearing at ever earlier ages. While such socialization need not be bad and could have strong benefits for cooperative efforts, this does not seem to be the way this development is moving. In any case I think we have to appreciate that it is the early socialization of so many of our contemporary young children which makes them particularly susceptible to media exploitation. Even young children now feel that have to idolize and imitate the current teen stars in order to be accepted by their peers.