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Home Education Magazine
July-August 1997 - Columns
Taking Charge - Larry and Susan Kaseman
Homeschoolers and the "I Am Your Child" Campaign
Increasing attention is being focused on children's growth and learning during their first three years. Among the specific developments:
* A national "I Am Your Child" campaign has begun and has a toll free number (1-888-447-3400) and a web site (www.iamyourchild.org).
* A White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning was held on April 17, 1997.
* Many articles in the mainstream media have focused on the White House Conference, research on the development of the brains of very young children, and other aspects of early childhood learning.
* On April 28, 1997, ABC broadcast a program titled "I Am Your Child."
As homeschoolers we are affected by these developments, simply because we are parents. In addition, developments such as these result in children being judged and labeled before they reach school age, undermining parents' confidence in their ability to homeschool and, in some states, creating legal obstacles as well. Even parents who begin homeschooling as soon as their children reach school age cannot escape screenings and institutionalized educational programs that now begin at birth.
This column will consider the "I Am Your Child" campaign and other emphasis being placed on early childhood learning, ways parents can be supported that are not included in the campaign, and ways we can respond to minimize the risks of the campaign.
Background
In recent years, increasing attention has been focused on children's early development. Some of this attention is based on sincere concern for children and recognition of the importance of the first three years of life. There are also economic incentives, however, since this is the age when professionals and institutions are currently least involved with children and therefore have the most to gain in terms of more clients, more jobs, and more prestige.
New technologies such as brain scans are being used to study the development of young children's brains. The resulting research is being used as the foundation for a campaign called "I Am Your Child." As promoters explain: I Am Your Child is a new national public awareness and engagement campaign to make early childhood development a top priority for our nation. Breakthrough brain research has revealed that the first three years of a child's life are more important for emotional and intellectual growth than we had ever thought. I Am Your Child is an unprecedented coalition of entertainment leaders, children's organizations, elected officials, health professionals, foundations and corporations who have joined together to help unite the work being done across the country to promote family and community involvement in young children's healthy development. . . .
The goals of the Campaign are:
* Raise public awareness and promote citizen engagement regarding the importance of the first three years of life.
* Provide families with young children the information, resources and services they need.
* Unite and expand the work being done on the national, state and local levels to improve services for young children and their families.
* Increase the public will to make quality resources and services more available to families with young children. (Statement from I Am Your Child campaign)
This description contains important red flags. The list of institutions involved includes the familiar combination of government, health care providers, and corporations. "Unite and expand the work being done" is another example of collaboration. Increased services lead to increased involvement in families' lives.
Positive Aspects of "I Am Your Child"
At first glance, the emphasis on early childhood learning may seem positive. We are being told that children's first three years are very important. Of course, we've known that for a long time and have acted in ways that have made our children's first years as good as possible. But still, it's good to have others finally recognize it. Concern is being expressed for young children along with statements that our society should do more to improve young children's opportunities to grow and learn.
In addition, a few pieces of the information available from "I Am Your Child" are, frankly, surprisingly sensible. For example, it encourages parents to talk, sing, and read to their young children and says that parents know their children best. (Unfortunately, much of the information being presented on early childhood is misleading, such as Newsweek's Special Edition "Your Child," Spring/Summer, 1997.)
Negative Aspects of "I Am Your Child"
There are three basic difficulties. First, the information focuses on scientific research on brain development and on specific things parents can do to help their children grow and develop. It fails to state clearly how important it is for parents to be with their children and overlooks the significant obstacles that prevent parents and children from being together.
Second, the campaign is geared to giving parents information so they will behave differently, but it does not include ways of giving parents what they need most, including opportunities to spend more time with their children.
Third, the emphasis on early childhood learning opens the door for increasing involvement in families by the government and other large institutions. "I Am Your Child" is not just providing information; it is a campaign.
Let's consider each of these difficulties in turn.
First, the information focuses on scientific research on brain development and on specific things parents can do to help their children grow and develop. It fails to state clearly how important it is for parents to be with their children and overlooks the significant obstacles that prevent parents and children from being together.
The information on scientific research on brain development tends to be simplistic and reductionistic, implying that a major problem facing young children today is that their parents do not provide them with the right kind of stimulation so their brains can develop properly. Framing the issue in this way and implying parents are to blame is misleading and tends to undermine parents' confidence, encouraging them to have their children screened by experts and then placed in educational programs at very young ages.
A basic problem is that our society does not give parents the support they need to spend the time and energy with their children that children need to grow up healthy and capable. Children's needs include a loving, supportive environment; security; space in which to grow; respect; and a chance to explore the world. They do not need to have their sensory input monitored and distributed in carefully measured doses at just the right time. Parenting is much more a matter of love, commitment, common sense, and listening to our children than it is a matter of understanding and following scientific findings. Unfortunately, emphasizing scientific findings often interferes with parents' ability to do the more important parts of parenting.
Much information is being presented about ways parents can interact with their children and why this is important. It is clear that the suggestions require either parents or exceptional caregivers with responsibility for only a few children. However, there are few, if any, statements about the importance of parents spending substantial amounts of time with their children. Instead, information is presented on how to find good day care and related topics. The assumption seems to be that parents will interact with their children in the suggested ways during the "quality time" they spend together during evenings and on weekends. The limitations of interacting positively with young children primarily when both parents and children are tired and pressed for time are not acknowledged.
The lack of information about the importance of parents spending substantial time with their children is particularly unfortunate because many parents would no doubt be willing to work fewer hours outside the home so they could spend more time with their children if they understood the importance of this. Both parents and children would benefit enormously from this time together. Parents need such information to counter the messages we now receive. Look at the many ways in which we are being told that it is more important for us to work outside our homes for money than to stay home to spend time with our children. Look at the many messages we get that our children need us to earn lots of money so they can have stylish clothes, specially designed toys, spacious homes, elaborate vacations, expensive educations, perhaps college degrees; that these things are more important than spending time with our children, giving them the love, support, and space they need to grow and learn.
With few exceptions, our society refuses to support parents who are trying to raise their children themselves and instead undermines their attempts to do so. Look at the responses we have received to our decision to homeschool. Society could have said, "Wow! Here are parents who are willing to make major sacrifices of their own time, energy, and money to take on the responsibilities of educating their own children, despite the fact that free public schools are available and most people think children should attend them. These parents are raising healthy and capable children and saving taxpayers money in the process. Let's give them encouragement and moral support." But instead we have been beset with the all too familiar questions, doubts, legal and legislative battles, and sometimes outright harassment.
Also, in recent years and decades, families have been undermined by the weakening of extended families and local communities, by the decrease in elders who can guide us based on their own experience and the wisdom that was passed down to them.
Second, the "I Am Your Child" campaign is geared to giving parents information so they will behave differently, but it does not include ways of giving parents what they need most, including opportunities to spend more time with their children. Since the information does not explain the importance of parents being with their children, it is not surprising that its practical proposals are not directed toward making it easier for parents and children to be together. Instead, the campaign increases families' reliance on experts and institutions, even though the kind of attention and support that the campaign says children really need can seldom if ever be provided by institutions.
The intent and direction of the "I Am Your Child" campaign were shown on a television program of the same name aired on ABC on April 28, 1997. Using an infotainment approach that presented a confusing combination of information and humor, highly complex concepts about children's growth and development were made to seem simple and compelling. No mention was made of other perspectives or critiques of what was being presented. This kind of entertainment with a highly honed set of messages is usually called propaganda, not education. The program contained the elements of sophisticated propaganda: well known stars; scientists; the highest government leaders; people suffering; identification of uninformed parents as the enemy; and clear messages of what needs to be done and what people must feel, think, and believe if we are to be safe and secure.
Taking children out of their homes at increasingly young ages and placing them in day care or preschools is not the ideal situation for the children, even when it is a necessity for their parents. Young children do best in a familiar, supportive home environment with one-to-one relationships with people they know well who love and care about them. As more children are spending less times in their homes and more time, at younger ages, in day care and preschool, these institutions are playing a larger role in raising children and are taking over the traditional role of the family.
Relying on professionals and experts who tell parents what to do is also not a good solution to the problems facing families. (This is not to say that parents automatically know what to do and do not need assistance and wisdom from others; in fact, they do help and support. But see below for much better ways that parents can get it.) Among the reasons that it does not work to rely on experts:
* Relying on experts undermines parents' common sense, intuition, experience, and abilities. Instead of developing and drawing on their own strength, parents who rely on experts have to put a lot of time and energy into figuring out what someone else thinks and then decide how they are going to carry out the instructions which may even be at odds with the parents' common sense, experience, and/or understanding of their own unique children.
* Experts are often wrong, sometimes because they have sold their souls to make a profit. The history of theories of child development and child rearing is littered with documents that have since been shown to be very unhelpful, and some of the advice being given today, such as locking babies and young children in their rooms when they have trouble sleeping, is really child abuse.
* Expert advice tends to deny the uniqueness of each individual. Experienced parents have found over and over that the information they really need comes from watching, listening to, and interacting with their own children. Our children give us incredible insights we would not get from professionals and experts.
Third, the emphasis on early childhood learning opens the door for increasing involvement in families by the government and other large institutions. "I Am Your Child" is not just providing information. It identifies itself as a campaign. Campaigns by definition include ways of measuring problems and results to determine whether they are succeeding in reaching their objectives. "I Am Your Child" will inevitably include more observation and screening of young children and their families and more assessments of how well parents are doing at raising young children. This will mean more intrusion into the family and greater regulation, especially since government, health professionals, and corporations are strongly involved in the campaign, as explained by the information from the campaign quoted at the beginning of this column. Strong support from the Clinton administration can clearly be seen in the White House's sponsorship of a conference on early childhood development and in Bill and Hilary Clinton's prominent appearance on the "I Am Your Child" television program on April 28, 1997.
Increasing involvement in the family is especially likely because this is the age where at present officials and institutions are least involved. For example, there is less pressure for children younger than three to attend school, and the most widespread screening at present is preschool screening, usually of children ages 4 and 5. Therefore, the first three years of children's lives present an opportunity for schools and child development professionals to increase their programs, jobs, income, and prestige.
The federally funded Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) includes a zero to three program, so the infrastructure of public and private agencies and companies that collaborate to find and treat children at risk is already in place in all 50 states. "I Am Your Child" would fuel those efforts and give the program much greater visibility and a fresh set of "scientific" tools to use in identifying and diagnosing children at risk.
Increasing involvement of institutions in children's lives from birth to three is especially serious because at present these years are an area where there may still be some hope for children since they are the ages that are least controlled by strangers and institutions. It seems unlikely that research will ever be done to show how children are destroyed by experts and institutions, especially since the current establishment would be very unlikely to support or fund such research. Therefore, people will continue to assume that the problem lies with the age where experts have the least involvement.
It may also be helpful to consider other examples of the application of scientific research to social situations. Two examples are the ways in which intelligence testing has led to books like The Bell Curve and the connection between genetic research and eugenics. Both show how "scientific" findings can be turned into reductionistic, highly flawed ways of explaining how people think and act, ways that are at the same time appealing to many because they provide a simple way to deal with people. We should ask what similarities and differences there are between these examples and the way brain research is being used and whether there are safeguards to ensure that brain research is not misused in a similar way.
Ways to Encourage Better Parenting
Of course, children would benefit from better parenting, and who among us improve. Positive approaches that are likely to help parents but do not have a significant place in the "I Am Your Child" campaigninclude the following:
* Encouraging mothers to breastfeed would greatly strengthen families and improve parenting. (A very small, weak section in the current information from "I Am Your Child" pays lip service to breastfeeding, but it is neither strongly encouraged nor effectively incorporated into other parts of the information.) It is commonly understood that breast milk is the best food for babies and that breastfeeding contributes to a baby's physical health. Often overlooked are the ways nursing helps mothers bond with their babies, talk and listen to them, respect them as individuals, meet their needs; and stay with them. Nursing also gives babies a good way to relax and unwind if they are over stimulated. When mother-child bonds are strengthened through nursing, fathers and other family members benefit as well.
* Encouraging parents to spend lots of time with their children and making it easier for parents to do so would greatly improve parenting. It is much easier for parents and children to get to know each other and develop strong and healthy relationships if they have relaxed time together rather than highly pressured schedules. Time together could be encouraged by a shift in our society's general attitude toward children and parenting, so that parenting is recognized as the very important activity that it is instead of boring work that capable people of both genders pass off onto someone else so they can get on with the really important work of the world. Time together could also be encouraged by offering both mothers and fathers more flexible work schedules, including providing medical insurance and other benefits to part-time employees. There could even be public service announcements that promote the value and importance of time together as a family to counter and provide an alternative to the many messages that imply that what children really need is expensive tennis shoes, glitzy toys, and the right kind of band-aids.
* Stronger local communities that offer a variety of opportunities for families to interact with other people would improve parenting by taking some of the pressure off parents and making it easier for them to observe, learn from, and talk with other parents, young people, and older people. It is appalling how little community space is available at a reasonable cost for groups that might want to get together to have potluck suppers, play informal sports, do crafts or work projects, play music, or simply talk while young children play nearby. Many groups have tried to form only to be stifled or squelched by the lack of meeting places.
* Increasing the number of informal networks and parenting groups would improve parenting. Such groups would allow parents to share their concerns and frustrations, to learn from each other's experiences and ideas, and to develop their own solutions. This approach encourages people to find and create solutions in ways that strengthen individuals, families, and communities, in marked contrast to the parenting classes and required parent training that increase parents' dependence on experts.
* Reducing parents' worries about money, shelter, food, and other basic necessities would certainly contribute to better parenting. To be sure, this would not be easy to accomplish, but economic realities need to be acknowledged as part of the problems families are facing and as something that cannot be solved by child development experts and early schooling.
* Books that help parents develop their confidence and abilities and learn to listen to their children and deal with them as unique individuals are helpful to parents and are very different from those that insist that parents follow an expert's advice.
What We Can Do
* We can recognize the importance of the example we are setting. The children and parents of America need us homeschoolers more now than they ever have before. They have needed us in the past to confirm what they knew intuitively but needed evidence to support: that parents can raise and educate their own children outside of educational institutions. Homeschooling affects all families, even those who would not dream of homeschooling themselves, because it makes a strong statement about what families can do and reminds people that conventional schools are not the only (or even necessarily the best) places for children to learn and grow.
Now, in light of the "I Am Your Child" campaign, families need us homeschoolers to help them try to hold their ground against the pressures that will inevitably arise as a result of this campaign, to help them maintain their confidence, and to remind them what ordinary parents can do. They also need us as examples of people from diverse backgrounds who have united and worked to regain and maintain rights and responsibilities despite pressures from large institutions.
* A campaign like "I Am Your Child" gives us both the opportunity and the incentive to think more deeply than we may have before about why parenting is important to us and why we are troubled by the idea that experts might further undermine our role as parents.
* We can work to prevent the idea that ordinary people cannot raise children without special training from experts from becoming an unquestioned assumption. One way to respond to the "I Am Your Child" campaign would be to strengthen the informal grassroots network of support that already exists among parents. This "network" has long existed among parents, grandparents, and their supporters. It can be seen in informal conversations, in groups of friends gathering together for various kinds of activities, in community life. It is the way in which parenting information, wisdom, and support is passed from one generation to the next.
As communities have broken down in our society in recent decades, parts of this network have become more formally organized to include play groups, groups like La Leche League, and parent support groups of various kinds. When we establish such groups and invite other parents to join us, we are providing a strong and much better alternative to the "I Am Your Child" campaign.
* We can share our insights and convictions with other parents whose confidence may be undermined by the current emphasis on early childhood learning. As parents we can support each other through informal conversations with people we know. We can also introduce ourselves to strangers we see with their children and comment on how great it is to see children being taken various places by their parents, parents and children interacting in positive ways, etc. The more support we as parents give to other parents, those we know and those we are meeting for the first time, the less parents will be drawn to campaigns like "I Am Your Child" and the less effective such campaigns will be. As homeschoolers, we know how to take responsibility for such actions ourselves.
We can also write letters to the editor of our local paper and articles that can be published other places, pointing out the importance of children's early years, parents' need for support, and what parents can do for their children that experts and institutions cannot do, since parents love their children, have opportunities to understand them as unique individuals, have made a commitment to them, can spend time with them, and can develop a deep and trusting relationship with them. We can share similar comments on call-in radio shows.
Conclusion
As homeschoolers we are in an unusually good position to evaluate and respond to the "I Am Your Child" campaign. First, we know from experience what parents can do without experts and institutions. Second, we understand ways in which experts and institutions are undermining families, through conventional schools and now through the emphasis on early childhood learning. Third, we know how to take responsibility for ourselves, do what needs to be done, resist inappropriate treatment by officials and institutions, and maintain our rights and responsibilities.
As parents we can counter the "I Am Your Child" campaign by extending a helping hand of support and encouragement to parents we know and to strangers we meet. We can let our voices be heard in various ways. In a way the founders of the campaign did not intend, "I Am Your Child" is providing an opportunity for parents to support each other. Let's take advantage of the opportunity! © 1997 Larry and Susan Kaseman
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