Invictus Academy

Does Early Childhood Education Really Matter

Patsy Lim — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 12:52:57 +0000

“Does early childhood education REALLY matter? And do I as a parent have to get involved in it?”

As an early childhood educator, I get asked that a lot. This is even more so when both parents are working at full-time jobs. When we come home, we’re tired and the last thing we want to do is to TEACH our children. And I understand when parents say, “After all, that’s what we pay teachers for… Leave teaching to the teachers!”

However, as parents, can we afford to do that? If we think about it, how old are children by the time they go to school? 7 years old? 6 years old? 5 years old? What about the years before that? Who is the teacher before school starts? Unfortunately, the short answer is YOU!

Did you know that ….

The brain is the only organ that is not fully formed at birth.
During the first three years, trillions of connections between brain cells are being made. These years are a time when the brain develops and much of its ‘wiring’ is laid down.
A child’s relationships and experiences during the early years greatly influence how their brain grows.
The overall development of children in their early years has a direct impact on the adults they will become.
The first five years of a child’s life shapes their skills, abilities and values.
They also shape their health and physical development, happiness and learning achievement throughout childhood, the teenage years and ultimately adulthood.
Children are born ready to learn and interested in the world around them.
It is critical that we provide real opportunities for children to learn, develop and have fun during those years.
Incredible leaps in skills, knowledge and understanding happen in the first eight years of life.

Think of all the above as you being the potter, and your child’s brain being the clay. You have the opportunity to shape this tiny being – your child! As a parent, you are the single most important influence in your child’s life – especially in the early years.

One of the most important things children learn in the early years is about themselves. An important part of that self-concept is the picture they have of themselves as learners. For children, their self-esteem comes from knowing that they are loved by people who value them, not just for their achievements, but for themselves. Saying, “I love you because you’re you” not “I love you because you can ….” helps them to feel good about themselves. Having good self-esteem help children try new things and gives them a firm base for their learning and development.

In the eyes of the child, we parents are superheroes – at least before they reach their teenage years. Then they don’t want to know us. (“Please drop me a block away” type of thing – but that’s another article.)

Grab these short years that you have by role-modelling for them. YOU can show your child that it is okay to be curious, explore, ask questions, tackle problems, try to figure things out, experiment, try something and fail sometimes. I’ve always maintained that there are lessons to be learnt for success and failures. Success is a short-term experience. With failure, if we tackle this right, our children will learn to pick themselves up and try again. YOU can model for your child that being a good learner means having a go, seeing yourself as capable and taking reasonable risks. We don’t want children who refuse to try because they’re afraid of failure but neither do we want our children to chase success at ANY cost.

What do children need to their support learning in the early years? The list is long and among them are:

adults who help them to stay safe and healthy
good learning materials
and experiences to learn from, and time to get involved with them.

As parents, we can provide all of the above. However, we will only do so if we believe that early childhood education REALLY matters.

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14 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School

Patsy Lim — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 10:57:14 +0000

Growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, life was relatively simple then. It was still OK to hitchhike a ride from strangers, we didn’t have mobile phones or X-Box games. Colour TV didn’t exist for much of my very early childhood and we learned to create and keep ourselves entertained. We understood respect for elders, and that if we wanted to be successful, we had to work hard and study to have good results.

Today’s kids now have the very latest iPhone, iPad, and Laptops. As a parent, try telling your child that their iPhone is not an essential “accessory” they must have and watch the melt-down happen in front of your eyes.

So how have we managed to breed this new generation of kids with their sense of entitlement … As parents, we really have no one else to blame but ourselves. We raised our kids. Sometimes we abrogate our responsibilities because we’re too busy trying to make enough money to pay for our children’s “essentials”. We do our best to provide our children with all the things we never had and in the process, we sometimes end up with ungrateful children who take things for granted.

Charles Sykes, the author of the 1996 book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write or Add and 2007 book 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real World Antidotes to Feel Good Education provided for high school and college graduates a list of things they did not learn in school. In his book, he talks about how the feel good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and set them up for failure in the real world. Below is just 14 out of 50 Rules:

Below is just 14 out of 50 Rules:

Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won’t care about our self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not our parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to your talk about how cool you are. So, before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. (And before you roll your eyes to this suggestion, just remember that one of the biggest “nerds” is now one of the richest man on this planet … Bill Gates, a “nerd” who is now making a difference in the lives of so many people.)
Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now.

Perhaps we should have raised our kids not to have more than we had, but to be better than we were. That’s not about having the latest high tech iPhone or flying Business Class on holidays. It’s about building character and teaching them the skills to be great leaders. It’s about understanding that someone with a different skin color who speaks a different language is not a lesser person than you … They are just different. It’s about developing their EQ (emotional intelligence) – the #1 predictor of professional success and personal excellence. EQ is critical to their success.

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Parenting Styles

Patsy Lim — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 10:34:46 +0000

Children need adults (parents) who would take the time to get involved with them to support their learning in the early years. However, there’s getting involved and there’s getting involved!

There are many parenting styles. Diane Baumrind, one of the most well-known researchers on parenting styles, categorises 3 distinctive styles:

Authoritarian or Disciplinarian, which is demanding and rigid – the “do this because I say so” parent
Permissive or Indulgent, which is not strict at all – the permissive parent does not enforce many of rules or punishments and the term “spoiled” often comes to mind when describing children of permissive parents.
Authoritative, which is characterised by a combination of expectations and warmth – the authoritative parents expect their children to behave but are also loving and responsive.

There is also another style of parenting commonly known as helicopter parenting. According to Dictionary.com, helicopter parenting is a style of child-rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child’s independence by being too involved in the child’s life. The term “helicopter parent” was first used in Dr Haim Ginott’s 1969 book Between Parent & Teenagers by teens who said their parents would hover over them like a helicopter.

The term “helicopter parent” is often applied to parents of high school or college-aged students who are capable of doing things for themselves – for example, speaking to a teacher about poor grades, arranging transport, etc.) On a personal level, I knew one young man who made it all the way through university on the back of his mother’s assignments! He was a smart lad – so smart that when his mother nagged him about his assignments, he let her do them for him! She definitely took too much responsibility for her son’s success and failures!

Ann Dunnewold, Ph. D., a licensed psychologist and author calls it “overparenting.” In her article in the First 3 Years, she said that parents need to give their children more space to play and slack off. While Amy Chua’s prescription in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom which uses strict Confucianist child-rearing techniques might get your children into Harvard, Ann Dunnewold says that it could also inflict crippling emotional and social wounds.

With so many parenting styles being bounced around, what do parents do? We want to get involved with our children, but we don’t want to be a helicopter or tiger parent. Neither do we want to be so hands-off and permissive that our children have no boundaries. On the one hand, we want to shelter our children but we also want to prepare them for the road ahead. We know we can’t do that unless we allow them to take some risks.

When they’re young, some of the risks we allow our children to take seem okay. For example, learning to walk, learning to ride a bike, playing in the playground are all essential parts of growing up.

On the other hand, as they grow up, risks, like driving the car, dating and spending the night at a friend’s house, are more frightening to parents.

Few of us fit into one single parenting style. We usually use a combination of styles. No matter which parenting style we use, we should be aware that from birth, modelling is an extremely powerful way for children to learn. As babies, they do this through their facial expressions, babbling and copying the words grown-ups use, and through copying gestures and body movements. As they grow older, mannerisms and attitudes that they’ve picked up from you begin to show.

As parents, we need to adjust our roles as our children grow up. It’s okay to be a helicopter parent when they’re babies but not so when they’ve moved into university!

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