Please don't 'baby' your children

[pineapple95]

Where do I start?

Parents of my y3/4 class routinely carry their children's bags in, take their lunch bags to the hall, hand in letters and money, put their reading diaries and spelling books in the right places on the right days, linger in the corridor chatting ... for goodness sake MAKE YOUR CHILD LOOK AFTER THEIR STUFF!

7-9 year olds can carry bags and remember books. Don't baby them. Even 3 year olds can carry their bags - don't be that parent who mollycoddles their children.

Where did I say that?

I really don’t think you are understanding what you read, zzzzz. You seem to want to believe that every child is unique and that learning should happen for each child according to a personal timetable and in a random order.

user - how about personal timetable, but not random order? And what is necessary before the development of reading and what is not? And where is your evidence that early reading stunts observation skills? Or did you not quite mean it like that?

I've seen documentaries where it has been demonstrated that there may well be a window for speech development (eg from children kept in appalling conditions who never acquire speech skills, but are capable of developing other skills), but it seems to me that the opportunities to demonstrate what you claim to be fact are seriously limited without resorting to torture and general child abuse, or looking for reasons for issues that are likely to be multifactorial.

It is desirable to schedule the teaching of many cultural skills in order to optimise learning ie make it easier and more efficient.

Toilet training isn’t a cultural skill. It’s a developmental milestone.

And if a child shows every sign of being ready to read? - replace a fascination with people eating solid food (maybe ready for weaning), or an ability to indicate you need the toilet (ready for potty training) with a fascination with what parents are reading, loving looking at books, pointing at words and pretending to read them, memorising stories, actually reading words you recognise, reading entire sentences, reading to your parents... I'm still not seeing a huge difference, tbh - it depends what you are exposed to, doesn't it? If your parents wander around naked and shit randomly all over the place, will you learn to hold on until you have found somewhere more socially acceptable and hygienic within "normal" time frames, if they are your only example?

As for potty "training" there seems to be a massive range of what is considered " normal," depending on a country's culture and availability of disposable nappies. So in what way is that a developmental milestone where reading isn't?

Toilet training is a developmental stage: the ability to control the bladder and the bowels is determine by physiological maturation and happens to every normally developing human. It really shouldn’t be a big deal, but like so many aspects of human development, consumer goods have created noxious interference!

And yet you claim children are not developmentally ready to read before a certain age.. How odd, if it is a cultural milestone, not a developmental one - and potty training is a developmental milestone not a cultural one, despite the fact it is affected by the country's culture and environment .

Reading/writing (literacy) is a cultural skill that requires a child to have met multiple developmental milestones in order to start acquisition.

And a child generally needs to have attained multiple other developmental and cultural milestones before they can potty train successfully - if they can't walk, or squat, or remove and replace clothing, or understand where and when it is acceptable to urinate or defecate, then they can't be fully potty trained.

Sure. Developmental stages follow one another in a largely predictable sequence. That doesn’t of itself change the fact that developmental stages/milestones, which are the result of physical and neurological maturation, are common to all humans across time and geographies.

Including reading... Is reading different because it is abnormal to be able to learn to read simply by copying your parents' example, as you did when you learnt to speak, to lie, to share, to piss in a toilet, etc?

What does learning to read early interfere with?

Early reading/writing interferes with observation/drawing. The brain area responsible for images is “hijacked” by letters, which are basically images. A lot of other things go on, but it is incredibly easy to stop children observing/drawing when they learn to read/write. Observation/drawing is a hugely important skill for understanding the world.

Another example: children growing up bilingually have much better linguistic outcomes (and, as we all know, language underlies a huge amount of all our learning) if they grow up as balanced bilinguals, equally fluent and literate in both their languages. A lot of harm can be done by not paying attention to this and it is hard to reverse later.

Not RTFT but at DD’s school we have been allowed into her class to do the whole mollycoddling thing since nursery / reception. She’s now year 3, and has only just started saying to me to leave as soon as we get into the classroom. She is really mature for her age though, and always has been - she is just getting a bit lazy with the bag / lunchbox carrying etc as I have always done this. Her school is very hot on getting the parents involved a lot though, and I think they like to ensure they are seen to be doing the integrated approach with the children, hence the time spent in the classroom in the morning etc.

It does make for quite a crowded corridor outside each class though, and bottlenecks in the mornings with pushchairs etc. I’m sure each school has their own policies / reasons for doing this, but as far as I can tell, it hasn’t done my DD any harm.