Advice for Lower School Parents – The Top Ten

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As I read books on parenting and effective teaching, I like to file away my favorite pearls of wisdom. Here are my Top Ten for parents of younger children. I hope you enjoy them!

  1. Raise your children to leave you.
  2. Remember that play helps children learn how to control themselves and how to interact with others. It is in play that cognitive agility develops. Social engagement actually improves intellectual skills by fostering decision making, memory and thinking, and the speed of mental processing.
  3. Allow your children time to get bored. Let them dawdle. This provides them with an opportunity to find ways to amuse or entertain themselves. When a child is micromanaged from the outside, he is deprived of the opportunity to develop on the inside.
  4. Let your child flounder a bit and learn from it. Give him more credit for figuring things out. Realize that through struggle and failure he will learn how to cope, and that error and experimentation are the true mothers of success. Remember that the experience is about the process, not the end product.
  5. If we ignore a child’s intrinsic strengths in an effort to push him toward our notion of extraordinary achievement, we undermine the plan. If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t ask him to be a doctor.
  6. Spend more time with your child and less time worrying about him.
  7. When praising your child, be specific. Remember that the sincerity of our praise is crucial.
  8. When praising your child, emphasize effort rather than smarts. When a child is praised for intelligence, he hears, “Look smart and don’t risk making mistakes.” Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control and provides no good recipe for responding to a failure. Research on over praised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes his primary concern. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.
  9. Read, read, and read some more to your child. Find the time to connect.
  10. Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify, simplify. It is through simplicity that we elevate purpose.”