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Bringing Down Baby
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13227 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
2,443 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Fleming
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MISEDUCATION
Preschoolers at Risk
David Elkind
New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987
211 pp., $16.95
We have all seen the ads: Give your kids an edge. Send them to Ivy League Preschool, where their capacities will be stretched to the max. Classes in nonfigurative finger painting, aerobic sandbox, pre-pre-calculus, and Old Persian.
The superkid is the latest variation on the age-old quest for the best system of child rearing. Like all bright ideas whose time has come, the business of forcing young children like so many tulip bulbs has its drawbacks and its dangers. As David Elkind points out in his latest book, children have a natural process of development. Excessive pressure at an early age - whether academic, physical, or emotional - may result in permanent damage.
Elkind, a professor of child study at Tufts and a contributing editor to Parents Magazine, cites a number of examples that would be amusing, if they didn't concern young children:
·A program to teach four-month-old children to swim
·"Suzy Prudden's exercise program for young children"
·"Abstract-thinking games" for six-month-old babies
·A virtual library of Glenn Doman books: for example, How to Give Your Baby an Encyclopedic Mind.
Elkind believes that many such programs are worse than fraudulent, because they can do serious (sometimes permanent) harm. The most detectible problems are physical. One clinic at Boston Children's Hospital is treating 150 children a week who have been hurt as a result of athletic activity. Children have been showing up with injuries we normally associate with professional athletes: tendonitis, torn cartilage, stress fractures, even bursitis. A child's bones and muscles are not adequate to sustain the level of pressure and abuse they receive in many organized sports, and the result of "going for the gold" at an early age may well be a long-term disability. It is, of course, and old problem. In their eagerness to win games, coaches not infrequently demand too much of their young teams, and many a good arm has been ruined in Little League and high school baseball. (Many pitching coaches have told me not to allow boys even to throw curveballs!)
The scars of early academic pressure are less easy to see but ultimately more damaging. Children have short attention spans and desire constant praise and reinforcement. The attempt to create intellectual and artistic prodigies frequently produces frustration and rage in the budding Horowitz. Apply too much pressure and they may become "curriculum-disabled", as Elkind terms them - children who persistently perform below grade level.
Advocates of academic pre-schooling like to point to the success stories like John Stuart Mill, but - as Elkind observes - studies of intellectual achievement in the United States do not indicate a
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