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The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

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Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#141

Post by bunderbunder »

rayiner wrote: post #115
bunderbunder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "parenting science" is like "nutritional science." It's almost entirely bullshit, and little to no progress has been made in the field ever. Your analogy is a good one, but it goes a layer deeper than I think you realize. "Parenting science" is like "nutritional science" in that, based on what you can get out of the popular sources, it is almost entirely bullshit. It's also similar in that the science has continued…

I disagree with that characterization, for the reasons stated here: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/10760622/nutrition-science-com... . In my view, if you can't develop mathematical models and test them against properly conducted experiments, then your field is not a "science." Nutrition is not a science, neither is parenting, or anything else that relies primarily on observational studies and lacks a theoretical model…

It seems like we part ways at the last point in that article, or at least, what you're saying here would seem to be at odds with it.

I'm inclined to agree with it, myself. It's true that these are messy problem domains, and that does make it harder to conduct and draw firm conclusions from scientific research. That inhibits progress, but it doesn't render the whole enterprise a lost cause.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#142

Post by recursive »

bkmartin wrote: post #132
rayiner wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on kid #2, and my takeaway is this: "parenting science" is like "nutritional science." It's almost entirely bullshit, and little to no progress has been made in the field ever. There is no use paying attention to it, other than doing/not doing the obvious things. (Don't eat too many calories; don't emotionally destroy your kids.) Your kids will turn out how they are going to turn out. Instinctively, you'l…

This is wholly and categorically untrue. Parenting today is much different than it was 100 years ago. The way we approach children, discipline children, and help them grow into their best selves has changed a lot. And it is based on lots of research. It is also based on all of the work that therapists do with adults after their parents have messed them up so bad with their horrible parenting. Every child will be thei…

The argument is not that parenting has stayed the same. It's that there's no measurable improvement in results from all the changes. So the argument goes, the changes aren't worth much, so don't worry about it.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#143

Post by myelin »

marcell wrote: post #124
btilly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn this around. As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

> there is on average no academic benefit What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you learn integration if you don’t do some practice problems?

+1. It's been a couple of decades since high school, but I remember making a genuine effort at homework being one of the critical differences between success and failure. I find it hard to believe that there's enough time for all the practice during class.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#144

Post by notduncansmith »

christofosho wrote: post #11

As a teacher of ages 4 up until 14, I think parents and people in general need to be concious toward what constitutes "over" parenting. Too often we as teachers see students that are behaving poorly, or having more trouble in school, because they do not have enough help or consistency at home. Parents reading articles like this might take them too literally and step too far from their child's life. Parenting should b…

It’s because behavior is an emergent property of a dynamical system, and that means that if you want a particular behavior, you have to know when to provide input and when to let the system process.

If you want a plant to bear fruit, you have to nurture it for a while, and you will never be able to browbeat it into producing fruit before it has developed the facilities for doing so.

Part of effective parenting is resolving the dependency tree for healthy attitude/behavior in your child.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#145

Post by milesvp »

marcell wrote: post #124
btilly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn this around. As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

> there is on average no academic benefit What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you learn integration if you don’t do some practice problems?

The recent studies that talk about this are slightly more nuanced. But much of it comes down to, what I suspect to be, some combination of the 60hr per week fallacy (that someone working 60hrs/wk creates more value than someone who limits their work to 40hrs/wk), the play trade off, the physical trade off, and the sleep trade off.

The brain needs lots of downtime to properly learn new skills, and if you're trading downtime for studying, at some point you're going to get negative returns on investment. This seems to happen somewhere between 40 and 50hrs/wk for cognitive tasks.

There's also a growing body of evidence that play, hard as it may be to define, really has an enormous impact on learning, as well as mental health. One of my favorite anecdotes is by Richard Feynman who was completely burned out when one day he, for the fun of it, tried to calculate the wobble of a plate being tossed in the air, and this changed his attitude with long lasting effects on his work. http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.... (search for "throws a plate in the air", though the whole book is a fun read)

I'm convinced, though I've not seen much research on the topic, that physical movement is essential to learning. Something related to stimulating the entire nervous system, or possibly just related to increasing non-circulator fluid exchange in the brain. Hell, it may just be a chance for certain areas of the brain to have downtime, while the centers related to muscle control take their turn. But if you're making this trade off, it'll start to have negative returns.

And then there's sleep. You're doing yourself a great disservice if you switch an hour of sleep for an hour of studying, your long term retention will go to shit, and the odds of you remembering some fact 3 months from now will greatly diminish, which mostly defeats the purpose. This may be the biggest problem with giving homework to highschoolers, who tend to have the habit of both procrastination and staying up late.

So, yes, I can see homework having almost no academic benefit when a student is in class all day. I can already see issues with my daughter in Kindergarten. There's so much pressure to teach too much content, that her school has made huge tradeoffs around play and exercise during the school day. I certainly don't want them forcing even more work on her, especially as she's getting old enough to start to have chores and other responsibilities that have nothing to do with school.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#146

Post by gowld »

ktsmith wrote: post #86
btilly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn this around. As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

Teachers often have no say in wether homework is assigned. The district in which my wife teaches and my son attends had a mandatory homework policy put in place by the school board. In addition to mandating that homework be assigned Monday through Thursday they specify that it should contain at least 10 minutes of reading per grade level (10 for k, 20 for 1st, 30 for 2nd, etc) as well as additional materials for othe…

"reading" is technically homework but not the kind of homework that education researchers are opposed to. The bad kind of homework is loaded down worksheets and projects that are high-stakes (perform or fail) and prone to cheating. Telling students to read has none of these problems, it's purely for the student's benefit and has no penalty attacked.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#147

Post by gowld »

bunderbunder wrote: post #112
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it should contain at least 10 minutes of reading per grade level Dear god, by the time a kid is in grade 5 or 6 they've lost an hour a night to reading alone. In my experience homework was rarely of use - the in class practice was enough, and home time was for the fun you didn't have while in school.

By the time they're in high school, they'll be doing more reading per night than I was doing while working on my master's. After devoting so much time to education theater, do the kids even have any energy leftover to put into actual learning?

When did reading become "education theater" ?

I hope your master wasn't in statistics, because you made a poor extrapolation from data.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#148

Post by gowld »

sli wrote: post #121
fatnoah wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the parent of a smart 10 year old with ADHD, homework has actually been invaluable. We use the larger assignments to help him learn to manage his time and attention level. For example, we take a 5 minute scooter break after 20 minutes of work. For very large assignments, we also break things up into manageable chunks. The homework is also very useful to have a chance to review topics and ensure understanding of th…

I wouldn't say they're ancillary, most of what you said is the claimed benefit of homework (regardless of the correctness of that claim). I'd say you're mostly using the homework as a guide for tutoring, which isn't something that actually requires homework to be assigned by the school if you're willing to be proactive.

Some parents need a little nudge to support their children's education beyond "school is daycare while I work".

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#149

Post by gowld »

pixl97 wrote: post #131
ddebernardy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no homework fan either, but in teachers' defense, when they don't assign much or any homework, the unfortunate outcome is that they get flamed by some parents (not all) for not giving more of it.

Why dont these parents realise they can assign as much 'homework' to their own kids as they want?

Same reason the salesperson at the car dealership (or th hiring manager at your new job) has to "talk to my manager" about your offer. Deferring to a synthetic external authority is a powerful negotiating technique.

Re: The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

#150

Post by gowld »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #85
btilly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn this around. As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

As a semi-academic, practice supervision sounds like a horrible use of limited teacher/classroom time. But I guess that is true at the high end (in universities and higher performing kids) but not at the lower end where professional practice supervision is much more necessary.

University-education researches also recommend supervised practice. When I got a job as a TA in college, I had the same attitude you did, and the TA lead / education researcher scolded me about it.
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