‘Kindergarten is too late’

Press, 24 February 1984, Page 15

‘Kindergarten is too late’

From

TOM McNAMEE,

“Chicago Sun-Times”

"Time" magazine once dubbed the “suicide belt" — already has a teen-age suicide rate triple the national average, estimates Dr Mary Giffin, medical director at the North Shore Mental Health Association. She fears many North Shore parents are imposing on toddlers the same destructive pressures and high expectations they once reserved for school-age children. "It's marvellous to offer children opportunities.” she says, "but clues have to come from the children. Push them at something they can t do and it lowers their sense of selfesteem." To which Dr Ann Jernberg. clinical director of Theraplay. adds a question: "Whose need is being met? It may make the parents feel good to have a child they can showoff, b>i‘ is it best for the child""

Hours after John Farnsworth was born, his mother began flipping the nursery lights off on on. off and on.

® That would strengthen his eye muscles.

Days later, she held him gently in her arms and twirled in circles.' ® That would improve his balance.

When he was 21 months old. she flashed word cards — “Mommy" and “Daddy" — before his eyes.'

® That would teach him to read. And more important, Ellen Farnsworth says, it will introduce her son to the notion that learning is “fun.”

Mrs Farnsworth and her husband, Roger, are among a rapidlygrowing cadre of young couple’s whose approach to parenthood is being guided by the motto "Kindergarten is too late." Bolstered by studies that suggest

the human brain is a isponge for knowledge in infancy. these achievement-oriented parents are introducing reading and mathematic skills to babies as young as six months. For them, the road to university begins at birth. -Accelerated learning approaches are gaining disciples across the United States, but perhaps nowhere is the phenomenon more in evidence than on Chicago’s affluent North Shore, where a national chain of private schools for infants and toddlers began in 1979. And. perhaps, nowhere are its critics more vocal.

"The danger is that children will come to think ’I have to perform

successfully in order to be loved’." says Chuck West, a North Shore parent, and director to the Theraplay Institute, a counselling centre. "A child has to be loved because he is. not because of what he is." He warns that parents who emphasise a baby's intellectual rather than psychological growth will come to find their child suffers ■‘any number of emotional disorders." The child will be overly withdrawn or aggressive, will have no friends, will have tantrums, and will stutter. But the "ultimate protest, Mr West adds will be teep-age suicide. T*ie North Shore — a region