What's wrong with hothousing?

But it didn’t take any effort. My child just picked it up. At that age they were meaningless sounds too - they didn’t understand anything from it. They are pretty bright in general and find learning quite easy (within the bounds of mainstream ability) but that knowledge didn’t transfer to anything more once they started learning to read.

Shapes and music have some obvious connections but putting it loads of effort to achieve this recognition feels like very odd use of time. If you want to start your child off, wouldn’t you be better with number games? Do they watch Numberjacks or Numberblocks? Both huge favourites from an early age with the mathematical children I know, including my own.

I suspect it is nearer to 3. Probably earlier in girls as they develop faster. I've developed a system for teaching perfect pitch myself which I'm thinking might be good enough to publish. It's certainly worked for my son. Like I said I don't have PP although I have a reasonably good ear otherwise. I expect genetics plus very early training (or in some cases mere exposure to the right musical environment) are the keys to developing PP.

@ThunderDad - are you happy with your own achievements in life or are you trying to live through your toddler/improve his lot? Genuine question. I have friends who flashcarded their DC, taught them multiple languages etc etc - all of them are now divorced because the other parent eventually could not witness more of the like.

There is absolutely no point in hothousing children. They grow up to be their own persons and make their own choices. If they are pushed too much they tend to resent their parents, even if they become millionaires etc. Musicians, in particular, who start too young, there is a risk no? Both to their bodies and burn out, in particular.

Middle class educated parents can’t help but hothouse a bit and should stop themselves from doing it. That is my view.

Your post was extremely rude so you got a rude post back. Maybe if you had worked on more shapes as a toddler you would have realised how this works. 😂

The thing is there's nothing really wrong with teaching your toddler a few party tricks. Your child learning the alphabet at 18 months is a great achievement, at the very least it does no harm and probably does some good. I believe (yes this is my own cranky theory) that deep understanding of concepts likely derives from assembling all those party tricks into something coherent later on. This is why children learn their times tables before they really grasp what multiplication is.

Learning about shapes ties in with learning numeracy skills, as the shapes all have different numbers of sides. Increasingly my toddler is starting to grasp the relationship between the number of sides and the type of shape. Some shapes (such as heptagon) are quite visually challenging for the toddler and the effort of figuring out what it is compared to say, an octagon, presumably does stimulate some neat brain wiring which is likely to be useful later on.

Congrats on getting your kid to know the alphabet at 18 months though. I haven't succeeded in this yet (although we haven't really worked on it specifically) but I have deep respect for the effort it takes to achieve this.

ThunderDad.

I am incredibly proud of my children and THEIR achievements. What I don't do is attempt to pass them off as my achievements. Their hard work, their positive attitudes, their intelligence. I support and encourage, love and nurture.
Your post is very rude. I would never make out that my children's many successes are my achievements. That's the difference. Your post claims that your child's successes are your achievements, and suggests that you are proud of yourself rather than proud of them.

You're bang on the money here. Thank you. Each child is different and so we need streaming in schools, a culture of getting the best potential out of the brightest and the least academic children according to their particular needs. What we have instead is an egalitarian education system which aims to have every child equally dumb by the end of it.

Private schooling is a partial solution for those lucky enough to be able to afford it. But we did away with excellence in schooling in the UK some time ago.

Another gripe I have is why are there so few boys' schools left in the UK when there is overwhelming evidence that boys do better (academically and in terms of pretty much every other success metric) when educated alongside only other boys?

Sucks. There are two girls-only schools in my local area and no boys schools, despite evidence that single-sex schooling does nothing for girls but a great deal of good for boys.

It's a bad state of affairs. I have a lot of sympathy for parents wishing to homeschools. But I digress.

I’m not a primary school teacher so my question doesn’t imply anything about the wider schooling system but I also don’t really get the shape thing. It sounds like a party trick to me. Where is this knowledge of shapes taking him? Was this just a highlight of his wider geometry skills that you used as an example?

My child could recite the alphabet at 18 months because they liked the song. Their nursery key worker would run through it with them while changing their nappy and we’d get them to do it for relatives. It didn’t mean they could read. The shapes sounds similar.

@ThunderDad Really? I had previously read the cut-off for perfect pitch is 6 or 7. I certainly missed it for my kids, but I also never had it.

It's called taking pride in your child's achievements. Try it sometime - it feels good!

I know parents from Asian countries whose kids aren't that bright (parents aren't either) hothouse their kids since they were born 🙄 and failed the 11+ miserably. Those poor children who couldn't just be kids.

And this is why I despair to send him to a regular school in the UK. So many primary school teachers have this kind of attitude. We just don't seem to take pride in excellence do we.

Back to your original question , hothousing implies that your desire to educate academically is to the exclusion of other elements of childhood eg not allowing play dates or parties because they get in the way of nightly tutoring similar to places like south Korea where 2-3 hours of after school extra school is common. Or pulling your children from going to school so you can teach more intensively at home but not allowing any extra curricular

I think we have a very similar view here @Violinist64 - happy that Ruth has progressed in her life but sad that she seems to have paid a price for it that was unnecessary. And your friend and mine certainly gave us very a similar picture - my friend said that the comment she kept hearing of Ruth was that Ruth was great at learning but did not have creativity in maths.

If you are trying, like Ruth's father to "push, push, push" then you may not know, notice or understand enough to realise this dimension. But if, instead, you just provide the support and environment for a youngster to flourish at their own pace, then the creativity will come if it is there in the first place, I would hope. If you are just trying to cram stuff in, then how can creativity come out? (Not sure I'm expressing my point clearly here!)

There seems to be some confusion as to what I mean by hothousing when I say that I hothouse my toddler. My definition is something along the lines of this article:

https://www.verywellfamily.com/hothouse-children-1449187

As in we do flashcards (hundreds of them), pitch training, games with an educational focus, jigsaws (with many pieces), piano practice, violin practice, memorisation of hundreds of images, flags etc. from books.

I think most of you would not describe this as regular parenting. However it is true that in Singapore, for example, it is culturally normal to do this with your toddler.

Without knowing any of the details, the Ruth Lawrence thing struck me as absurd, really damaging, her father very much 'needed his head checking'.

Whatever professional or academic field the hothousing parent wants his or her child to ultimately succeed in [something like pro sport is different, a poorly adjusted brat can certainly succeed there], the child will as an adult need to repeatedly interact with other people, with a halfway normal childhood being the tried-and-tested way of building the skills we need to do that as adults.

e.g. there was a kid in my class at school who was probably about as good at maths as a Ruth Lawrence, but the parents there did absolutely the right thing, yes the child quietly sloped off in year 8 or something to sit A level maths, and thereafter didn't show up to regular maths classes, doing some kind of private study instead, but every other lesson, including sports and so on, took place with appropriately aged peers, and university started at the normal age. in RL'c case, going to university aged 12, with no opportunity to make friends, have boyfriends, etc, was utter madness.

As I said, we knew her father’s first wife well, and she left with her kids because she refused to let them have the upbringing that Ruth ended up with.

@Curlewkate, you are right. @HawthornLantern this is exactly what I was trying to get at but you have expressed it far better than me. I met someone who was at Oxford at the same time as Ruth Lawrence and he said much the same as your friend. He also said that although she was very good she could not be thought a genius or outstanding (by Oxford standards) until she had proved something new.
@justanotherdaduser thank you for the update on Ruth Lawrence. I didn't mean to give the impression that she was hidden away but l appreciate what you said about her career and family. She is obviously a success but would have been a success with a much happier childhood if she had been allowed to be a child.

Pretty sure-although happy to be proved wrong-that you can't develop perfect pitch. It's innate.

Sorry I mean 2 not 3.

He’s 3. Come back when he’s 18 and let us know how it all worked out.

Hothousing = destroying a child's mental and spiritual wellbeing in the pursuit of higher academic outcomes than would be achieved by simply letting them pursue knowledge at a pace they can cope with. if you are just nurturing and encouraging your child's natural talent and curiosity it's not hothousing.

this. It’s more than just tutoring/support/encouragement. There’s an element of the child being forced well beyond their natural capability.

In threads like this, I think Ruth Lawrence’s example is often seen not as someone whose life was destroyed - clearly she has a family and is working in mathematics and I hope she is happy and feels fulfilled - but as someone who experienced a high profile “hothouse”/faststream education and the end result did not seem to produce the high profile mathematician that her father perhaps expected. There was a big disconnect - Ruth is a good mathematician, clearly, but she is not a global name in mathematics. She could have gone to university at the normal age and had a career achieving everything she has achieved.

I had a friend at Oxford reading maths at St Hugh’s (Ruth’s college) at the same time Ruth was there. Apparently Ruth was well liked, though her father wasn’t, but Ruth could not, fairly obviously, participate in all the social activities that a university has to offer. She missed out on that.

The telling point here, I think, is that Ruth herself has chosen a private life for her children and said that she would not wish her own experience for them.

@ThunderDad I think what you're describing is called "parenting"....