Parents, how many of you are confident that you know how to bring up your children in exactly the right way? This is a question asked by Helen Pearson, author of The Life Project at a Ted Talk in Vancouver in 2017. Over the last 70 years, scientists in Britain studied 70,000 people from birth onwards. These studies are called The British Birth Cohorts. You can watch this Ted Talk here if you’re interested:
I’m not sure about you, but I can honestly say that raising children is complicated. As parents, we do our best to instill the values we want to see in our children, but what we know is that this doesn’t always translate into our children making great decisions. Helen Pearson refers to the British Birth Cohorts studies and identifies some simple things parents can do:
- Talk and listen to your children. Put time aside for this. Build it into a bedtime routine. Perhaps this is 15 minutes before they go to bed when you can just listen and talk to your child.
- Respond warmly to your children. Sometimes in our busy lives, we brush our children off, making them think that what we are doing is more important than them. Sometimes what we are doing is important, but we need to provide a warm reception or response to our children so that they know we are not putting them behind everything else on our plate.
- Teach them about letters and numbers. Take time before children are the age of 5 to teach your children about letters and numbers. This does not have to be complicated. We need to help our children become familiar with these symbols through counting, singing, drawing, building, and playing.
- Take them out of the house for visits or trips. These trips can be to the library, riding a bus, visiting an art gallery, going to a community centre, or walking on the beach to look for sea critters.
- Read to your children. There appears to be a very significant link between children who read books and those who do well in school. Read as much as possible and eventually, allow your children to read to you.
- Have a bedtime routine. Children raised in homes with consistent bedtime routines in which they go to bed at the same time each night exhibit lower behaviour issues than those who have no bedtime routine.
- Show ambition for your children’s future and their education. Let them know that they are capable, that you believe their future is filled with opportunity, and that you value their education. Parents who tell their children that they didn’t like school either or that they didn’t do well in math or that they couldn’t read well, are not showing their children that their future is filled with opportunities and that getting an education is a key part of those opportunities.
So, why does this matter so much? Well, Helen alludes to something else in these studies that seems to play a signifant role in the financial, emotional, and physical well-being of adults. She says that children born into poverty or disadvantaged homes are more likely to end up in lower paying jobs, have worse health, and die earlier than those children born in more wealthy homes. However, she also indicates that good parenting can offset the impact of being raised in disadvantaged homes by 50%, and this is why not all children raised in poor homes end up in low paying jobs or have a lower amount of education. Good parenting reduces the educational gap in poor families by 50%.
As an educator, I can attest to much of what Helen is saying. I have seen children raised in financially disadvantaged homes, but they have been raised by parents who value their children’s education and spend quality time with them. They show interest in their lives, show their children that they are loved, and help their children learn. In fact, this was the story for much of my upbringing and that of my parents, who immigrated to Canada at a young age. My parents modeled a strong work ethic, they expected me to do well in school and reiterated many times the value of an education. They never questioned the integrity of the learning I was getting in school and if my teachers told them that I wasn’t doing my homework, they sat down with me at night until I got it done. They showed me love, attended my sporting events, came to my parent-teacher interviews, took me camping, and ensured that we sat at the dinner table each night as a family so that we could share stories about our day. I know they stressed about finances and the extra hours of work my dad would endure to pay the bills, but they did not make their stress mine. What I understood from them was that an education would open the door for me to have a better paying job, a more fulfilling job, a greater understanding of the world, and a better future for me and my family.
So, from one parent to another, I simply ask for us to consider a few questions with respect to our children:
- How might we take the time to show our children how much they matter?
- How might we let our children know how important their education is for their future, not just from the standpoint of employment, but from the perspective of being a part of a well educated society?
- How might we deliver positive messages to our children about reading, writing, and mathematics?
- How might we help our children deal with stress, anxiety, and challenges without trying to fix for them the situations precipitating those feelings?
- How might we ensure that the values we want to instill in our children are observed by our children in the we ways we conduct ourselves?
Feel free to add your questions in the comment section!
The Pulse 