Audience: Parent

Busywork Blues

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. In the living room of my parent’s house there is a table worn smooth from the weight of books and spotted with flocks of pen tip indentations. This of course is the dreaded “Homework Table,” which sustained nearly two decades of use by both me and my older brother. It is from this table that I would often depart early in the morning, only to return again later—after school was out, after tennis practice was out, well after sundown. Although I explicitly remember spending what constituted a significant portion of my adolescence at this table, I am hard pressed to recall the specifics of any of the actual assignments. Granted, this retrospection is a few years removed, it still brings up an interesting question: if the overwhelming majority of homework is busywork, why assign it at all? While each of the papers t …

Want to Avoid the Homework Wars? – Here’s How

School is back in session and parents everywhere are bemoaning the return of the dreaded H-word. Homework. Yes, kids are coming home loaded down with math worksheets to compute, reports to write and projects to do. By the time they’ve slogged through it all—and done the extracurricular du jour—it’s bedtime. In fact, it’s past bedtime. Forget relaxing. Forget hanging out with friends. Heck, forget a sit-down meal with the family. In general, kids have too much homework these days. The amount of time students in high-achieving schools spend on homework has dramatically increased over the past 30 years or so, and guess what? Their lives haven’t gotten any simpler during this time frame. Not only does too much homework not foster academic achievement, it can actually hinder it. What’s more, it may harm kids in countless other ways. (For more info on this subject check out our research on homework at challengesuccess.org.) Excessive home …

Back to School, Back to Routine

As a magical summer winds to a close, I cannot help but get excited for the new school year. After two decades in the classroom as a student and another two decades as a teacher, my calendar begins at the end of August. In our house, a return to the routine of the school year revolves around the one immutable piece of the schedule: bed time. Summer sunlight, travel, spontaneous family movie nights, and more all wreak minor havoc on sleep. With the added complication of juggling different sleep needs for our four, ten, and thirteen year-olds, our evenings can be, in a word, interesting. Like Madeline Levine described in her recent blog, sleep is one of the most critical factors in maintaining health and happiness. In addition to the studies she cited linking good sleep habits as a protective factor against depression and extreme crabbiness, sleep helps the brain consolidate memories and learning, allows the body to process carbohydrates correctly (preventing excessive weight gain), b …

Back to School Alert: The Necessity of a Sane Bedtime

As a culture, we’ve somehow gotten to a place where a good night’s sleep is typically seen as a luxury. Sleep deprivation is de rigueur for many adults all year long. And as summer fades away and a new school year looms on the horizon, it’s about to be even more true for our kids. It’s not hard to see why sleep has fallen to the bottom of the priority list for many families. Our lifestyles are crowding it out. Our kids often have not just one but several extracurricular activities, each of which requires a significant time commitment. And let’s not forget homework: most kids have plenty of it to fit in between soccer practice or music lessons or karate class. By the time we’ve picked up the kids from whatever practice they’re at, shoveled in dinner and gotten them started on homework, it’s already late. By the time they’re done with assignments and study time it’s alarmingly late—but what are you going to do? The thinking goes like this: we live in a super-competitive world w …

The Art and Practice of Play

4 year-old: So, what do you want to do? 10 year-old: I don’t know. 4 year-old: Well, you could be my dog. 10 year-old: Ok. 4 year-old: But this time, you have to behave. If you live with a preschooler, play is probably the default activity in your home. Make believe, construction, water play and more are staples in our house, even for our thirteen and ten year-olds. Variations of the conversation above, one I overheard a few months ago, occur on a daily basis and the infectious enthusiasm of our youngest is nearly impossible to resist. Assorted scholars define play differently. I am comfortable with this simple definition of play: play is any freely chosen and self-directed activity. Soccer practice, while hopefully fun, is not play. A neighborhood whiffle ball tournament with group-decided bases and imaginary all-star players is play. While we live in an era in which play and free time have been marginalized, I am thrilled to see the increasing attention paid to th …

Why it Pays to Play

If you’re like many parents, your child’s summer may already be booked up with “enriching activities.” Maybe you’re shipping her off to a rigorous math or computer camp designed to give her an academic edge. At the very least you’re using the break from school to double up on her (already daunting) schedule of gymnastics and dance classes, supplemented with an ambitious summer reading list. I have a question though: When will your child have time to play? Just…play? It’s too bad that the old-fashioned notion of summer as endless free time—to climb trees, chase fireflies, build a fort in the woods, maybe set up a lemonade stand—has fallen by the wayside. This is what kids need—they need it far more than they need a high-priced summer camp or some other program aimed at cramming a little bit more learning into their exhausted brains. Play is serious business. We may see it as wasted time, but it’s actuall …

Media and “The Meanest Mom in Town”

In the interest of full disclosure, I have the “only” seventh grader in “the whole town” who does not have a mobile phone. According to his friends I might be the “meanest mom in town”… As Madeline Levine persuasively contended in her most recent post, an essential job of parenting in our (especially electronic) media-saturated society is teaching media literacy. In fact, I believe this so strongly that I have incorporated media literacy activities into my classroom curriculum for over a decade. However, in our home we have delayed some of the thornier issues surrounding media inflow. We have one family computer and one television. Both sit in a public area and their use is determined by our family rules. We expect our children to learn how to become savvy media consumers and we know that the learning process will probably involve some mistakes. For our thirteen year-old, we know he is not quite ready to tackle some of the decisions that …

Friendships 2.0

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. I don’t have a Facebook account. Anymore. About two years ago, I deleted it in a move which has since brought me a lot of weird looks and comments about how “out of the loop” I have become. People complain that I am now “hard to reach” and wonder how I manage to stay “in touch.” Which I all find very interesting. Because I have a phone. And an email address. And even a P.O. Box. And I also live on the same campus as them. It is almost as if the rules of social interaction have been rewritten. Apparently, it is no longer socially acceptable to get by with seeing people face to face. So what is it about these new platforms that makes them such a crucial part of day to day life? Why do I really need one? And how did it get to the point where I found that they were actually hu …

“Just five minutes more. Please.”

I’m certain there isn’t a parent alive who hasn’t been begged, implored, cajoled or even threatened by their otherwise reasonable youngster when faced with the command to shut down the television, computer, video game, Facebook page, smart phone or tablet. Little kids throw tantrums, bigger kids have meltdowns and teens slam doors. It’s as if we’re cutting their digital umbilical cord without warning or anesthesia. Almost all forms of media consumption are up, and the average child is spending over seven and a half hours a day with different forms of media (actually, closer to 11 hours a day if you separate out all of the multi-tasking.)1 This is more time than most kids spend in school or with their families and friends. Parents have every right to be concerned about the impact of such a disproportionately large amount of time spent on activities that we know so little about in terms of their potential long-term consequences. Are our kids getting smart …

Trainers for Four-Year Olds! Will Kids Pay a Price for Getting an Athletic “Leg Up?”

A year or so ago as I was waiting to give a presentation entitled, “A Balanced Approach to Navigating Youth Sports” to a group of preschool and elementary parents, a mom approached me and asked if it was okay if her kids’ “trainer” attended the session. This was a new one for me—4 and 5 year olds with an athletic trainer. I had visions of little kids doing boot camp-style exercises, but it turned out the trainer was a recent college grad with a sports background who was, according to the mom, “teaching them fun games that were sports related so they could begin developing a good fitness foundation.” Hiring athletic trainers is all part of the “earlier is better, more is better” arms race that pervades youth sports, just as it does academics (think Kumon, academic camps, tutors, test prep industry, and private college advisors). Now at seemingly any age, opportunities abound for parents to provide “additional sup …

Giving Your Child A ‘Leg Up’: A Short-Term Boost With Long-Term Consequences

As the school year winds down, many teachers assign thought-provoking, topical projects and year-end tests to allow the students to both synthesize the semester or year’s learning and also demonstrate an ability to articulate new knowledge. While assessment itself is a fiercely debated topic and is the subject of many ongoing studies, the essential goal for any type of assessment is to allow the student to demonstrate her or his understanding. Key word: student. While I feel confident that many parents can make a lovely model of Mission San Juan Capistrano and write some excellent paragraphs to accompany the fourth grade project, that is not the point. Unfortunately, there seems to be widespread angst about these final challenges. Performance on any particular task is perceived to either ‘make or break’ the year’s learning. Concerned parents want to be sure that their daughter or son’s work is the best it can possibly be, and here is where they veer fr …

A “Leg Up” or Cut Off at the Knees

In 1996 a young couple, Julie and Bill Clark, from Alpharetta, Georgia, invested $18,000 of their savings to produce a VHS (remember those) product called Baby Einstein. Julie, a former teacher and stay-at-home mom, and her entrepreneurial husband quickly added an extensive line of videos with names like Baby Van Gogh and Baby Mozart, beginning a Baby Einstein line-up that would eventually include multiple videos, educational toys and even a television show. The target audience for these videos was infants and children ages 3 months to 3 years (or perhaps more accurately, the parents who put their babies in front of these videos, so that mom or dad could jump into the shower, guilt free.) In any event, the Clark’s business skyrocketed, growing from $1 million to $10 million to $400 million in a little over a decade. Popularity and profits soared and, in 2001, Disney bought a majority share of the company. Estimates were that one in three American households with a baby owned at l …