The power of simple play
Learning
Today's parents are trying to do it right: Mozart for the baby in utero, educational toys for the toddler, spelling software for the aspiring kindergartner. Modern American parenting has become an expensive and often exhausting investment in a stellar future. "Everybody wants to have a kid that no employer will ever let go and no college will ever say no to," says Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, director of the Infant Language Project at the University of Delaware. The problem, she says, is that we are really working against these goals. In the recently published book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards (Rodale, $22.95), Golinkoff and coauthor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University, make the case for a simpler approach.
Today's parents expect a lot of their children and themselves, right?
KHP: We are told that faster is better, that we must make every minute count, and that our children are empty vessels waiting to be filled. Parents believe it's best for kids to learn to read early. They think kids should not be starting school ready to learn but already having learned. We've taken elementary school and pushed it down to preschool.
So we buy smart toys?
RMG: Yes. We have parents of newborns asking us, "When should I start the flashcards?" The marketplace knows parents are eager, so it makes products that claim to make your child's brain bigger and smarter. Yet there's not a shred of evidence that any of these products have any effect on kids' heads. The electronic smart toys are based on fact learning. We are confusing memorization with achievement. The toys have flashy gizmos and make cool sounds but do not offer a real advantage.
Is there evidence to back that up?
KHP: We know a tremendous amount about how young children learn, based on 30 years of wonderful science. The research shows that real learning has to take place in context--and that play is the best teacher. Children learn a tremendous amount through everyday living: playing with other children, creating stories together, finding patterns in leaves, and figuring out that if there are four people coming for dinner, you need to set four plates, four forks, and four napkins. Young children can learn about physics with blocks. What they don't need to do is to go around reciting E=mc2.
Isn't a child better off going to school knowing the states or how to add?
RMG: There appears to be no real advantage to pushing kids ahead. And there are some disadvantages. We push them into being perfectionists. When we teach that there is one right answer and that the product is all that matters, kids become anxious if they can't produce. Memorizing teaches them to be invested in the grade, not in the process of learning. Also, by giving them a constant stream of activities and enrolling them in a constant stream of classes, kids become so used to us structuring activities for them that they're at a loss when they don't have an activity. We're developing a generation of kids whose favorite words are, "I'm bored." They don't know how to be independent. By treating kids as if they're simply thinking machines, we are giving short shrift to their emotional development.
What toys should parents buy?
KHP: Toys that foster self-expression: crayons, Play-Doh, K'nex, and Legos. I love blocks, Brio, and any other toys that allow kids to create their own story, like Playmobil characters, a costume drawer, tea sets, kitchenware, dolls, and puppets. Zero-budget toys are empty boxes that can become taxicabs and forts. Pots and pans become rhythm instruments and nesting cups. Take field trips to the backyard to learn how ants crawl on a stick. If we give them computerized toys with one right answer they will never grow up to be creative problem solvers.
Technology is changing so fast, parents feel the child's future depends on taking advantage of every "learning opportunity."
KHP: The children of the 21st century are going to have a lot of facts at their fingertips. With search engines you don't have to have all this junk memorized. But they do need to know how to take all those facts and combine things in new and interesting ways to create solutions. The kids who can are going to be the bosses of the future. The people who know only facts are the worker bees.
This story appears in the December 8, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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