Stop Turning Every Parenting Moment Into a Pop Quiz
Chill out mom and dad
Parents Magazine’s “5 Ways to Support Your Child’s Preschool Curriculum” is not just annoying; it is WRONG.
So, is the whole idea it’s pushing: Kids are dumb as dumplings and don’t learn anything without you, the mom (or, haha, dad), constantly, endlessly nattering at them. So, it tells parents: make every moment like school. Don’t waste time just hanging out or cuddling!
No! Your job is to be a super-uninspired, relentless teacher. Thus:
In the car or on bus rides, play a game where you ask about an object, and encourage your child to figure out the shape and color of it.
That sounds SO BORING!
Do YOU go around thinking about the shape and color of the seats? Life is so much more interesting than those questions, and SO ARE YOU! Almost any spontaneous topic is more enriching — and fun — for both of you because it is a CONVERSATION, not a QUIZ.
And trust me: kids WILL LEARN THEIR SHAPES AND COLORS WITHOUT YOU DOING THIS!
Other questions Parents Mag wants you to ask:
“How many cereal boxes are in the cupboard?”
“How many crackers do you have?”
“Does the picture look like a square or a triangle?”
Aghh!
If a kid doesn’t know square from triangle yet — give it a rest! Or — here’s a wild idea — enjoy the picture book without turning it into a geometry lesson.
Also by Lenore Skenazy
“Independence Therapy” Could Revolutionize Anxiety Treatment for Kids
Losing Track of Your Kids Should Not Be a Crime: Georgia mom arrested for “reckless conduct”
How to Diversify Your Child’s Potential: Don't raise a college-obsessed robot
Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard Let Their Children “Free-Range” for Seven Hours
Junior Must Get Ahead!
These questions are supposedly designed to get your child ahead in pre-k. But why? So, they know their shapes two months before the other kids? Will they be two months ahead till the end of time?
If you wonder why the Surgeon General issued a whole report last year on how incredibly stressed out parents are or why a Pew study found a huge leap in the number of people of childbearing age who don’t even want to BECOME parents — from 37% in 2018 to 47% in 2023 — Parents Mag may be at least part of the answer.
Follow its advice, and there is no downtime! There is only non-stop, sing-song schooling and the nagging worry you have to come up with yet another education-boosting comment or question, stat!
What’s crazy is not just that this is stilted and stultifying — it’s also SO UNNECESSARY! Kids have always learned things from their parents — and their world — through CURIOSITY. They look around. They ask questions. (Do they ever!) They mull. They are humans, not AI Large Language Models to be programmed by some insane, inane, boring-fact-spouting bot.
They exist to live, look, and love. They do not require constant drilling!
Chill Out
Please do not trust Parents Magazine. (Trust me, with no degrees in child development, psychology, or pediatrics! But really — do.) The parenting blogs and magazines have to fill their pages with shoulds and musts and warnings, or no one would read them. So, they do! They have figured out how to turn every meal, shopping trip, and bedtime snuggle into a child-success minefield.
Who signed up for the job of grim, 24/7 pre-k teacher? No one! Not even pre-k teachers!
Children learn from us by the fact we are their parents. We care for them. We do stuff that they watch. We are their teachers by virtue of being around them and living our lives with them. Not by virtue of being giant workbooks that hug and drive them places.
Don’t believe the hype that parenting requires you to spend those formative years yakking away about shapes and counting the crackers on the table (and floor). If it’s boring to you, it’s boring to your kid.
Set your sights on plain old living life, and bonus: your kid gets to, too!
Bring the The Let Grow Experience to your school—it’s free. And for more resources visit Let Grow, where this piece originally appeared.
 | A guest post by
|
I couldn’t disagree with this more. Kids are curious about the world. To them thinking about what shape something is or what color something is becomes fascinating. In our ongoing conversation, we often talked about colors, number of items, etc. In books, we talked about the pictures, sometimes playing a version of iSpy. These things aren’t boring to children and encourage interaction and dialogue between parent and child. They also encourage attention to detail and noticing which helps in later school years. I’m not saying that children should be in any kind of organized curriculum, but these things are fun for kids. It also leads to open ended conversations with children. Kids have a natural curiosity about the world. As parents, we can encourage this and have fun while doing it.
When I was trying to teach my daughter with Down syndrome, a really wise special education teacher told me to “teach, don’t test” and made me realize how annoying it must be to be constantly quizzed, especially for a child for whom learning is really challenging. Instead of asking “what color is that flower” I learned to say “that red flower is so beautiful” and that turned into fun discussions, similar to what I think Janelle was saying in her comment. And it relieved all the pressure of having to turn everything into a learning experience, because you realize everything IS a learning experience already. Just engage and be interested!
One thing I do agree with in the parenting article is to read books together. I didn’t do much “school work” with my 3 kids, but I read to them all the time and not only have they excelled in school (the oldest is graduating soon) reading together was one of my life’s biggest joys!