Custom Search

Pushy parents may help kids do better at school, but is it all good?

Latest research into parenting techniques suggests that pushy parents - you know, the ones who get their kids involved in everything under the sun from when they first start walking and aren’t in nappies - actually help their children to do better at school.

However, I’m sure that can be taken too far, and Mary Ann Sieghart at the UK’s Times newspaper seems to agree. “It will certainly turn them into exhausted, regimented automatons, so used to taking instruction that they would walk blindly off a cliff if their ballet teacher told them to. It will stunt their imaginations, leave them no time to themselves and teach them nothing about how to cope with boredom.”

Well I might not take it that far, but her points are valid and make sense. There’s no point pushing your kids blindly in to any and every activity that school and the community can offer if they’ve no aptitude or desire to do it.

It’s the ‘I was forced to learn the piano’ adage multiplied into any activity you could imagine. Why would you force a child into an activity that they hate only to have them lose confidence, motivation, and possibly loathe that activity for life (which otherwise under their own steam they may have enjoyed later on).

Continued below...

“Certain pursuits are very difficult to pick up as an adult, and these are worth learning when young. Playing an instrument is one; skiing (if you can afford it) is another. But it is pointless to push children where they don’t want to go. If ours regret, as adults, that they didn’t stick to their sax or guitar lessons, I shall simply say, “More fool you!” Yet more ambitious parents pore over each piece of research, trying to determine what will maximise their children’s chances of getting into the top schools, earning the top exam results, sailing into Oxford or Cambridge and thence to a top merchant bank. They are happy to play Mozart to their foetuses or hold showcards above their babies’ cots if that is what it takes. It makes me want to weep.”

She concludes: We do our children far more good if we encourage balance and moderation. Don’t become an obsessive but, equally, don’t idle your life away. Pursue what you enjoy, do enough schoolwork to achieve goals that are realistic for you. Be happy. That’s enough.

Good advice. What do you think?

Read