No Need to Rush

Emily Kaplan, in her article on the edutopia website, writes:

“Erika Christakis is a former faculty member of the Yale Child Study Center and the author of the best-selling book The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need From Grownups. Christakis says that we’ve reached a perilous moment for very young kids: Increasingly we treat them as commodities and find ourselves ‘in danger of losing the child in childhood.’ Instead of imposing adult expectations, she argues, parents and teachers should try to ‘take their blinders off’ and see the world through the eyes of young children—a change in perspective that might allow us to better understand and cultivate their unique abilities.

I recently had the opportunity to ask her about our evolving cultural values around childhood, what good early educational environments look like, and how we can resist the tendency to ‘adultify’ young children.”

Here's an excerpt from Christakis that Kaplan shares:

“The notion that there is something of value in being a little kid—with little kid desires and, above all, needs—seems to have fallen out of favor. We talk about young children, increasingly, as commodities to ‘invest’ in for future payoffs. Parents express enormous anxiety about their children’s futures, and seem to be curating their children’s life experiences in a way that would look quite unnatural and even rather joyless to previous generations.”

Source: “What’s Lost When We Rush Kids Through Childhood,” by Emily Kaplan, eduptopia.org, August 23, 2019

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