Category Archives: Parenting

Do the choices of well-educated parents affect the acheivement gap?

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It (almost) goes without saying that the choices of poorly educated children have a profound influence on the achievement gap. But do the choices of well-educated parents play any role in the achievement gap? Yes, they do.

Veritas RiffIn a recent podcast interview with Ruth Lopez Turley, Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University, the Veritas Riff explored exactly that question. The seven minute interview is worthwhile and helpful. In addition, here are some important dynamics not covered in the interview.

  1. Prizing academic achievement above community flourishing is passed from parents to children. Children learn from the lived decisions of their parents what is most important to them.
  2. Parent networks really matter in diverse schools. My eldest daughter has attended two very racially and economically diverse schools. And I can say unequivocally that parent involvement (by educated, creative, entrepreneurial parents) created the tipping point in both schools toward a thriving learning environment for all.
  3. Cultural competence is learned by practice. Children (like mine) in diverse schools learn cultural competence by doing it on a daily basis. In addition to Caucasian, Latino and African American children, my daughter’s classmates from China, Mexico, Togo, Thailand, and Bolivia. Can it make some learning dynamics more challenging? Sure. Do the benefits outweigh the challenges? Without question.
  4. Schools are not the biggest factor in education. The choice of educated parents to invest in diverse skill has a profound impact on those schools. However, it must be noted that classroom education is only one dimension of education. The total learning environment of children matters immensely – the impact of home life and community cannot be overstated.
    1. Early home life matters most. Here’s the rub. If you have diverse schools – in which some children have had a language-rich, supportive home environment, whereas others have had a hostile or neglectful home environment, the achievement gap already exists the day they walk into preschool. All of the children will receive the benefits I’ve listed above, and those Dr. Turley highlights in her interview. But some will have greater capacity to receive – and therefore the gap will persist – as it has at my daughter’ schools. The inter-racial, inter-cultural intermingling must happen long before school begins.

 

Strong families, Strong Communities, Strong Nation

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Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted the critical importance of early childhood for the well-being of children, their families, communities and the nation.

“Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.”

It isn’t when a child begins learning, but how and what he or she learns. Learning begins before birth regardless of the choices parents make. What a mother eats and drinks (and smokes) while pregnant affects a child’s learning capacities. From their first moment out of the womb, all children are immersed into a learning environment. The emotional attachment that children form (or fail to form) to their parents in the first year of life has a lifelong effect on learning. The tone and number of words that they hear in the first three years of life furnish them with the tools with which to explore the world.

In short, the President’s call to make preschool available to all children is laudable. Preschool really can be a wonderful learning environment for children. But the really great gains are made in interventions with families (not just children) even earlier in life. After all, without intervention to support parents, preschool is not prevention; it is remediation.

How to engage parents without being condescending

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Yesterday I had an astute mother and educator ask a profoundly important question: “How can I engage poor parents without being condescending?”

This friend is a teacher in a thriving charter school; she is also the mother of a nine-month old and the member of a moms’ group. However, as she pointed out to me, all of the moms in her moms’ group are of the same social strata (and they’re not poor). She knows from experience – in the home and in school – that what happens in the home in the earliest years of life is critical for setting a trajectory of learning. So how can we engage disadvantaged parents without looking down on them?

Honor Their Virtue

The first step in not being condescending is realizing that honor is more appropriate than condescension. For whom is it more difficult to participate in a moms’ group: the articulate, college-educated mom, or the single, poor, poorly educated mom? The courage to put yourself in a situation where you know that everyone else has more of everything (education, money, power, connections, etc.) for the good of your child is a truly honorable act of humility and courage. It should be honored as such.

But what if they’re not making ANY effort?

It is easy enough to see the beauty of a poor parent who overcomes obstacles to love their children. But what about the parents who just don’t seem to care?

If I’m not mistaken, every person – no matter how disfigured – has a story. It may seem like they have nothing else to offer. But everyone has a story. Listening to the stories of parents is a powerful way to avoid condescension for several reasons. It validates that they have something unique and valuable to share. No one else has their story. When parents share their stories, my sympathy skyrockets. If I was looking down on them a few minutes ago, when I hear their stories my heart breaks for them because my previous perspective was so shallow compared to the depth of their pain. Once I have heard a parent’s story, I can truly admire and celebrate – without pretense – the steps that they take toward loving and nurturing their children.

The challenge is bringing parents together to share their stories.

On teaching responsibility

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Have you ever heard the word, “sorry” said without a shred of authenticity by a young child? If so, you’re not alone.

Here’s a wise piece of counsel from the folks at Parenting is Heart Work:

To avoid having children say one thing (I’m sorry) while feeling something different in their hearts, we encourage children to say, “I was wrong for… Will you forgive me?” This statement doesn’t require an emotion but is an act of the will. A child should be required to take responsibility for an offense whether it was provoked or not.

Do you want to teach authenticity as well as reconciliation? This is a great simple step in that direction.

(This gem came from a Parenting Tip email. If you’re interested, you can subscribe here. I find it to be the most consistently helpful parenting email available.)

 

Politics and Parenting

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On Saturday, Nicholas Kristof became the next op-ed thought leader (following David Brooks’ example) to engage Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character in his article Cuddle Your Kid.

He does it well by calling on our political leaders and candidates to recognize that nation-building hinges on family-building.

Yet the cycle [of poverty] can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

It is not only the most cost effective way to address poverty; it is also the most pivotal way. If all other social institutions are restored, and the family remains in ruins, a community cannot thrive, because the family is the lynchpin of character formation, skill development, and cultural transmission.

But this isn’t just about poverty. It is about virtue. It matters no less what goes on in the homes of affluent children in early childhood. Indeed, it matters more because these children will grow to have even more cultural power to do good or harm to their neighbors. Indeed, they can be the ones who pioneer creative, merciful ways to strengthen and support shattered families.

I don’t hear anyone talking about that: neither of the presidential candidates; nor Paul Tough; nor Messrs Brooks and Kristof. Now is the time for that meaningful conversation to begin.

Zero percent: Home Life and Thriving Schools

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In Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, he recounts a conversation with Elizabeth Dozier, the principal of Christian Fenger High School in Chicago.

When we spoke . . . Dozier said her thinking about schools had been changed by her time at Fenger. “I used to always think that if a school wasn’t performing, that it was strictly because there was a bad principal, or there were bad teachers,” she explained. “But the reality is that at Fenger, we’re a neighborhood school, so we’re just a reflection of the community. And you can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community.” (p5)

That is a wise insight. If you listen to the public dialogue about the education crisis and the achievement gap, the tacit assumption underneath much of it is that the school is the exclusive locus of education (and therefore the problem to be solved).

It is not. The school is vitally important, but it is primarily a reflection of the community. And therefore any attempt to address the needs of the school must address the needs of the community.

Tough and Dozier continued their discussion of the adversities that children in the community face.

A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, [Dozier] said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. (ibid)

Zero percent. Statistically that might be inaccurate. Despite the fact that Dozier couldn’t think of a single student, surely there was at least one in her school. How many children live not only with both biological parents, but with both biological parents who are married and were married at the time he or she was born? That might just be a statistical zero at Fenger.

What’s Going On in the Community
This is the elephant in the room that no one seems to have the courage to address publicly (unless it is finger wagging). What is going on in this community, and in virtually every community of endemic poverty in the United States is the devastation of the family. Since the family is the primary locus of cultural transmission and character formation, the devastation of the family is the demolition of the community, and the culture.

Any serious, courageous attempt to combat cyclical poverty must not only acknowledge this, but ardently seek to undo it. That means having the courage to say emphatically, “This is not the way things ought to be,” and “Because this is not the way things ought to be, we are willing to walk with those dying in it and call their children to lifelong, chaste marital faithfulness.”

The Other Zero Percent
I know almost no one who has the courage and integrity to boldly make both of those statements and live them out. It is that hard. It is like committing to live with the maimed in a mine field while slowly and painstakingly marking, disarming, and removing the land mines. That is the measure of the virtue required to serve and renew a shattered community.

The Relational Approach

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A child’s early experiences affect every dimension of relationship, learning and health. In The Psych Approach New York Times columnist David Brooks highlights the correlation between adverse child experiences and long term life outcomes. Here’s the thirty thousand foot view: compared to those with no experience of childhood trauma, individuals who had suffered four traumatic childhood experiences were:

  • Seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults
  • Six times more likely to have had sex before age 15
  • Twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer
  • Four times as likely to suffer emphysema

“Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score [number of traumatic childhood experiences] of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.” In short, your early experiences wire you for life, impacting your relationships, health, and ability to learn and thrive.

David Brooks calls this “The Psych Approach” because it turns attention toward the psychological impacts of “economic, social and family breakdowns.” In terms of treatment, the psych approach is probably a good description. However, with respect to prevention and restoration, The Relational Approach would be a more apt title. To break the patterns of family, social and economic breakdown, we must acknowledge that relationships are paramount – not least the relationship of a child to his or her father.

  • Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor.
  • Infant mortality rates are 1.8 times higher for infants of unmarried mothers than for married mothers.

Brooks concludes his column: “Maybe it’s time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.” It is indeed time for to bring people together to make a push against the relational barriers to human development and flourishing communities.

Improving the Odds for Children by Asking Better Questions

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In the introduction to How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, Paul Tough frames the problem of improving the lot of poor children:

“We haven’t managed to solve these problems [how early experiences connect to adult outcomes] because we’ve been looking for solutions in the wrong places. If we want to improve the odds for children in general, and for poor children in particular, we need to approach childhood anew, to start over with some fundamental questions about how parents affect their children; how human skills develop; how character is formed.” (xxiv)

The answer those questions is that childhood – and early childhood in particular – is the apprenticeship of being human. Character is formed and skills are developed in the context of relationships – which is why the impact of parents in those early years is so profound.

There is another line of questions that needs to be pushed farther than Paul Tough ventured.

  1. Is it possible that qualities and skills that enable “success” in contemporary society may be acquired, and yet the person be bereft of real virtue?
  2. How can we cultivate in children the kind of virtue that enables them to persevere in pursuit of the good even, and especially, when pursuing the good means losing rather than winning? (Think of Martin Luther King Jr. receiving death threats and persevering until he was assassinated.)

These are the kinds of questions we must ask if we are serious not just about getting kids through high school, but about the pursuit of real virtue and flourishing communities.

“I don’t want you to end up like me.”

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Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging through Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character. It is packed full of insight into the role that families and communities play in forming children, and the role that supporting organizations can play in those families in communities. Paul’s first book, Whatever it Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America sparked my interest in apprenticeship as a compelling metaphor to describe what happens in every family and home during the earliest years of life. How Children Succeed contains many overlapping themes with The Apprenticeship of Being Human, and is worthy reading for anyone who cares about education, inequality and social flourishing.

The Breaking Point

Paul tells the story of Kewauna, who was arrested at age 15 for striking a police officer. Kewauna’s mother sat her daughter down and said to her, “I don’t want you to end up like me.” For Kewauna, that conversation was the beginning of change. It took her mother’s radical honesty about her own history to help her change course. (In one year, her GPA changed from 1.8 to 3.4.)

In the weeks and months to come, I will argue that this kind of honesty is essential to breaking cycles of poverty. Only when parents can honestly say, “I don’t want you to end up like me,” can there be an honest dialogue about responsibility and possibility. Kewauna’s mom was ruthlessly honest and humble. Her courage made possible her daughter’s transformation. That is beautiful, praiseworthy and revolutionary.

What Children Really Need is Character

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The New York Times Motherlode recently carried a post titled What Children Really Need for ‘Back to School.’ It a sentence, what children really need is character, because their character shapes how they will manage all of the challenges they face: at home, in the classroom, and in their vocations. Character is the primary factor that determines the joy or pain that they will bring to parents, teachers, colleagues and neighbors.

Children (and adults) build character by forming habits. Bad habits form bad character. Good habits form good character. Arthur Levine and Diane Dean highlight the bad habits of parents bailing out their children, overpraising them, and failing to teach them responsibility. Bad habits bear bad fruit in parents and children alike.

The beginning of a school year is a great time to ask hard questions:

  1. What are my bad habits that are forming bad character in myself and my children?
  2. What are the habits that we need to focus on and form in the next week, month, and year?
  3. What are the virtues that I most want to form in my children? What family routines and habit can help them to form those virtues?