Have American Parents Got It All
Backwards?
Author, Parenting
Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us
The eager new mom offering her insouciant toddler
an array of carefully-arranged healthy snacks from an ice cube tray?
That was me.
The always-on-top-of-her-child's-play parent
intervening during play dates at the first sign of discord?
That was me too.
We hold some basic truths as self-evident when it
comes to good parenting. Our job is to keep our children safe, enable them to
fulfill their potential and make sure they're healthy and happy and thriving.
The parent I used to be and the parent I am now
both have the same goal: to raise self-reliant, self-assured, successful
children. But 12 years of parenting, over five years of living on and off in
Japan, two years of research, investigative trips to Europe and Asia and dozens
of interviews with psychologists, child development experts, sociologists,
educators, administrators and parents in Japan, Korea, China, Finland, Germany,
Sweden, France, Spain, Brazil and elsewhere have taught me that though parents
around the world have the same goals, American parents like me (despite our
very best intentions) have gotten it all backwards.
Why?
We need to let 3-year-olds climb trees and
5-year-olds use knives.
Imagine my surprise when I came across a
kindergartener in the German forest whittling away on a stick with a penknife.
His teacher, Wolfgang, lightheartedly dismissed my concern: "No one's ever
lost a finger!"
Similarly, Brittany, an American mom, was stunned
when she moved her young family to Sweden and saw 3- and 4-year-olds with no
adult supervision bicycling down the street, climbing the roofs of playhouses
and scaling tall trees with no adult supervision. The first time she saw a
3-year-old high up in a tree at preschool, she started searching for the
teacher to let her know. Then she saw another parent stop and chat with one of
the little tree occupants, completely unfazed. It was clear that no one but
Brittany was concerned.
"I think of myself as an open-minded
parent," she confided to me, "and yet here I was, wanting to tell a
child to come down from a tree."
Why it's better:
Ellen Hansen Sandseter, a Norwegian researcher at Queen Maud University in
Norway, has found in her research that the
relaxed approach to risk-taking and safety actually keeps our children safer by
honing their judgment about
what they're capable of. Children are drawn to the things we parents fear: high
places, water, wandering far away, dangerous sharp tools. Our instinct is to
keep them safe by childproofing their lives. But "the most important
safety protection you can give a child," Sandseter explained when we
talked, "is to let them take... risks."
Consider the facts to back up her assertion:
Sweden, where children are given this kind of ample freedom to explore (while
at the same time benefitting from comprehensive laws that protect their rights
and safety), has the lowest rates of child injury
in the world.
Children can go hungry from time-to-time.
In Korea, eating is taught to children as a life
skill and as in most cultures, children are taught it is important to wait out
their hunger until it is time for the whole family to sit down together and
eat. Koreans do not believe it's healthy to graze or eat alone, and they don't
tend to excuse bad behavior (like I do) by blaming it on low blood sugar.
Instead, children are taught that food is best enjoyed as a shared experience.
All children eat the same things that adults do, just like they do in most
countries in the world with robust food cultures. (Ever wonder why ethnic
restaurants don't have kids' menus?). The result? Korean children are
incredible eaters. They sit down to tables filled with vegetables of all sorts,
broiled fish, meats, spicy pickled cabbage and healthy grains and soups at
every meal.
Why it's better: In
stark contrast to our growing child overweight/obesity levels,
South Koreans enjoy the lowest obesity rates in the developed
world. A closely similar-by-body index country in the world is
Japan, where parents have a similar approach to food.
Instead of keeping children satisfied, we need to
fuel their feelings of frustration.
The French, as well as many others, believe that
routinely giving your child a chance to feel frustration gives him a chance to
practice the art of waiting and developing self-control. Gilles, a French
father of two young boys, told me that frustrating kids is good for them
because it teaches them the value of delaying gratification and not always
expecting (or worse, demanding) that their needs be met right now.
Why it's better: Studies show that children
who exhibit self-control and the ability to delay gratification enjoy greater future success.
Anecdotally, we know that children who don't think they're the center of the universe
are a pleasure to be around. Alice Sedar, Ph.D., a former journalist for Le
Figaro and a professor of French Culture at Northeastern University,
agrees. "Living in a group is a skill," she declares, and it's one
that the French assiduously cultivate in their kids.
Children should spend less time in school.
Children in Finland go outside to play frequently
all day long. "How can you teach when the children are going outside every
45 minutes?" a recent American Fulbright grant recipient in Finland, who
was astonished by how little time the Finns were spending in school, inquired
curiously of a teacher at one of the schools she visited. The teacher in turn
was astonished by the question. "I could not teach unless the children
went outside every 45 minutes!"
The Finnish model of education
includes a late start to academics (children do not begin any formal academics
until they are 7 years old), frequent breaks for outdoor time, shorter school
hours and more variety of classes than in the US. Equity, not high achievement,
is the guiding principle of the Finnish education system.
While we in America preach the mantra of early
intervention, shave time off recess to teach more formal academics and cut
funding to non-academic subjects like art and music, Finnish educators
emphasize that learning art, music, home economics and life skills is
essential.
Why it's better:
American school children score in the middle of the heap on international measures of
achievement, especially in science and mathematics. Finnish children, with
their truncated time in school, frequently rank among the best in the world.
Thou shalt spoil thy baby.
Tomo, a 10-year-old boy in our neighborhood in
Japan, was incredibly independent. He had walked to school on his own since he
was 6 years old, just like all Japanese 6-year-olds do. He always took
meticulous care of his belongings when he came to visit us, arranging his shoes
just so when he took them off, and he taught my son how to ride the city bus.
Tomo was so helpful and responsible that when he'd come over for dinner, he
offered to run out to fetch ingredients I needed, helped make the salad and
stir-fried noodles. Yet every night this competent, self-reliant child went
home, took his bath and fell asleep next to his aunt, who was helping raise
him.
In Japan, where co-sleeping with babies and kids
is common, people are incredulous that there are countries where parents
routinely put their newborns to sleep in a separate room. The Japanese respond
to their babies immediately and hold them constantly.
While we think of this as spoiling, the Japanese
think that when babies get their needs met and are loved unconditionally as
infants, they more easily become independent and self-assured as they grow.
Why it's better:
Meret Keller, a professor at UC Irvine, agrees that there is an intriguing
connection between co sleeping and independent behavior. "Many people
throw the word "independence" around without thinking conceptually
about what it actually means," she explained.
We're anxious for our babies to become
independent and hurry them along, starting with independent sleep, but Keller's
research has found
that co-sleeping children later became more independent and self-reliant than
solitary sleepers, dressing themselves or working out problems with their
playmates on their own.
Children need to feel obligated.
In America, as our kids become adolescents, we
believe it's time to start letting them go and giving them their freedom. We
want to help them be out in the world more and we don't want to burden them
with family responsibilities. In China, parents do the opposite: the older
children get, the more parents remind them of their obligations.
Eva Pomerantz of the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign has found through multiple studies that in China,
the cultural ideal of not letting adolescents go but of reminding them of their
responsibility to the family and the expectation that their hard work in school
is one way to pay back a little for all they have received, helps their motivation
and their achievement.
Even more surprising: She's found that the same
holds for Western students here in the US: adolescents who feel responsible to
their families tend to do better in school.
The lesson for us: if
you want to help your adolescent do well in school make them feel obligated.
I parent differently than I used to. I'm still an
American mom -- we struggle with all-day snacking, and the kids could use more
practice being patient. But 3-year-old Anna stands on a stool next to me in the
kitchen using a knife to cut apples. I am not even in earshot when 6-year-old
Mia scales as high in the beech in our yard as she feels comfortable. And I
trust now that my boys (Daniel, 10, and Benjamin, 12) learn as much out of
school as they do in the classroom.
