Question One: Your five-year-old daughter comes home from kindergarten with a paper that the children have worked on in class, writing letters or distinguishing shapes or colors.
Your daughter’s page does not contain a sticker, although you have noticed that most papers that come home from school do have a “good job” or “nicely done” sticker attached. Which of the following best describes your reactions
and subsequent actions?
A) You cuddle up on the couch with your daughter and some vegetable snacks. You read Robert Lopshire’s classic _Put Me in the Zoo_, arguably the greatest children’s book ever written. Then you and your daughter make oatmeal raisin cookies emphasizing that three teaspoons is one table spoon so two table spoons must be six teaspoons.
B) You send an angry text to your child’s teacher decrying her blatant discrimination and gross incompetence. Unable to reach her, you send a scathing email to the principal of the elementary school excoriating her for her hiring practices. Excerpts from your repeated texts and emails contain the phrases, “my daughter’s self-esteem will be irrevocably harmed” and “all the other children got stickers.”
If you picked “A” above, you are my kind of parent. You are allowing your daughter to make her own way. You are not forcing your own anxiety about the future to get in the way of her processing her own experience. If you even noticed that there wasn’t a silly sticker on her paper, you set the ground work for her being able to deal with little bumps on her own now so that she’ll be able to cope with bigger bumps down the road.
If you picked “B” above, you are, in my professional judgment, heading for trouble. The time to intervene in your child’s kindergarten classroom is when you feel your child is in genuine danger. It’s a great idea to allow your child to understand that she can solve problems on her own-IF she even feels that they are problems.
The other reason that I have concerns about “B” is that children tend to absorb the anxiety of their parents. We want to communicate to our little ones that the world is basically a safe, protected place. Also, we want to keep our opinions to ourselves about a great many topics. I know wonderful parents with content, high functioning children who used only two words in bringing up their kids. “Drugs and condoms” they said. “We’re against the former and–if and when the time comes–in favor of the later.” Any other issues–whether or not the child came home with a sticker, for example–they assiduously ignored, preferring that the children make their own way, figure things out on their own.
My last (I promise!) issue with the mother who hovers like a lawn mower over her child’s kindergarten classroom is that the behavior makes good teaching that much harder. It’s one thing to get a herd of five-year-olds to and from the lunch room and engage them in learning their numbers and letters. It’s another level of stress for a teacher to have to be concerned about an overbearing mom looking over her shoulder, second guessing her every curricular choice.
Some of the worst teaching that is done at the elementary level results from teachers who are worried about how parents will react. Norm referenced testing which is contraindicated for all children but especially visceral for little ones is a result of those crazy parents who won’t leave the kindergarten teacher alone and let her do her job. “I can’t explain about ‘ages and stages'” teachers lament. “The parents don’t get it when I talk about how not every child is ready to read at age five. So I administer those harmful tests. At least I can show the parents percentiles and graphs. Then they leave me alone. For a few days.”
Oh, and what happened to the missing sticker, the sticker that caused the outraged mom to write the scathing emails? The sticker was “found” on the child’s desk at school. The child had pulled the sticker off of her paper and put in on her desk.
