When I brought my first school report home in the summer of 1971, while I’m sure my mother was pleased to read the comment: “Your daughter reads well for her age,” I’m also certain she didn’t take complete credit for it.
So why, 35 years later, when I opened my daughter Lily’s first report with trembling hands, did I feel so nervous?
How, like millions of other parents, had I come to believe I was entirely responsible for whether my child excelled or not?
Today it seems that no sooner has sperm met egg than the womb becomes our children’s first classroom. Unborn babies become a captive audience for classical music blasted in utero before they even have ears. Once delivered, the curriculum proper begins: flashcards before they can properly see, sign language class before they can talk and swimming classes before they can walk.
The truth is, of course, that pushy parenting has been with us since Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet, albeit in a very different form. While it used to be about having a child whose behaviour and manners reflected well on your social status, this century has seen a gradual turn-around in how we view our responsibilities as a parent.
Once if a child had a talent, it was viewed as a God-given gift. But then Sigmund Freud proposed that parents were almost entirely responsible for how children turned out, psychologically at least. On top of that, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed his ideas that children go through defined stages of development and could be viewed as “little scientists”.
But it was the creation of a nationwide network of grammar schools towards the end of the second world war to teach the most intellectually able 25% of children that put everything in place for pushy parenting to take hold. After all, if entry to a grammar could change the course of a child’s entire life, what else was the responsible parent to do but give their child the best chance in life?
As the question “How can I make my child more clever?”, became increasingly pressing for parents, the first answers were gratefully received. They came from a man of whom you have probably never heard, but it is likely that his ideas have had a profound effect on how you think you should raise your kids.
In 1963, Glenn Doman, a US physical therapist, published Teach Your Baby to Read. Based on the rehabilitation of brain-injured children, Doman’s theories rested on his observation that an infant’s brain grows more in the first year than at any other time. In his mind, this translated to the fact the brain needed to be stimulated as much as possible until growth slowed at the age of three.
Doman went so far as to say that babies arrived in the world so thirsty for knowledge that they would rather learn than eat.
From the start, few experts in child development supported Doman’s claims that babies could read. But already, it was too late. Teach Your Baby to Read sold 5m copies and was translated into more than 20 languages.
A trend for educational hothousing took hold and grew through the 70s. However, by the early 80s, psychologists began to report cases of overstressed children.
The new ABC’s of babyhood, according to a 1983 Newsweek magazine investigation into the issue, were: “Anxiety, Betterment and Competition.”
Parenting books no longer focused on the basics of feeding and caring for a baby. Instead, they concentrated on increasing IQ. One bestseller, How to Have a Smarter Baby, even promised a rise of 30 points if parents followed its advice.
While Doman never succeeded in creating a generation of early readers, he did prove another point. He demonstrated that the insecurity of parents could be turned into cold, hard cash.
As the claims became increasingly outlandish, the protests of the researchers who pointed out that marketers were confusing neurology – the study of the nervous system – with psychology, grew louder too.
So, it was in this atmosphere that I plonked my first baby in her bouncy seat in front of a Baby Einstein video. There I left her to gaze up at a surreal mix of lava lamps, wind-up toys and glove puppets dancing to xylophone reductions of Mozart.
Common sense should have told me this was unlikely to do anything but confuse her or send her to sleep. But I, along with millions of other parents, swallowed the sales pitch that I could give my daughter a big head-start in life. Indeed, within five years of Baby Einstein’s launch, one in four US families had bought at least one educational baby video. By 2006, Baby Einstein title had generated sales of £540m in the US alone and the company that released it was bought by Disney.
But there were problems on the horizon. Some studies started to suggest that far from improving a baby’s abilities, educational videos might thwart them. As the criticism mounted, Disney offered parents refunds and downgraded its sales pitch.
Yet even today a trip down the aisles of Britain’s largest toy retailer, Toys R Us, is enough to make a parent believe that it is never too early to get your baby ready for algebra.
Here is the Mozart effect gone mad. Newborns, who don’t even know their feet belong to them, are encouraged to make music by kicking giant piano keys in infant play gyms.
In this fast-tracked world, even something as simple as a skipping rope comes with flashing lights in order to teach the times tables, which can then be tested on “target mode”.
Most neuroscientists say that our expectations of educational toys and videos are overstated at best and unfounded at worst. Somewhere between laboratory and nursery, the science has become seriously muddled. Small grains of truth have been magnified into huge money-spinners.
It is not just the fact that educational toys do not help. A growing number of experts take the view that they actively deprive children of the time and brain space they need to learn more vital skills, which is provided by open‑ended and imaginative play.
While it is true that leaving a child in a darkened room with no stimulation means it will not develop as many brain connections, the flipside is not that the more you expose them to educational stimuli, the smarter they will be.
Brain scientist and molecular biologist John Medina says: “Sadly, myths rush in when facts are few and they have a way of snaring people. Even after all these years, many of the products are still out there, trapping unsuspecting parents into parting with their hard-earned cash.”
Making learning and playtime stressful is counterproductive, adds Medina. “The more stress hormones swarm children’s brains, the less likely they are to succeed intellectually.”
But perhaps nowhere have the insecurities of parents been exploited more than in tutoring. A generation ago, private tuition was the preserve of a small number of children struggling to keep up or trying to prepare for key exams.
Today a quarter of schoolchildren receive tutoring, up from 18% five years ago, according to research by the education charity the Sutton Trust. From traditional one-on-one teaching to group classes and online services, the UK market alone has been estimated at £6bn per year, and to employ one million people.
Yet many parents find that tutoring is not the magic bullet. Put an under-confident child in one-to-one tutoring with a tutor who does not know how to handle problems such as low academic self-esteem and that child will often end up feeling even worse about themselves and more resistant to learning.
Far from producing a brave new world of accomplished wunderkind, we are churning out anxious and depressed children. Instead of helping children do well at school, hothousing and tiger parenting risk instilling homework resistance, maths anxiety, a lack of enthusiasm for reading, low confidence, sleep problems and disconnection from parents.
Many parents have not yet realised that some of the behavioural issues they are struggling with are a result of the pressure that many children now feel.
Many children either feel loved conditionally on their successes – or they detach to avoid feeling that they are disappointing parents.
It is not just the fault of parents. They are bringing up children in a competitive culture, encouraged by governments and status-obsessed schools. Parents are made to constantly fear that they are never doing enough to help their children succeed in a cut-throat world of work and higher education.
But it is time for parents to reclaim a carefree childhood for their children and to enjoy parenting once again. Parents need to stop raising their children on the principles that they must beat everyone in their class, that their school needs to rise up the league tables, or for their country to defeat every other nation on Earth in global education rankings.
In short, parents have to be careful what they wish for. Happiness and security, not exam grades, should be the real measure of parental success.
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