Hey, It's OK! What To Do When You Realize Your Child Is Not The Next Nobel Laureate
Keep the right mindset with some helpful tips when your child doesn’t match the expectations you might have for him or her.
I’ve learned a lot about kids during my years in education. For starters, they come in all sorts of packages. You have the quiet ones, the loud ones, the focused ones, the scatter-brained ones. You even get a sprinkling of the ones who aren’t really sure which universe they exist in. It all makes for a fun and exciting school day. I say that in all sincerity. If there was one thing I would remove from school today if I knew it wouldn’t affect the outcome is the pressure to succeed. I am almost convinced the school accountability movement that sprang up as a reaction to societal issues has morphed into a tyranny of testing.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am for assessing and learning. I want kids to learn, to really grasp a truth so tightly that it alters their being; but the pressures that come from making sure children achieve that razor’s edge of knowledge has led to some unintended outcomes. One notable one is a dissatisfaction when our children come home with anything less than an “A” on their assignments. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the testing scandal that happened a few years ago. You probably remember the parents who got caught and then went to jail…all because they knew their children weren’t up to the standards of the schools they wanted the kids to go to, and they cheated to get those kids into school. I wonder what those poor kids thought knowing they were not the students their parents made them out to be, and how it affected them in their inner thoughts.
Which takes us back to our topic. We all want our children to succeed. We want them to have the notoriety, the accolades, the credibility of being a top student. I have lost count of the times I sat through a parent interview and been assured that the five year old drawing outside the lines in front of me was the next Einstein, only for those parents to see that their child was really just an average kid when the assessments came back in the first quarter. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have a hope that our child will be “the one”, but parents often put themselves and their children into a corner by setting arbitrary expectations for learning success before any verifiable data shows where a student actually stands. As the years go on, pressures mount until students get to high school and parents struggle to understand why their child is shutting down and refuses to learn, or constantly lives in a state of anxiety.
Mom, Dad, let me help you out before it gets to this point. It’s okay if your child is not jumping grades at 6 years old, or competing in the Math Olympiad as a 9 year old. Believe it or not, there are a lot of “average” people out there changing the world, and your child could change someone’s world for good one day if you do the most important thing in child rearing - training a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6). In our rush to make sure our kids have the skills for life, let’s not forget to teach them how to live. To do that, here’s some practical tips and goals for helping your child through school.
“Life is about timing and overcoming difficult things.”
GOAL #1 - Help Your Child Find God’s Will
Knowing the will of God for our life is the single greatest thing we can know. God has a plan for each of us that starts with salvation and goes from there. We are each uniquely designed to fulfill a purpose in His plan, and He has given us the skills, capacity, and temperament to complement the physical attributes needed to accomplish that purpose. Teach your child the benefit of hearing God’s voice and following His leading to the greatest blessings in life.
GOAL #2 - Develop Your Child’s Talents
It doesn’t matter how you came into the world or what your intellectual abilities are, God gave you a talent (or more). Even people who would be classified as developmentally delayed or disabled have God-given talents. Help your child realize those talents and then learn how to wield them for blessing and the glory of God.
GOAL #3 - Instill Character
Someone once said that talent without character is a horrible combination. Teach your child godly character that hones and balances the inclinations of human ego toward using talents in a biblical manner. We have several examples in Scripture of people who had talent but used it for wrong. The end results were not good. Conversely, there are those who did use talent for good, and we see the blessings that came as a result of it. Make the learning of character a constant habit. Instill it from an early age and refine it as the years progress.
GOAL #4 - Show the Blessing of Hard Work and Learning as a Process, Not a Consequence
Your child is going to come up against what I call “the Wall”. This is the point at which learning becomes exponentially harder for a student. It usually happens around 4th grade, but can occur as late as 9th grade. This is the point that kids realize that learning is becoming very hard, and the reason it happens around these milestones is because the material starts becoming more abstract. Children’s brains are not quite engaged in the abstract reasoning process in the latter elementary years, so concepts that don’t have concrete physical representations really become mindbreakers. It’s frustrating for a child, but it’s even more frustrating for a parent who has forgotten what that stage of life felt like. instead of getting frustrated when your child comes home with a mound of homework and “just doesn’t get it”, sit down and talk through the problems. Let your child know that learning is a process that involves struggle and failure. If failure can be internalized as a stepping stone to greater success, it leads to more confident and successful kids who turn into the same as adults. This is why I love science. There is no right or wrong, only valid and invalid. If we find that we have arrived at a bad conclusion, we back the process up and go a different direction until we find the truth. Whenever your child comes home and work is a struggle, remind him or her that it’s ok to work and strain, but it is never ok to quit.
Setting a good precedent early is a life changing experience for a child. Our own experience at SBA, and the data, shows that creating a hard-working, initiative driven mindset with these goals in mind creates a lifelong learner who embraces those things put before him. I would encourage you to start wherever you are with your child and develop a wholesome mindset toward learning with these four goals and tips. You never know what genius you might actually unleash.
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
To Screen Or Not To Screen - The Effects of Screen Time on Brain Development
We live in a world full of screens. You’re probably reading this on your smartphone or tablet, and the fact is that screens will not be going away any time soon. For some, the prevalence of the portable screen has become the bane of society; while for others, it has become the world at their fingertips. There are a number of opinions on the topic. However, we want to take you into a different area of understanding on this topic - screen time for your children.
GENERATION ALPHA
Ever since the first smartphones came out, there has been an increasing shift toward personal screen use. Those of us who grew up in the stone age before the IPhone and IPad remember when you had to turn on the TV for all the world to see. We remember the constant battle for control of the remote so we could watch our show instead of our sibling’s. Now, you can get whatever content you want whenever you want, and wherever you want. Between social media and streaming content, the average daily use of a screen for teens is up to 8.5 hours a day. For preteens, it is about 5.5 hours a day. That’s a sizable chunk of time. While it may seem excessive for teens, we want to take the focus to children from 12 years old and younger. This is Generation Alpha, the digital natives.
We all want our kids to succeed in learning, so the focus of this article is to educate parents of children in this age group on the benefits and dangers of screen time. With over a decade of data in our hands, it is apparent that devices and screens are a two-edged sword. A simple internet search will provide a number of articles and opinions on the effects of screen time. Before we get into the specifics, we need to realize that screens are not going anywhere. Banning them from a child will only lead to that child running head on into a detrimental activity when he becomes an adult, and that is the last thing that needs to happen. What we need to do is manage how our children interact with technology so that it provides the greatest benefit and the least risk.
“On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens, and teens spend up to 9 hours.”
AN OPEN DOOR TO THE WORLD
Many adults remember when the internet went public. It was like the world was put at our fingertips. Then, mobile computing happened and now we had access to the world in our pockets. I personally enjoy seeing friends and family from across the world when I’m talking to them, and don’t get me started on the rabbit holes of information available at our fingertips. With all of the technology available, it has never been easier to deliver information and it’s a tool we use in our classrooms. As a student, I was limited by the ability of my teacher and the curriculum at hand. As a teacher, I can deliver an expert to my students within seconds, or we can model information that was not possible a generation ago. There is a wonderful world out there, and the right approach can unlock the door of knowledge for our students.
A POTENTIAL OBSTACLE
Our brains are in constant development during childhood, making millions of neural connections that build upon each other. Not only are we making connections, but our mind is constantly pruning off connections that no longer matter. This is the maturing process. It occurs through the constant mixture of learning, doing, assessing, and even boredom. Children have an insatiable curiosity about the world around them. Combined with little knowledge and experience, you have a recipe for investigation. It is these moments when meaningful connections are made and lifelong memories implant themselves deep into the core of our brain. We use these connections to inform ourselves about our world and gain deeper understanding as those connections are broadened.
However, studies have shown that putting children in front of screens for long periods of time has enduring side effects, notably: sleep problems, lower grades in school, less time with family and friends, not enough outdoor or physical activity, weight and mood problems, and less time learning other ways to relax and have fun. Physically, it has been shown to thin the area of the brain where our memories are stored, impairing a child’s ability to recall information quickly and accurately. Limit the time your child spends in front of a screen and make him or her spend time solving real world problems, being creative, or just playing with real objects and his or her imagination.
RECOMMENDATIONS
It might seem like it’s time to throw out the screens and go for the old pen and paper. While that may be tempting, it won’t last. Our lives are too intertwined in digital technology. Instead, parents should limit how much time their children have in front of any screen, as well as controlling the content that comes across that screen. Here are some helpful tips for healthy screen use.
AGE RECOMMENDATIONS
Under 2 - no screen time
Ages 2-5 - no more than one hour of screen time a day, and only educational programming
Ages 5-12 - limit activities and content. Focus on offline activities for most stimulus
OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS
Cut out screen time during family time.
Eliminate background screen time during homework times.
Remove screens at least 60 minutes before bedtime.
Enact parental controls to limit content and access.
Don’t use screens as a babysitter or pacifier.
Working on using screens as tools for our children will benefit them in the long run. Aside from moral dangers, we must be careful not to allow screens to pose an addictive danger that limits our children to a virtual world that is not all that it seems.