Stop Pushing Your Kids To Be…

It seems, in today's society, we can't let our kids mature at their own pace. We must push them to excel, to achieve, to learn more and learn it more quickly. As the mother of a child who has done everything early, I sometimes find it difficult to strike a balance between letting him run ahead and teaching him to take his time.

As I try to balance letting my son explore and learn at his (fast) pace and sheltering him from information he's not yet mature enough to process, I'm being asked daily by other moms “how did you get him to…” I didn't. He did it all on his own. What's really important isn't that I didn't. It's that I wouldn't.

Popsugar recently covered this new phenomenon in an article about why we really ought to stop pushing our kids to be “gifted” and just let them be kids.

Here's what the article had to say:

What mom doesn't want her kid to be bright and ahead of the game, especially in our digital world? However, we've become a bit too obsessed with pushing our kids as well as “discovering” if our kids are gifted or not.

It's not enough to be smart. It's not enough to just do the average load of work. Parents today want their kids to be nothing less than brilliant.  It's so imperative to us that our kids be brilliant that we have forgotten the many other wonderful things kids and people bring to the table, besides being brilliant, and especially when they're not “gifted.”

I mean, how many people and children can be truly gifted in this world, truly “genius” level IQ? Not many.

Intelligences come in all different forms. One child may build well with her hands and not know a single letter, and the other child may know every letter yet not have a clue how to use scissors. Each child has his or her own intelligence levels and abilities, and this is what makes life wonderful. That one child will build bridges or fix cars, and perhaps the other will be a teacher or lawyer. Each child, each person, is needed in our society, yet as mothers and parents, we often push until we get that A, that gold star, that academic perfection.

Sometimes, the pushing is too much. I have seen parents shove and shove their kids in desperation for their standardized test scores to go up, and in response, the kids retreat and retreat further away.

I say, enough already. Enough shoving your kids and pushing your kids to be little flash card readers, factoid spillers, and standardized test monkeys.

Indeed, there are many gifted children, and the parents of these kids have their own unique challenges in attending to the intellectual and social needs of their kiddos. There is no clear-cut category into which any child will fall. The point is that every child is unique and comes with his or her own challenges.

It's problematic, though, in that we all obsess over this assumption of high knowledge when it comes to our kids.

While my son is bright enough to know that dinosaur with the long neck isn't called a “long neck dino,” at two he doesn't yet know the difference between a Diplodocus and a Brachiosaurus. I'm sure that somewhere out there, there's a two year old that does know the differences. As Popsugar suggests, we sould stop pushing our kids to be “the best” at everything and recognize their own unique strengths. We need to learn to accept that they are good enough, way better than good enough. After all, what mom doesn't think her kid is totally awesome? When did we start needing to qualify that amazing little creature by labeling him “gifted”?

To find out what the writers at Popsugar suggest we do to combat the push towards “gifted,” read the entire article about why it's time to stop pushing our kids.