Superchildren--Pushed Too Far for Their Own Good?

Music in the womb. Swimming lessons at 3 months. Violin at age 3. Phonics and math in preschool, and home-computer learning for tots. What could be wrong with giving your child a jump start in life?

Plenty, say a growing number of educators and pediatricians, who are leading a backlash movement against accelerated academic learning in preschool and kindergarten. What schools need instead, they say, is a “hands-on” curriculum, rooted in children’s experience and driven by their stages of mental and physical development.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the California State Department of Education School Readiness Task Force, which will issue a report Dec. 15, have zeroed in on the tendency to push academic learning down into kindergarten and preschool.

“There’s a body of new research out of developmental psychology and early childhood education that says children learn well from ages 4 through 7 under (certain) conditions--and those conditions are very different from what’s going on in kindergartens today,” said Carollee Howes, professor of education at UCLA and co-chair of the school readiness task force, appointed by Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction.

For their part, pediatricians warn that stress-linked psychosomatic illnesses and behavioral problems in children are on the rise.

Since the early 1970s, doctors have seen stress symptoms moving down from school-age to preschool-age children, according to Barbara Korsch, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and chairwoman of the committee on psychosocial aspects of child and family health of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“We’re seeing kids who . . . are overstimulated and overpressured,” Korsch said. “They develop headaches and bellyaches, or may have sleep disturbances. . . . And now we’re seeing more and more chest pains. The kids want to comply and don’t want to rebel, so they get physical complaints.”

In February, Korsch’s pediatrics academy committee plans to issue special guidelines to help pediatricians deal with problems of the “hurried” or pressured child. Educators also suspect that too-early reading and computation training produces children who become bored and unmotivated later.

“It’s an academic burnout problem,” said Lilian G. Katz, professor of early and elementary childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and editor of Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

“By second or third grade, kids become psychological dropouts. They go through the task, but have given up whether it means anything.”

Where did this all begin?

One educational historian, Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennsylvania, believes the current trend reeks of old wine in new bottles. He cites G. Stanley Hall, a leading American psychologist who in 1885 warned of the “grave danger” posed by late-Victorian parents who “perhaps not without vanity and cupidity, not only allow but sometimes encourage teachers to overpress their children, and sow seeds of suffering and incapacity.”

Competitiveness Emerged

The launching of Sputnik in 1957 gave a major jolt to American education, but the nationwide trend to teach academics in preschool and kindergarten began emerging sharply in the ‘80s. Factors such as the increasing competitiveness of college--and sometimes kindergarten--admissions, American industrial competition with Japan, and the changing American family have heightened Americans’ educational anxieties.

Working, single and often guilt-stricken parents want to believe their children are “learning” in preschool.

“Many parents react by overstructuring the toddler’s learning because of their own inadequacy and guilt,” Philadelphia educators Jeanette M. Gallagher and Judith Coche wrote in a recent special issue of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly devoted to “hot-housing” of young children.

For baby-boom generation parents, often older and with one or two children, parenting may “become a project” that gratifies parental egos, said June Sale, director of UCLA Child Care Services, which provided staff for the school readiness task force. Bruce Littman, a West San Fernando Valley pediatrician, confirmed a rise in anxiety among patients.

“I definitely see middle-class parents who are unnerved by their child’s lack of interest in early calculus and the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” he said.

For minority and working-class families as well, promoting academic achievement as early as possible may appear the way to overcome social inequities, Sale said. And some advertisements for toys, computers and baby classes imply that money can buy a youngster early brain development.

‘A Bill of Goods’

“Parents have been sold a bill of goods, that if they start pushing earlier, they’ll have super babies and super children,” Sale said.

Imposing a structured curriculum on young children may be especially inappropriate because their rates of development vary so widely, Howes said.

Studies show that 25% of children ages 4 to 6 have lower achievement levels than their peers, but that by third grade, development has leveled out. Boys often lag six months behind girls in development.

However, the growing practice of academic “red-shirting,” or holding children, especially boys, out of kindergarten, is not the solution, Katz said. Instead, schools should “adapt the curriculum to the kids,” the editor of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly said.

That means preschool and kindergarten programs should help children move through their natural developmental stages, said Richard Cohen, a task force member and teacher at UCLA’s laboratory University Elementary School.

Developmental Activities

For example, curriculum should help children develop eye coordination, left-to-right orientation and the ability to scan. Activities, like graphing types of Halloween candy garnered, should help children learn not just to count, but what a number represents; that “things written down” are language; that a single word exists in a stream of speech; and that there’s a sound system that can be recognized in letters. At home as well as in school, children should be “enmeshed in a rich environment of language,” Howes said.

Field trips and fantasy play are important in fostering young children’s initiative and creativity, said Gloria Guzman, head of the human development department at Rancho Santiago Community College in Santa Ana and coordinator of three community college child development centers.

Such experiences further “the process of comprehension that comes from experience. . . . They furnish a wider knowledge base where the child is able to ask his own questions and solve his own problems. Then he has a base of knowledge to understand more deeply what he’ll be reading later, Guzman said.

Minority children also have particular developmental needs, many educators say. Black children need “teachers who understand the Afro-American experience,” pointed out Thelma J. Duncan, coordinator of the Proficiency in English Program for the Black Learner for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Eighty to 85% of Black children speak varying degrees of black English and need to learn and practice “the cash language of our society,” standard English, she said.

Need to ‘Feel Good’

Children not proficient in English need to be surrounded by words and print in their own language, Howes said. They need “to feel good about their own language” and “not be told not to use it,” Sale said.

While no one advocates stopping children of any age from reading, teachers say learning to read is easier and more enjoyable for child and teacher when the child is truly ready.

“It’s like a plant that all of a sudden is ready to shoot up and grow,” said Sharon Sutton, who has taught for 20 years, the last seven at UCLA’s University Elementary School. Pointing out that many Europeans don’t read until age 7, Sutton told of one 6-year-old who wasn’t ready to read in September, but by February, “was devouring books. He was laughing at how often he went to the library.”

Guzman also underlined the physical component of academic readiness.

“I lived with an aborigine tribe in the Philippines,” the former Peace Corps worker said. “There, a kid was ready for school if he could touch his left ear with his right hand.”

‘They Want to Know’

“The role of kindergarten is to help a child with validation of self, to become competent socially and emotionally,” added Linda Rosenblatt, who has taught 3- to 6-year-olds for six years at University. “They’re naturally curious, they want to know how is a spider different from an insect. . . . If they’re bound tightly academically, you don’t have time to explore those things.”

Despite testimony that one Fresno grade school principal threatened to turn a kindergarten’s blocks into firewood, school readiness task force members offer block-playing as a paradigm of developmentally appropriate activity for youngsters. For example, because blocks are a finite commodity, teachers can use them to help children solve the mathematical and social problem of sharing them. This also promotes socialization necessary for later learning in a group.

Cohen also told of having 4- and 5-year-olds dictate stories about airports, dungeons and dragons that inhabited their block buildings. He then taped the typed stories onto the block formation for a group of school visitors to read.

“This way, the kids got the notion that they could transmit information to people who could read the stories. . . . What we were doing was instilling the notion (in children) that they can get the information they really need and want through reading. Then you’ve got them hooked, and teaching them to read isn’t a problem, because they want it so badly,” he explained.

At four statewide hearings conducted last spring by the task force, the overwhelming majority of 136 speakers representing 47 California school districts weighed in favoring early curriculum tied to children’s individual developmental needs. But, as Guzman pointed out, the California credential program for elementary school teachers does not require a course in child growth and development.