The Kindergarchy: Read This.

[Overpaid Slacker]

The Kindergarchy

An excerpt:

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

"Graduating" from Kindergarten and trophies for every child create a false sense of achievement, furthered by complicit parents who themselves equate having a child with "achievement".

JP

[M.D. Holloway]

Our 5yr old Daughter plays soccer. The league tells us not to keep score but our little one does and she gets real bummed when they don't win. Hay kid, thats life. Get used to it! You want to win? Score more they they do.

[kstar]

[the]

The author seems a wee bit bitter.

[onewhippedpuppy]

The whole not keeping score thing drives me nuts. Talk about sending the wrong message. There's winners and losers in life, I plan to prepare my son to be a winner. In the real world, everyone is not equal, and everyone does not get a trophy when the day is done. Callous? Maybe, but so is life.

[nostatic]

bitter, long-winded, and could use some therapy and/or meds.

[kstar]

You win some, you lose some; that's a good lesson in life.

"For the loser now
Will be later to win . . ."

Keep score, age be damned.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I think the author is dead-on. Maybe a bit brutal, but for one I appreciate the brutal honesty.

This politically-correct crap where everyone's special, everyone's a winner and everyone deserves huggy-wuggys is B.S. Fact is the world is tough, there are winners and losers and if you want to be a winner, you better start learning that hard lesson at an early age. Too many parents "over-shelter" their kids in manners like this and when the kids hit the realities of the real world, they're caught totally unprepared and they end up getting their asses handed to them.

Competitiveness makes us stronger, not weaker.

We should be rewarding and supporting the successful, not coddling the failures. If kids fail, let them understand it, let them experience it (how much it sucks) and most importantly realize it's not the end of the world and they can/should pick themselves up, dust themselves off and try again, this time more experienced and better prepared so maybe they can succeed this time around.

Freekin' "sensitivity training" inspired bull*****. Only drags us down collectively. I have little use for it.

[Overpaid Slacker]

I thought it was strong medicine, but deservedly so.

Anyone who has faith in the efficacy of parenting ought to read Freakonomics.... notwithstanding the insufferable self-important twerps resulting from the current paradigm.

JP

[The Gaijin]

Good stuff.

"What it produced was another group of people who later spent their lives going about the world's business, with no strong grudges against their parents or anger at such abstract enemies as The System...."

This sums it up:

"As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.."

The remarkable ones? Those that found a passion. Does any of this modern parenting help with that?

[URY914]

This year was my 12 year old daughter's third year of very competitive club volleyball. The first two years we were just lucky she kept it off the floor and got it back over the net. This year we had a talk to her coach and he said if she is going to become an elite player she needs to start hitting the ball aggresively. Now she needs to turn the corner from being a player having fun to a player trying to win. We need to stop telling her it was OK to hit a bad ball once an awhile and start riding her ass about doing better. My wife had a little problem with it at first but I was all for it.

Kids need to learn that there are winners and losers. Winning is much better.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by LubeMaster77

Our 5yr old Daughter plays soccer. The league tells us not to keep score but our little one does and she gets real bummed when they don't win. Hay kid, thats life. Get used to it! You want to win? Score more they they do.

Kids know exactly who wins and loses; their feckless parents wishes be damned.

[nostatic]

I have no issue with winning and losing. My son knows that there is a difference, and you strive for one and avoid the other. He's been told, "suck it up" more than once in his young life.

But there also is a balance. How many kid's sports have been ruined by idiot parents who want to win at any cost simply for the sake of their own fragile ego?

While I agree with much of what the author says, he still comes across as bitter and exceedingly long winded. Just because the essay is long doesn't mean it is "important." That is another unfortunate side effect of current "paradigms."

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by nostatic

I have no issue with winning and losing. My son knows that there is a difference, and you strive for one and avoid the other. He's been told, "suck it up" more than once in his young life.

But there also is a balance. How many kid's sports have been ruined by idiot parents who want to win at any cost simply for the sake of their own fragile ego?

Very true...I also believe that kids know exactly which parents are tool sheds and those that are not. I did, and so did the unfortunate spawn of the idiots. It can get grim.

[onewhippedpuppy]

In teaching your kids to win, you need to teach them to do so in the right way. That's the part that many people miss. I'll never be angry at my son, so long as he gives his full effort. That's all I'll ever ask.

[lendaddy]

How did this drift to sports? The point I see is that we are teaching our children the world revolves around them and that won't serve them well emotionally later in life. I'm guilty of it myself as it's hard to deny your children anything including attention.

I see the authors own life being brought up not as an example to follow but as a testament to the fact that our kids don't need us nearly as much as we think they do.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I agree, but given a choice between the extreme of overly-competitive, aggressive kids with insecurity complexes (who grow up to be overly-competitive, aggressive adults with insecurity complexes) and the other extreme of ones that are a bunch of coddled, spoiled bratty little schits that don't know how to do anything other than b*tch and whine about how unfair life is anytime they're presented with a situation with a less-than-guaranteed outcome (who also grow up to be adults with the same characteristics), I'd take the former any day.

Sadly this is NOT what I see happening today - in most cases anyway.

[Seahawk]

Now, this guy is on to something.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

[john70t]

School should be about the experience and the process of learning, nothing else. After that, they fly or die.

You could blame the credit-crunch today on the little girls who didn't have $100 Jordache's in Kindergarten. No self esteem, no vision, no goals, or vision, or soul.

[the]

I don't really see a bit "everyone is a winner" mentality going on, at least not in my kid's schools, sports programs, or anywhere else.

Yeah, I guess you do see it with really, really young kids (like 5 years old). But by, say 8 or 9, that's done. Kids are quickly ordered by skill and ability, and everyone knows it.

Some examples:

1. School. In our school, by 4th grade, everyone knows who has tested into the gifted program, who is an "A" student, and who is a "C" student. Those are just objective facts based on achievement, the kids have to, and do, deal with it. The ones who excel learn how to deal with it and get along with others (i.e., down play it, not mention it, etc.), and the ones at the bottom learn how to deal with it.

2. Sports. In organized sports, by 8/9 it is by NO STRETCH of the imagination an "all wins" situation. Scores are kept, teams are ranked, and a Champion is crowned. Rules are in place to ensure at least some participation (minimum innings played, minimum minutes played in basketball, etc.), but the ranking of players is never in doubt. The highly skilled play the impt positions, and play the most, the least play the least. All Star teams start by age 8. By 12 years old, if you are not a skilled player, you are riding the pine, and by 14 if you are not skilled, your baseball career is done.

Although I'm not sure that "everyone wins" is what the author is complaining about.

He seems to be saying that you can give your kids too much love and too much attention. I'd have to disagree with that. Yes, it needs to be the right kind of attention, moving towards positive things, and growth. But just because he was apparently ignored as a kid, he seems to be saying you should intentionally withhold love and attention from your kids. That's nuts.

A great quote I read was from Tiger Wood's dad. Of course, Tiger's dad was a huge part of his life. But they had a great, close relationship all the way through adulthood. Tiger's dad said something along the lines of "All of his life, I've been preparing him to leave me." That really made sense to me, and in making decisions involving kid-raising (both everyday little decisions, and long term decisions), that's what I always have in the back of my mind. Take the choice that is going to help him, in the long term, become a happy, healthy, confident, caring, successful adult.