Childrens academic abilities, natural or as a result of parents input?

[peppersneezes000]

Following on from a thread on primary education where a poster was in disbelief her y1 daughter was in the bottom sets in comparison to her peers.
As the thread developed it transpired that the top set were getting tutoring & lots of parental help & extension work at home.
She didn't want to do this as child is only 6.
What's the general consensus on mn regarding an academic child. Imho I feel a certain amount of parental pushiness is necessary even if the child is self motivated. In my DC's school most parents seem to be extremely engaged & clued in, our school isn't a leafy middle class school & would have parents & kids from all backgrounds...

Genetic.

I'm a pretty hopeless parent in that I've never done "play" type stuff... But I know a lot (!) And we talk about all sorts of things.

I also insist if you're going to watch TV it'd better be bloody documentary! (N.b., they whine about it but fuck me - sponges ). (I'm not spending my time hearing shitty cartoons in the background).

They're both top of their class.

My only concern is maths - it's all well and good being "top"... But I feel maths education is now v poor. I keep meaning to check if carol vorderman still does her online maths programme.

The methods they're using to teach maths now seen to be very backwards and aimed towards the LCD. My eldest has figured out (on his own!) Old school methods.

I think it's a combination of factors rather than one set factor. I also think that those factors have differing ratios in different children so despite being raised in the same home by the same parents with the same education, some children just won't do what their siblings might despite similar advantages/disadvantages.

I think birth month and birth order also play a part.

DH is very clever. He's always been academic and learns new skills/languages at a rate I am amazed by. DS2 seems to have inherited this and his vocabulary at 7 is wider than the majority of adults I know and his academic ability is through the roof. DS1 is more like me and bright but a little complacent with it so doesn't feel the need to always 'best' himself the way that DS2 does. DS1 doesn't give a shit if he gets spellings wrong, DS2 does. DS1 doesn't give a shit when other DC achieve stuff. DS2 at 3 years old asked how old DS1 was when he rode without stabilisers for the first time and when he heard it was almost 4, pushed himself to ensure he rode a bike before his big brother had.

That's an extreme example, and a bit of a nutty one, but for some children being 'top' or 'best' matters so much, for others not at all. I think had DS2 been the first born he'd have had nobody to compete against so would have been a very different child.

It’s a mix of genes plus environment.

You can have the genetic framework, but if your child doesn’t have access to books etc then they are less likely to achieve.

And some kids can be tutored to the max and still struggle.

I am one of those people who naturally pick things up, and my sister has problems learning. We were both brought up in the same environment, and my sister had extra tutoring. I didn’t have any tutoring or any tutoring style help from my parents, but lots of access to books. My sister tried so much harder than me at school, was extremely well behaved, conscientious and worked very hard, but just couldn’t “get it” academically. So I think my anecdotal evidence shows that genetics must play a part.

I disagree it is completely genetic.

There is a fair amount of evidence that what happens while in the womb, and nutrition as a child, have an impact on brain development.

I am not particularly clever but I had good parental input and was very well fed as a child so I better than I think I would have had I been left to it.

Iodine and iron during pregnancy are important, as is avoiding alcohol and some medications.

As with everything it is a combination of genes, environment and parental input.

I have a degree so sort of academic and my daughter is very academic and wants to be a doctor. She is naturally intelligent. My son is intelligent but lazy!

at 6 years old it can just be a matter of maturity

I think it's enormously wide-ranging.

But it seems weird to me that so many people think academic ability is the same thing as being a 'good' student at school.

Why do people think that if a child has atutor then they’re not playing, reading, having conversations with parents, having down time and a number of other ‘being a child’ experiences?

I'm not sure where anyone has said that, Charles. I don't think that.

But I also don't think tutoring is all its cracked up to be quite frequently. And I think some tutoring appears to be a pretty joyless experience (from what I've heard from friends).

I believe that intelligence is pretty much hard wired into you. If all it took was tutoring and parental pushing to make you succeed academically then every child tutored for grammar or selective schools would pass. But they don't, many if not most fail. Having an innate academic ability is no different to having an artistic flair or being naturally athletic.

One of our DCs is naturally athletic, very coordinated with great poise and balance. Doesn't matter if they pick up a tennis racquet or a hockey stick they look so fluid and skilful.

It's not really a surprise that the mother's educational attainment is the best predictor - if she has done very well, that's likely to be a combination of good genetics and a supportive home environment. Which she is likely to pass on.

I would have thought that it's not just a supportive home environment, but a stable one too that makes a difference - one child I know started this (calendar) year with his dad dropping in and out of his life, then hasn't seen him since March. Another adult family member joined the household in May, but found it difficult to get on with his mum - the result was violence (both verbal and physical) between the adults. The family member left much earlier than planned. The mum is working shifts, and relies on ad hoc childcare from friends, so the child does not always sleep at home, and it's unpredictable (for him) who will be looking after him, or where he will sleep. His mother does her best to support her at school but unsurprisingly, he is struggling.

From my own experience as a parent and observing families I know I'd say genetics are more important here. I know several high achieving kids with zero input and vice versa.

If a naturally athletic DC had been brought up in an environment where they were encouraged to watch telly in a small room every day and weren't able to get up and run about and throw balls because there isn't any space to do it in, they might not look so fluid and skilful. Having natural ability is great but without the chance to practise these skills they might just be average, and the same goes for academic skills which begin, at the most basic level, with talking and sorting objects into categories and if you don't get the chance to practise this, because either nobody is talking back or there aren't sensible objects to practise classification on, then those skills don't get a chance to develop early. So they start school a bit behind those children who have had the chance and they are already playing catch up.

To a lesser extent, the child whose parents don't challenge them to think for themselves but are happy to engage in terms of supplying answers is also playing catch up, like in my post upthread about why can't cats talk. But that child doesn't look obviously disadvantaged and in fact an adult is bothering to answer their questions but the quality of engagement isn't the same as the adult who is asking questions back. The athletic child in this instance is one whose parents have a nice garden and take the child to the park but maybe they can't teach her tennis because they don't know anything about it and haven't thought about or can't afford lessons. It's a shame for the athletic child. Everyone should have the chance to develop whatever they are good at. But it's a much worse shame for the children whose brains aren't being developed because rightly or wrongly our society is mainly set up to reward those who achieve academically. Being good at hockey will not get most people the means to support themselves and get a reasonable job. Not getting a decent pass at English and Maths at GCSE will close off an awful lot of avenues for further development.

I am sure stability is important too. Stress is terribly bad for brains and impacts on things like memory even short term.

I don’t believe intelligence is fixed. Brains are malleable, and teaching is about transformation, whether it happens at home or in school.

The latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most people, unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers – curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example – an approach Eyre calls “high performance learning”. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/25/no-such-thing-as-a-gifted-child-einstein-iq

Good article, @ScarletAnemone.

I find the issue baffling, to be honest, because I can’t account for my own comparative cleverness either via genetics or environment.

My parents were illiterate, and understood nothing about school, homework or how to study — their only ambition for me was to not stand out from the crowd, and to have an office job rather than a manual one. There were no books in the house, and nowhere quiet to do homework, and I was sent to the failing local school, and actively dissuaded from considering university as ‘above my station’. Yet I ended up at Oxford, have four degrees, and am a senior academic who has won prestigious prizes. I can’t see it ‘coming from anywhere’. I’m some kind of fluke. As far as I know, all my family on both sides were agricultural labourers and factory workers who left school as early as possible.

@love

But presumably there have been millions of highly intelligent agricultural/factory workers throughout history. They were indoctrinated by church and state to accept their lowly station in life as part of the natural order and never had access to education above primary level if that.

The intelligence has always been there just not identified or given the opportunity to emerge.

My parents are working class and had no qualifications before having me at a young age. They never pushed me academically however made sure my maths, reading and spelling were practised in a fun way on a daily basis before i started school at 5. As a result i have always been ahead of my peers and did really well at school and university.

I really believe gently training me to problem solve at a young age helped throughout my academic life without much further input from them during school years.