Didn't you lie? Or have you just forgotten?
Really, it's just part of the age. Go with it. Try having fun with it.
My kids have never lied, so I can only assume bad parenting. Or bad genes.
Actually, I fear that Iris (11) has finally reached the point where she can (sometimes) lie without it being pretty obvious. The good news is that, now that she can fake sincerity, she's got it made.
1: I'm not upset, but it really is an amazing quantity.
I was a procrastinator as far back as I can remember.
I don't think I lied much, but maybe I'm conveniently forgetting.
In my internal autobiographical narrative, which may have very little correspondence with what actually happened, 7th grade math represents a particularly significant inflection point. That was when, basically, I persuaded my teacher that because I found the material easy, I shouldn't have to do the homework unless I wanted to. I've almost certainly exaggerated the importance of this one class, but the dispositions and behaviors this experience reflected and reinforced--'fixed' rather than 'growth' mindset, towering self-regard combined with extreme insecurity and fear of failure--became more and more pathological, the procrastination turning to full-blown paralysis, leading eventually to losing most of a decade failing to get a PhD.
In short: yes, parents, you should absolutely start worrying in middle school! And make sure your kids do their goddamn homework.
We got an email from the parent of one of the kids on my kid's Minecraft server that this one kid had been destroying a lot of their kid's shit, and killed their other kid's horse and attacked her with animals and made her cry. So we had our kid ban the troublemaker (who's had it coming for a while), until such time as we hear back from the troublemaker's Mom that he's been spoken to. So far, Mom has not returned our email, and the troublemaker is sticking with the story of "I've been framed."
Which of course is bullshit, but apparently some of the other kids believe him, and now my kid is taking a lot of grief from Troublemaker's friends, who are also my kid's friends, except Troublemaker is probably a bit more popular so now my kid's the bad guy through no fault of his own, just for being stuck in the middle here.
So anyway, my point is, kids are terrible.
Give me a marshmallow and I'll tell you.
But, like 4, I've always been a procrastinator.
5 is an interesting story, but draws the wrong conclusion. Don't worry, parents! Whatever you do your kids will find a way to mess themselves up. Or not.
I know 8 is true, because my momma tried.
Those kids are geniuses because they figured out how to play Minecraft, the game that baffles and confuses me.
I always procrastinated. "This spelling assignment can wait because to get myself ready I need to watch a full hour of The Jeffersons"
I had a somewhat related experience to x.trapnel's. I hated math so much in 6th grade where we had to do these horrible homework modules filled with dozens (hundreds?) of problems. I got the teacher to agree if I did the whole semester's worth of work in a few weeks I wouldn't have to do a single one the rest of the term.
It was painful but I buckled down and did them all. But she lied. That's when I learned that hard work and the avoidance of procrastination will get you screwed.
My first unpleasant procrastination memory was third grade (project on the pyramids), so pretty set in pretty early.
12: One of my main memories of middle school/early high school math is endlessly finding the roots of polynomials.
Is that still a thing? Is there a reason why it was considered so important that so much time was spent on it?
This comment is not off topic because I procrastinated on all of those homework assignments.
My goodness, 12 is awful! So unfair.
I'm not much of a procrastinator. I hate the feeling of tasks hanging over me and feel better when they're done. I think I was actually more of a procrastinator as a kid than I am now, but then again, as an adult, I don't have to make my bed (dumbest chore ever) or clean my room (the boyfriend cleans).
If the linked post in 5 were titled "how to bootstrap yourself to grit" and posted by a less reflective person than Swartz, everyone would snark. It doesn't make it wrong. I just wish every self-helpy piece of advice in the world had an asterix saying, "assuming your'e in a position where the circumstances in your life aren't objectively overwhelmingly, you're not clinically damaged, your basic needs are met, and the consequences of failure that might come from moving beyond your baseline coping mechanisms aren't catastrophic, this perspective/practice might help."
Oh, god, that reminds me--then there was a 9th grade biology project on flowering trees, for which I was supposed to collect and preserve the flowers as they appeared during the spring. Which of course I didn't do. Day after day, I'd see the trees sprouting as I walked to school and back--and then withering and falling, still uncollected. The went on for many weeks, of course, since different trees flower at different times. I finally ended up just printing out some pictures at the last minute. But for at least a decade afterwards, whenever I saw flowering trees in the spring, I would feel anxious and guilty.
||
Stupid fuck-ups, part of an endless series: my cargo arrived today (yay! cargo!). And I had to go to the airport to give them my passport and sign some forms. Which passport I had to spend the better part of the morning getting back from HR as they process me for my local ID. So I get it back and get a driver to the where the shipping/customs clearing company is located and give him my passport and fill out a form or two and go back to work. Only to get home and an hour later receive a call that I had forgotten to sign a form that customs required. Which is this idiot who should know his business had phrased it. No, dumbass, I had schlepped my ass to your place of business to hand over my passport (!) and sign whatever required forms you put in front of me in order for customs to release my cargo. So now I have to arrange a driver to take me back there in the morning (more added expense since I'm now carpooling with cow-orkers. Very minor shit, I know but it adds up and is quickly seeming typical around here.
But at least I'll be able to take a picture of the graffito I spotted nearby the airfreight company, in English it said: "THE QAEDAS" as if it were the name of some silly punk band.
|>
When I was in school, we only had dot matrix printers. We couldn't even print flowers.
Argh. Being tired and pissed off does nothing for my editing.
16: I agree, actually. The reason I always link to that piece rather than something at Dw/eck's own site is because I feel that knowing Swartz's backstory basically provides that asterix you're talking about.
Younger son, now aged 11 (let's call him Hitsuji) has been a procrastinator since kindergarten. I probably noticed it early because his older brother (call him Tatsu) has always been so bloody organized.
In the days when they both had daily homework to be handed in the following morning, Tatsu would run back from school, haul out his worksheets, get it all done in 30 minutes, and be off and out to play.
Hitsuji would wander in later, get himself a snack, dig around in his bag for his homework, look for a pencil, go to the bathroom, look for a pencil sharpener, get himself a drink, sharpen his pencil, complain about the amount of homework, launch into a story about something that happened at break, get himself another snack, finally start on a worksheet, go looking for an erasor, resharpen his pencil, call a friend to ask something, demand another snack ...
Unfortunately he clearly takes after the parent who's been procrastinating on the Internet most of the day.
Ick--#21 came across badly, like I'm trying to use his death to push my preferred pop-psych theory. Let me try again: I (seem to recall that I) read that essay shortly after he died, and I think that because of that background knowledge, I was able to take it as a work-in-progress, a grasping-towards-something by someone struggling with his own serious difficulties, rather than a piece of self-promotional life-hackery. I think because of that, I took it more seriously than I otherwise would have, which I think was a good thing for me.
my cargo arrived today (yay! cargo!)
Clearly, Barry has been swimming hard enough! he is an example to us all!
I had a somewhat related experience to x.trapnel's. I hated math so much in 6th grade where we had to do these horrible homework modules filled with dozens (hundreds?) of problems. I got the teacher to agree if I did the whole semester's worth of work in a few weeks I wouldn't have to do a single one the rest of the term.
This is a humblebrag, but we had something similar. One morning I did the entire term's maths worksheets, in about 90 minutes. The teacher was completely furious. Incandescent, even. I was supposed to get each one checked after I did it, but each time I went up there was a queue, so I thought -- being a good boy, and all that -- I'd do another while I was waiting. When I finally got to the front of the queue with some ridiculous number of sheets, she completely lost it.
I think I was 10. I'd already formed the opinion, obviously, that some adults were arseholes, but this definitely confirmed it.
23: Yeah, that makes a lot sense. On a phone but hopefully will post more about this later.
25: At about the same age, we had SRA cards. Those were reading assignments with small quizzes. I finished the whole set early in the year. After that, during reading time, I got to read whatever. I used to read the dictionary, despite having many other options.
Lucky you. When I finished the box, I got stuck tutoring the kids who were in the early colors.
That was an option, but it turns out that very few kids want to be tutored by the guy who is happily reading the dictionary.
Oh, the tutoring was grimly unsuccessful. I actually remember the lowest levels being really puzzling -- they were trying to write with such a restricted vocabulary that nothing made much sense.
I distinctly recall forgetting to do my first ever homework assignment. I haven't gotten any better since.
We had weekly spelling exams. If you got 100% on the pre-test, you could play Oregon Trail when the rest of the class had to take the test. So many times, failing to ford the river.
Procrastination for me is always tied to anxiety over failure, and it hit very hard when I tried to do independent science projects. Not sure I'm entirely past the anxiety, to be honest, as it still takes me a while to psych myself up to start writing if I get out of the habit.
xelA already lies.
'Have you done a poo?'
'No!' [marches off reeking like a medieval cesspit]
Hawaii is Tatsu. But also, afterschool care is a godsend because they do their homework there, and so Hawaii has no sense that homework is a domain that pits you against your parents.
I am a terrible procrastinator, although, ironically, I've been super productive and not really procrastinating much at all at work recently. In fact, probably for most of the past year, I've been just getting shit done.
Up until graduate school, procrastination was never really an issue, as I could pretty much do anything, pretty well, in the panic'd few minutes I'd actually do it in once I could procrastinate no longer. This does sort of help at work. I can read and write so much faster than all of my colleagues that it's not funny. Allowing for corrections, I can literally write convincing academic or business-y prose at about 40-50% of the speed I can type at. I can churn it out like automatic writing.
It totally bit me in the arse in graduate school, though, when there's no regular pressing deadlines, and the work has to be better than just the standard I could achieve in little panic ridden sprints. Lots of nightmare-ish failures to do things when they needed to get done, and total paralysis where work that was objectively fine would send me in endless loops of rewriting and corrections. Resulting in work that had taken forever but was poorer than what I started out with.
I was diligent by habit on anything routine (daily homework), but terrible about planning out any week long or more project in High School.
In college and my first jobs, I was a solid plodder, but when work slowed down, I'd build up bad habits that were slow to recede when it got busy.
Argh. I fit the trapnel/Cala profile. What a source of frustration and unhappiness.
My daughters are like Ume's kids, though the same age, so watching that unfold is part of my DIY twin study. The school gets some blame, I think, for assigning homework beginning in kindergarten, which is counterproductive bullshit, and of course I get blame for being a shitty parent who couldn't figure out some creative way to help Thing 2 negotiate some way around the crippling stress that homework now precipitates.
I took her to a psychologist last week to be evaluated for ADD, and he's convinced that that's not the issue, so at least there's that. She totally hated the session, even though I thought she'd warm to him a little when he was adamant about how destructive homework can be, explaining that there's zero correlation between amount of homework and achievement in elementary school. So now I'm hoping that the prospect of going to talk to the boring old dude might prod her to get her work done, but I doubt it will.
I was on Team Tatsu, and was concerned my kid was headed in that direction. I agree with x trapnel, peep AND crim bulg in that it was clear to me from a pretty young age that my parents could have done so much better in helping me learn to manage my Tatsu tendencies BUT that they were overwhelmed by three kids close in age, a crappy marriage, money woes and the aftermath of their own grimly miserable upbringings. So eh they did the best they could.
The very structured homework regimen at the kid's school, his own stubborn insistence on doing his own work, our relative disengagement with the minutiae of his schooling could have recreated dq2, but didn't I think because of greater stability in our family life in general plus that we have just persistently kept up with low key inquiries re tasks and status, always offering to help if requested but not micromanaging. And a couple of crises in I think the equivalent of 5th grade really were beneficial in the end, as we were willing to help with typing/technical support late late into the night and discuss content/suggest edits but certainly there were follow up discussions about this being less than ideal, happy to help differently in the future but we're not going to become the bad cops, etc. He's far from being the most on top of everything ever kid but I hope will be in better shape to cope on his own than e.g. kids whose parents have a rigid structure for how homework gets done.
I get blame for being a shitty parent who couldn't figure out some creative way to help Thing 2 negotiate some way around the crippling stress that homework now precipitates.
Nicotine is good for managing that kind of stress. Maybe give her some cigarettes?
For me procrastination as a student was all about not writing papers. There was a mythical time of innocence early on in elementary school when I wrote unselfconsciously and effortlessly and teachers would make a fuss over my stories that were epics by the standards of 2nd grade. By 7th grade every writing assignment was a curse, and when I succeeded in actually writing something it was done at the last possible moment, and I wouldn't reread it, because I thought that if I did, I would be too embarrassed to turn it in. On a few significant occasions, I simply failed to write anything at all.
I did a little better at times in college, but this was a big factor in my dropping out of graduate school.
The solution to the problem was to never have to write anything.
My 8th grader is failing because he won't do his homework. I don't know what to do. I don't have a sense if they will actually fail him for this or not.
Stepdaughter had crippling Tatsu tendencies plus would overcommit to sport and music and drama and etc etc etc so that every 4-6 weeks through high school better half would call school to say see ya in a few days and then she'd sleep for 36-48 hours arising only for a pee or huge meals. Worked in the end she's a lovely fully functioning adult, my conclusion is keep up a persistent level of the good parenting you yourself can manage and support resiliency in the little buggers whenever you spot a glimmer, it'll work out.
What is good parenting for a Tatsu? Or for that matter, a Hitsuji?
41/45: Just to be sure the names are the right way round: Hitsuji's the procrastinator, Tatsu the homework machine.
40: With Hitsuji I do think that the Cala-type fear of failure/perfectionism was part of the homework procrastination, though not the whole story (he's generally easily distracted and has poor impulse control compared with his brother). I have a vivid memory of him at about age 3, drawing dinosaur after dinosaur and screwing them all up unfinished. Grandmother picks one up, takes a look, says "That's fantastic!" Hitsuji wails "But it's not fantastic ENOUGH!" and throws himself face-down on the floor. It did help when he was younger to keep reassuring him that not everything has to be perfect, it just has to be done.
Let's be honest: no one at age 3 draws a good dinosaur. Grandmother is a liar.
Replace all my Tatsus with Hitsujis, I get a zero for failing to read the instructions!
Perfect being enemy of done oh my god do I know that sucker.
I'd prefer "wolf cub" and "puppy", for the sake of clarity.
46: Honestly, I have no idea. It's a pretty deep-seated tendency; I think the best you can do is not intentionally try to exacerbate the anxiety as a way to control your kid.
I was always very good with fixed tasks -- still am. I also do better when I'm somewhat overscheduled. The terrifying part is the open-ended creative work when I can't see how to proceed, and the work around I have is just to start, telling myself that it's okay if it's crap and I can throw it all out later and that producing a bunch of crap is just part of how my process works.
Maybe I should come up with an excuse to tell Jane the story about the study with two sets of pottery students. I find that one imaginatively compelling. (Not that it makes me not an anxious procrastinator, but she's still perhaps more malleable.)
I do think it's best to get the homework done before playing, but for me, the problem is now that the homework is NEVER DONE.
There are no perfect dinosaur drawings, because the truth is that we don't really know what dinosaurs looked like. Some are better than others, though.
46: Try to figure out how much is the perfection being enemy of done vs overwhelmingness of size of task vs just would rather be doing something more fun - likely to be some combination - as part of an open ended conversation you pick up and leave off over the years and approach in evolving age appropriate ways. Avoid pursuing deep meta discussion when the shit is hitting the fan, provide support then but put in a low level place marker for a future conversation. Basically avoid making things do or die in any one particular instance, but persist in keeping lines of communication open.
I pretty much can't do open-ended projects but I have recently done well by making sure I have a partner. When I procrastinate too much, I ask for a meeting and we work together. That gets me activated.
My kids have mostly not been like me, for which I thank goodness. I don't know how much of that is natural inclination (they're not super-effortlessly organized and ahead of everything, they're just not painfully procrastinaty), and how much of that is something we did right.
One thing I did, overreacting to my own neuroses, is be really, really, really non-threatening and non-negative about it on the occasions when they got behind. 'Okay, you're in a situation. What can you still turn in? How are you going to manage it? What do you need me to do to make getting everything done possible?"
I had such a strong tendency to go all furtive whenever I was in any difficulty, which just made it worse, so I reacted very, very strongly in favor of making coming to me for help getting things fixed completely non-threatening.
I do think it's best to get the homework done before playing, but for me, the problem is now that the homework is NEVER DONE.
I had such a strong tendency to go all furtive whenever I was in any difficulty, which just made it worse
Ugggh, I was very much like that as a student. As I mentioned here before, at some point I got much better about not procrastinating at work (though I still procrastinate on all sorts of stuff outside of work), but reading this thread is giving me terrible flashbacks (I also feel slightly afraid that reading this is going to bring back all of my tendency towards procrastination, but I think that fear is irrational).
I'm procrastinating right now!
Bird By Bird was a really helpful book for me - both because of the 'bird by bird' approach, and because of the 'shitty first draft' chapter.
Not that I'm much better. I went into therapy for my procrastination during my PhD and did finish (both therapy and my PhD). As a post-doc I'm better because there are enough smaller tasks but I'm still procrastinating on all the stuff that I'm supposed to be self-motivated about because it's needed for my career (various forms of writing). I think academic writing is the worst because it doesn't have concrete end dates so I never have that panicked finishing race to get done, just that heavy dread of not getting stuff done. A writing partner might help but I haven't found one.
Oh also, only making myself work for 20 minutes is really really helpful ('oh it's only 20 minutes, then you can slack off for 20 minutes' said me to me)
Kid A is a hopeless procrastinator - all her best schoolwork gets done at 3 am the night before it's due in, etc. Ever since she was very little, she was extremely easily distracted - e.g. I would end up spoon feeding her at mealtimes when she was like 2 1/2 because she would get bored and try to wander off long before she was at all sated. Directly telling her to do anything, such as get up, or do homework, results in refusal or further delay. (She'll do things for other people straightaway, like the washing up, just not anything she thinks she's in control of.) So I have learnt to come at things from an angle, get her to think it's her idea. C has not. Conflict ensues.
She also never ever lied as a young child, seemingly because talking about EVERYTHING was more important than not getting into trouble - I'm still fairly confident she doesn't have any major secrets from me.
Kid B is my over-conscientious perfectionist, but that mainly requires soothing which is more straightforward, and the other two are in between.
My four-year-old told a medium lie a few months ago and got big punishment: no stories for a week, trip to the zoo cancelled. This is surely in contravention of current American parenting norms, but he's been pointedly honest since. Or he's smoking dope on the side.
Can't quite tell yet how diligent and conscientious they're going to be. The older one does shut down if he thinks someone is trying to teach him something.
You ask him if he smokes dope?
I don't want to know.
The older one does shut down if he thinks someone is trying to teach him something.
As I've probably mentioned here before, I slowed down Sally's reading by a year or so by getting overenthusiastic about it. (It was actually super weird -- she was writing legibly in full sentences at a level where she completely denied being about to read anything similar.) I learned my lesson and mostly butted out after that.
She was fine with school, she just wanted me specifically to back the hell off.
61: I've found The Now Habit to be useful, at least to internalize its theory if not to take all its practical recommendations. Right now, I figure if I'm putting consistent effort into doing at least one thing I really don't want to do, I'm not procrastinating. And hey, stuff is getting done. Slowly. Barely.
So saying "Don't come home until you can read" is counterproductive? I'll take it under advisement.
A friend told me that she loved teaching because she couldn't procrastinate. If she fucked up and didn't prepare, she delivered a bad lecture. But then it was gone and she couldn't do the work later to make it up. That sounded great to me too. Short deadlines, reasonable pressure to meet them, but if you don't, it is over and can't be redeemed by doing the leftover work.
69: Unless the street signs have pictures, I don't see that they'd have a choice.
67: I was practically reduced to tears this weekend trying to do rudimentary reading with my daughter, because I was so sure she was playing games and pretending not to know letters. I think it probably wasn't conscious, but was evasive panic stuff, and consequently I may just not have anything to do with her reading whatsoever and continue to baby her by reading books to her until, say, she confesses that she stole and read my copy of Young Torless and now has a bunch of questions. (I'd still bet a very modest amount of money on a dyslexia situation like alameida's kid's. Something doesn't quite add up. But she isn't four yet, either. I've just met very few people with her intense interest in books and narrative who weren't at least semi-literate by this early point, which is probably the erroneousest of sampling errors.)
I appreciate the parental insights in this thread but have none of my own. I have no idea how well Dweck's work holds up -- Sifu?
65 - that's how I ended up home educating. 4 year Kid A: "I don't want other people teaching me things; I want to learn them by myself." Me: "errr. Oh shit."
I've found The Now Habit to be useful, at least to internalize its theory if not to take all its practical recommendations
Interesting. This may sound like a cliché, but I couldn't make it all the way through The Now Habit. I got about a third of the way through and nothing in it clicked for me; it was too abstract.
By contrast, I found Getting Things Done to be much more useful. Lots of good, specific instructions.
Of course, this is the ultimate YMMV topic.
Jane ADORES books and pores over them for hours, but at five her reading is highly rudimentary. At three, definitely nada. (I learned to read fluently like a mutant at about 2.5, definitely the high point of my lifetime achievement.)
You should never, ever name a kid after a Radiohead album. What did you expect?
(I'd still bet a very modest amount of money on a dyslexia situation like alameida's kid's. Something doesn't quite add up. But she isn't four yet, either. I've just met very few people with her intense interest in books and narrative who weren't at least semi-literate by this early point, which is probably the erroneousest of sampling errors.)
Sally! and Newt! Both heavy readers as older kids and now, but Sally wasn't reading well until spring of first grade, which was 6.75, and Newt, while he was earlier and I was less focused on it so I don't remember exactly, certainly not before 5. Before 4 is way, way, way early to be thinking about diagnoses -- while there are plenty of kids who learn that early, plenty means a couple of percent of the population. There's nothing even a tiny, remote bit surprising about a preschooler not yet being semi-literate.
Don't be like me! Back off!
That was over-excited. But really, reading at all much before kindergarten is fluky weirdness. I was a weirdo like Redfox myself, but didn't end up astonishingly more literate than anyone who learned to read in school.
lurid, it felt like kid A teetered on the edge of reading for about two years. She could tell you the sound of any letter, could find her way around games, etc, but just wasn't quite putting it all together. I think she just wasn't interested in reading the books that were within her ability reach. She loved being read to, always listened to stories on tape/CD, had a great vocabulary, and so on. (She still listens to audio books most nights.) When she did start reading, she was very quickly onto long/older books. She wasn't in school, so there was no rush or pressure though.
Getting Things Done was less helpful for me; my problems didn't quite fit into that system, although I recognize its utility and have borrowed little bits of it. Yeah, very YMMV.
76 - ha, Kid A came out just before kid C was born, so he was the one named for the album really, and the others followed.
I think we've talked before here about there being a lot of us here who don't remember not being able to read. And if you'd had told me as a newish parent that my obvious genius firstborn wouldn't read until she was 6, I would have been horrified. But she had chunks of Alice in Wonderland and LOTR memorised by then, and the actual reading seemed less important than the general language skills.
The youngest was reading properly until she was 9, and even at that point she would have been happy to carry on listening to stories, and having other people read things for her, but I'd had enough and said she had to learn. It's only 3 years later and already there's no difference between her and her peers (she's in school now).
But really, reading at all much before kindergarten is fluky weirdness.
Oh, I'm sure this is true. I did try to make it clear that I was annoyed with myself for doing a bad job teaching her to read and that I wished I could do it better. "You just have to practice more," she said, and gave me a hug.
I think she just wasn't interested in reading the books that were within her ability reach.
Yeah, I worry about this, but I admit one of the desired outcomes on my end is that I don't have to read any more Disney Princess I Can Read Level 1 titles that get put at kid eye level at every effing bookstore in town, and if she wants them, her job. It goes in fits and starts though and we had a very pleasant 4-month-long dry spell of utterly ignoring them. I guess I remember how comfortingly anodyne cartoons can be, very soothing, in no way tied to any expectation of virtue or achievement, in no way interesting to grown-ups.
I learned to read sort of late, too. Maybe partway through first grade, so age 6. I got good at it fast and was reading above grade level in months. My mother told me I refused to try earlier because I was worried I'd be bad at it. I did that a lot as a child.
Yeah, I think learning to read really early is certainly correlated with being very literate as an older kid and adult -- early readers are mostly all going to be in that category -- but learning to read in an ordinary or even slightly late time-frame doesn't say anything about ultimate interest or skill level.
"You just have to practice more," she said, and gave me a hug.
Pretty dang adorable, that!
At what age would a kid start to reveal procrastination tendencies?
Birth. I put off doing that as well.
I should add, in case Thing 2 ever RsTFA, that they go to an arts-magnet middle school, and she does really well at the creative stuff, especially dance. So the the rest of school and its Stakhanovite "work ethic" can just fuck the fuck off.
I don't think I properly read until 5, which was the normal school schedule and so I started when everyone else did; although I went from zero to LotR in a year or so. I certainly wouldn't stress about a preschooler not reading yet. In fact, I'd put that way over in (no offence) too much pressure Tiger Mommy/Daddy territory.
78, 89 and 83 are right. My kid had a serious interest in books, and some reading-ish concepts but didn't start really reading until 6 and first grade. NBD, she's now 7 and apparently an off the charts reader, though probably not by the unobtainable standard of Unfogged kids or personal life anecdotes.
Don't give in to (or perpetuate!) the mindless tyrranny of precocity; parents are way way way way too into having their kid be the first to do something when it turns out that, in general, being precocious at something doesn't matter for shit, unless you freak out and let it do so.
I think when I was in school it was the absolute norm to just start reading in first grade. Now everyone is like, "Oh I read at 6 months, but Balthazar only started at 18 months. I should have worked with him more."
I mean basically no one will ever give a shit about the age at which you or your kid started reading, walking, talking or whatever and if you take pride in such things you're a fucking pathetic moron. Real talk with Tim "Ripper" Owens.
Come to think, I wonder if that's part of the force for redshirting. Your kid isn't reading at five, they're not ready for first grade, so you hold them back? If so, my eyes are rolling.
But yeah, in kindergarten in '76 I was in some idiotic gifted program, and even in that, no one was literate but me that I recall. I got in trouble for reading some book that explained the facts of life at a grade-school level off a teacher's shelf, because they weren't expecting the students to be reading anything.
84 last: there where certainly books that got a lot less love and attention in the delivery and sure enough they tended to fade from the repeat list ... I fell firmly on the side of "there are fully trained professionals who will teach you to read/do math/whatever, let's do something more fun together!"
89: Yes this totally, we've absolutely edited the feedback we get from teachers and told the kid what we do and do not think is important. Lowest grade among entire class in sport, do I care? Nope!* And for years he was just slooooow to complete in-class written work. Cleared up on its own. In your shoes I'd be much more interested in understanding the different components of her anxiety and doing what you can to have her feel able to talk to you about it.
*There may be an exception to this for the last grading period this year, as it included gymnastics and kid cleverly teamed up with other dancers so per him they ended up with by far the best routine - if this isn't reflected in his grade we are calling foul. But that's the teacher's issue, not the kid.
My parents spent a lot of time reading to my brother and I and, I think as a result, we both ended up learning to read ourselves relatively late. (I mean, when your sense of how books work is that they're a group thing it's less obvious why you'd be really excited to learn to read, at least as compared to trying to race snails on the back porch or something.) At least partially due to a truly awful first grade teacher I wasn't reading comfortably until probably third grade, at which point I was reading everything.
I'm not sure if that's reassuring to parents whose children learn late or not, though.
My 10yo has developed a disturbing lying pattern. I totally understand swiping a forbidden soda from the fridge and drinking it, but when you have been definitively busted--empty soda can was found in your room--you still deny it. She swears up and down she didn't drink it, but she clearly did. She's sticking it out, which I don't understand as her punishment would be less if she copped to it and begged forgiveness. She is also telling a lot of stupid lies to avoid getting in trouble, but this tactic isn't working for her, even though I I understand the motivation. However, the really shitty thing is seeing your worst qualities surface in your kid. I was quite the master of deception as a teen and seeing it in her bugs the cramp out of me ( although I have to say I was much better at it than she is)
Whoa, okay. I swear to you, I truly had no idea that the preschool reading thing was so unusual. My crowd is a real outlier. I thought three was early but you might see the kid read simple words, four was early to typical, five was typical to a bit late, because that's what I'd heard about my friends and their children. I didn't do research on the subject because, I don't know, that seemed obsessive and weird? But I guess I should have.
To push back a little against the warranted attack on precocity which I mostly share: parents do want their kids to walk not for bragging rights but because it's useful to have a child who doesn't have to be carried or pushed everywhere, they want kids to talk so they can communicate with them, and they (I, here) want kids to read so that the kid can pick up some of the reading-aloud burden. There are reasons to wish for your kid's greater autonomy that are not solely about status or cultural norms. Here I will cop to being an asshole who likes to be left alone, even by my beloved child, but I think that's a much more significant part of whatever my participation in this pattern is than the wanting-to-brag or tiger mothering. ("I showed you how to get a taxi to Carnegie Hall, right? Do you need anything else before your recital? Just text me.")
98: Maybe there's a hobo hiding in your house?
I'm picturing 92 illustrated by stills from "Au hasard Balthasar" and cracking up.
Anecdotally, I'd really not be worried about the reading yet, lurid. Like others, I didn't take off until 7ish, but after that (like most of the unfoggetariat - omg, how do you spell that) I pretty much moved into the top percentiles and didn't budge.
I was also young for my grade, so perhaps that played into it.
I started teaching both mine to read in English when they were four or five, but that was largely because friends who were also bringing up bilingual children warned me that once they learned to read Japanese they would find English spelling too hard and demotivating compared with the simplicity of hiragana. As it was, like a lot of Japanese kids, they both picked up reading hiragana from all the writing they saw around them and started writing them with no input from me before starting school. Early reading hasn't led to their being great readers in their early teens, though, or even readers at all. These days I have to beg, bully, cajole, bribe and nag to get them to read anything at all other than manga.
lurid, it felt like kid A teetered on the edge of reading for about two years. She could tell you the sound of any letter, could find her way around games, etc, but just wasn't quite putting it all together.
This was Hawaii. In a very anthropological sense, I couldn't figure out why couldn't read - she seemed to have all the pieces in place.
There was one memorable scene where I was trying to get her to say the word "top" or "ten" or something from the cover of "Ten Apples Up On Top". She knew the title of the book, she knew the sounds, and I just couldn't figure out why she couldn't get it from context.
I finally laughed and gave up when Hawaii said, "Tuh. Aah. Puh...apple?"
Kids have really shitty taste in books. The book my son read the most eagerly was a novelization of a video game. And not a good video game either. The one where plants stop zombies.
A soda-loving hobo
A soda-loving hobo consultant. Maybe you can arrange a consulting-for-soda barter arrangement.
I thought three was early but you might see the kid read simple words, four was early to typical, five was typical to a bit late, because that's what I'd heard about my friends and their children.
If this is what you're hearing about your friends' children as a norm? Eh, do you think there's plausibly a little exaggeration going on there? You know them, I don't, but that sounds to me like a social circle with a combination of a couple of people telling inflated stories about their little genius and the rest of everyone being shamefacedly quiet because their kid wasn't up to snuff. (I mean, there certainly are very early readers. But a whole peer-group of them? I'd be surprised.)
Hawaii isn't terribly interested in books themselves, she just loves being the eldest who can bestow the secret language on the other kids. I'm really, really working on not being pushy about books. I have made it clear, however, that she can stay up late if she's reading in bed, and I'm also in the process of clearing out the mezzanine to be a special reading nook.
Kids have really shitty taste in books.
Thing 1's morning reading for the past couple of weeks has been Battle Lines, so I'm offended on VW's account, but he can kick your ass himself, seeing as how you're in the same state. Bedtime reading is still Finnegans Wake, with which I will persevere until they tell me to stop, but so far they still seem to like it.
Awwww the thug enforcer vice principal at the HS graduation has turned on the human side of his personality and is delivering leis to what I think were some of his repeat customers from their families seated further back in the auditorium. The looks of surprise on the kids' faces are pretty great.
I won't read or listen to Finnegans Wake.
But wait a minute. I had unreasonable ideas (not shared by anyone else here) about how early kids learn to read, but this is also a significant cultural trend and kids are in fact being pushed to read earlier? Am I likely also getting bad messages from The Culture? I pretty much don't talk to anyone and don't read parenting articles unprovoked, but now I'm totally confused. (I would also describe myself as having been mildly surprised but not "concerned" that my 3-year-old can't read, and now no longer surprised.)
108: I think the precocious ones (or their parents) say when they learned to read and the unprecocious don't say anything by contrast, thus the error. It's a bunch of misfits many of whom happen to have this hyperlexia thing in common.
I hate to be all Common Core, but this is what kids are expected to be able to do by the end of kindergarten. I read stupidly early and expected Mara to start way earlier than she did because I didn't know what to expect.
112: You can say that now, but when your sweet little spawn asks it of you, you'd be a monster not to.
They are being pushed to read earlier, but mostly that means 5, in kindergarten. Before kindergarten is still notable. Not terribly unlikely, but, say, I'd expect your average kindergarten class to have between one and none kids who were really reading in any meaningful sense on day one. If more than a couple of kids were really reading when they entered kindergarten, that'd be unusual, I'm pretty sure.
(Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from my kids' decidedly non-hothouse grade school? But I don't think so, it wasn't that non-hothouse.)
The change from my childhood is that the expectation for really beginning reading has been moved from first grade to kindergarten.
Hawaii's class didn't have anyone reading at the beginning of the year. About three of them were put on easy readers by October or so. This based on the (slightly obnoxious but whatever) read-at-home-for-points program.
My mother used Teach Your Baby To Read flashcards on me and my brother 50 years ago, and swears I was reading fluently by age 3. So the idea has been around for a while.
Reading at 3 or 4 definitely an outlier. If you'd rather read something different than the princess crap do the minimum of that badly, explain why and read other things wonderfully because it's never too early for your kid to learn you are human.
If you'd rather read something different than the princess crap
I usually either say no or speed through, + moratorium on new purchases. Getting inventive and edumacational about it this weekend was a bad move. It actually went a lot like 105. Aside from this one lapse we have a healthy relationship with books and reading and there is no pressure.
I should never comment serially like this; I'm just not cognitively up to the task. I've contradicted myself and written gibberish many times over. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion on my end.
I feel like I'm jumping all over you, and I don't mean to. I'm just being overexcited about saying everything is absolutely fine!
And you don't sound like you're being neurotic or pushy about it, just that maybe you're parenting crowd has developed some weirdness on this issue that has led you a little astray about where the norms are.
I will now stab myself in the eye for that "you're". While I learned to read early, I'm not good at it yet.
Second senior speaker going a good job, just brought the house down with effective bad joke. 2 more plus valedictorian to go!
Don't feel bad, lk! If you're looking for read-together books, I'll find the name of the ones we use where the parent reads a page and the child picks up the rhyming word or words on the next one, which is easy enough to get from context without actual reading and makes them feel fantastic. Nia was feeling bad about her fluency the other night and I had her pick one of those up and prove that she could do the adult parts now, which was cool. Actually I just remembered the bug's name and this is the one she was reading.
My older kid, who is almost four and a half, will sound things out such that you'd think it would be impossible not to make the leap to the whole word, and yet he has yet to leap. His teachers, when I ask them why the fuck they've failed my child, say that eventually something just clicks and they're off and running.
As for reading loathsome books, as I think I've mentioned, I just tell him what I hate about the book, and he often seems to get it, and repeats it back at appropriate times.
My favorite book when I was learning to read was some I Can Read brand piece of nonsense called "Pickles, the Fire Cat". And I demanded that it be read to me enough that (a) my father got really sick of it, and (b) the pages fell out. Dad was always really good with manual stuff, so he did a fantastic job of gluing it back together. But in a passive-aggressive moment, he accidentally glued the last half of the book in first, and the first half after it.
I don't actually remember that bit. But I do remember reading it on my own, and believing that it was a book with two stories in it with some of the same characters. The first one began in medias res, and the second ended abruptly, but I had no idea they were the beginning and the end of the same story.
Did I mention the exchange (3 years 2 months or so) where I said that the rack of dismal "I can read" books she loves demoralized me because "I just don't think they're very good books"? She snapped back: "Well, I don't think you are very good parents," and looked up with this great fearful/fearsome imp face at me. I laughed so hard.
I love the stage where kids know that each letter follows the previous letter, but they don't have the L to R concept down, and so the text turns down the side of the page and upside down and wherever they have space to write.
This is a big advantage available to parents you can only get by putting in the time - their darn brains are growing and until those brains can do certain cognitive tasks they just can't do them, and that's just that. You see it over and over, again and again, eventually it sinks in. Apparently parental brains need time too.
The development of critical faculties and molding of taste, that can and must be a ceaseless struggle! Kidding! Not really kidding!
So, my brilliant therapist once said that early and voracious reading is a sign of a child desperate to escape, which was certainly true of me. But generally? I suspect this is the group to ask.
will sound things out such that you'd think it would be impossible not to make the leap to the whole word, and yet he has yet to leap.
Exactly.
I'm sitting here with Kid A and telling her about this conversation and the distraction/procrastination. She countered by telling me she was considering taking 'study drugs' after reading about modafinil. Jesus Christ. Just do some fucking work! (She's finished school forever, currently on study leave, with university-choice-deciding exams starting in 12 days.)
Oh gosh, I don't think I wanted to escape, I just wanted to know things. Although - my mum's been in hospital this last week and a half, and I have read an awful lot of books on that time. (Now on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.)
Kid A now reading me a list of ADD/ADHD symptoms in case I think she has it.
I thought it was reading that made me so odd that I needed to escape my peers.
132, 134: You rang? Not that there was anything all that rough about my actual life, but wow did I want to get anyplace else.
Hi, Thorn! Views on early reading?
Adrafinil, the slightly dirtier prodrug to modafinil that was developed first (I think called Olmifon), is available legally in America. It never got scheduled or run by the FDA and for whatever reason just ended up in "eh who cares" category so you can just buy bags of it. I think it's more restricted in some areas in Europe (but not the UK), though.
Wow the Mongolian Consulate gave a couple of scholarships.
Also guys brace yourselves if you have any lingering interest in keeping your look up to date - your hair is going to get a lot bigger.
139 - yeah, her main obstacle is not really getting hold of it, but just getting it delivered here in time to be useful. But if you were a person who could plan ahead to get your modafinil/whatever delivered in good time, maybe you'd be the kind of person who didn't need it.
I was taught to associate early reading with general precociousness, mostly I think as a reason for one set of grandparents for being proud of trotting me out to the their friends' houses to show how I could read the NYT as a little kid. Then my girls showed some early aptitude, then they plateaued for a bit and then learned to read just fine on their own. Later, I met a Waldorf-educated kid who had no reading instruction and was suddenly plowing through the Narnia books at 7 or 8. I wouldn't be surprised if the correlation between early reading and much else is pretty close to nil.
Well, there's at least the minimal correlation that all the kids who end up having genuine trouble reading are not going to be early readers. But yeah, I'd be surprised if it's much more than that.
My kid successfully pulled off the "I'll just memorize Goodnight Moon and trick my parents into thinking I'm a precocious reader" move. I was never clear on when exactly he made the transition from fake-reading to reading.
trotting me out to the their friends' houses to show how I could read the NYT as a little kid.
When I was about 9 or 10, I was mildly obsessed with our tilt-table marble-maze game, the 12"x12" size board with the 1oo numbered holes.
My mom's repetitive, passing comment as I played was, "Your cousins used to take two of those and race against each other!" As I never got past hole 50 or so, I eventually found this comment rage-inducing after the first dozen times, and would stare furiously at the game, not trusting myself to make eye contact.
Anyway, she would also talk about how early those cousins could read the NYT and I was unable to take this any way but as a personal comparison.
(My mom is pathologically positive and only sees the best in people. She's not actually a jerk but it did result in lots of upsetting self-comparisons with people she appeared to idolize, like my peers.)
trotting me out to the their friends' houses to show how I could read the NYT as a little kid.
When I was about 9 or 10, I was mildly obsessed with our tilt-table marble-maze game, the 12"x12" size board with the 1oo numbered holes.
My mom's repetitive, passing comment as I played was, "Your cousins used to take two of those and race against each other!" As I never got past hole 50 or so, I eventually found this comment rage-inducing after the first dozen times, and would stare furiously at the game, not trusting myself to make eye contact.
Anyway, she would also talk about how early those cousins could read the NYT and I was unable to take this any way but as a personal comparison.
(My mom is pathologically positive and only sees the best in people. She's not actually a jerk but it did result in lots of upsetting self-comparisons with people she appeared to idolize, like my peers.)
Your cousins have never double posted the same comment.
Although - my mum's been in hospital this last week and a half, and I have read an awful lot of books on that time.
Good thoughts to your mum! Also I thought Kid A was done & into uni? (Oh, wait, have just thought about the testing schedule and realised perhaps I am a bit confused.)
She should be discharged tomorrow! She got ill here, which has made life easier for me, but means we still need to get her back to Wales.
And yeah, kid A's offer is dependent on getting adequate grades this summer. Which are perfectly doable, but also missable ...
Miranda #98
"My 10yo has developed a disturbing lying pattern. I totally understand swiping a forbidden soda from the fridge and drinking it, but when you have been definitively busted...She's sticking it out, which I don't understand as her punishment would be less if she copped to it and begged forgiveness."
This tactic is *also* developmentally appropriate, difficult as it may be to deal with.
I wrote about it over on Grounded Parents, here:
https://groundedparents.com/2014/05/25/your-kids-telling-lies-good-for-her/
xelA is sort of pretending to read a bit. He just tells me what's happening in the pictures, but occasionally pops in partially garbled versions of phrases he's clearly remembered.
He also clearly thinks the hero of The Gruffalo is the 'Grufoo', rather than the mouse.
He also told me today that it was 'a picture of a rocket'*, rather than 'a rocket' which is a new thing/conceptual breakthrough.
* his obsessions are motorbikes, dragons, and rockets.
Like, escape to some universe where you can e.g. lead a powerful army of swordsmen to dominate and destroy your foes? I'm still pretty into that as you may have noticed. Not that there was anything that bad to escape from for me. But just realistically being a powerful, feared fantasy warlord is way better than whatever the hell else you're doing, whether you're 4 or 44.
This tactic is *also* developmentally appropriate, difficult as it may be to deal with.
I wrote about it over on Grounded Parents, here:
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
||
Can anyone recommend me a good probate attorney in the Chicago area? (Very simple estate.) Many thanks.
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Has anyone linked to this yet? Could be crap; I dunno.
For example, in the 1970s, the German government sponsored a large-scale comparison in which the graduates of 50 play-based kindergartens were compared, over time, with the graduates of 50 academic direct-instruction-based kindergartens.[2] Despite the initial academic gains of direct instruction, by grade four the children from the direct-instruction kindergartens performed significantly worse than those from the play-based kindergartens on every measure that was used. In particular, they were less advanced in reading and mathematics and less well adjusted socially and emotionally.
My parents' story is that at around two years old I scooted under the bed and started reciting the alphabet backwards, which I always chalked up to parental exaggeration until a couple months ago when the Calabat scooted under the bed and started reciting the alphabet. Given that he's a carbon copy of shiv otherwise, I take this as proof that he's my son and I didn't hallucinate the whole pregnancy.
i started procrastinating schoolwork when it became clear that it wasn't worth getting things done early or on time. I benefited from working ahead when I skipped a grade, but the way I worked ahead - doing everything in the textbooks that were supposed to take most of the school year - stopped being possible when assignments were keyed to specific tasks (selected problems instead of all problems, writing prompts not available months in advance, etc.) and I couldn't just sit down and run through weeks of work. It could have just been a coincidence. I think I've always procrastinated writing, except for the brief period when I blogged regularly.
I got really bad at procrastinating, by which I mean didn't get my work done right, by the time I was a junior, and got caught out with a bad grade on a calculus test because I just copied in the solutions from the solutions book. The teacher trusted us not to do that, which is why we had a solutions book. I knew I'd never have the discipline to do the homework nightly for the rest of the year and it was winter break, so I spent a week of the break learning what I needed to complete every assignment we were going to cover until March or April. I then turned them in as if I'd been doing them all along.
True to form, I didn't do the remaining 10 or so assignments for the year until I absolutely had to. I only had that one week of focus.
Oh, I didn't realise delagar had a novel (and sixty seconds on Smashwords, and I have a copy).
Back to say Delagar's novel is excellent, angry-making in its depiction of oppression. Recommended to, say, fans of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series or Ursula Le Guin's Werel/Yeowe stories (probably more sex scenes than either, I kind of skimmed those bits because of the power relations involved).
I mean, I don't doubt that you did. I'm just astonished at how fast some people read.
LOL escape. my daughter's teachers all wanted to talk to us about how they are concerned because she doesn't do as well on written assignments even though they are morally certain she knows the stuff, because she's told them the facts herself, in class. she was heartbroken because her first thought was she had done terribly on her exams, which she hadn't even so badly but she did worse than friends who didn't study. girl y is tatsu while girl x procrastinates, which doesn't help, but girl y is also just horribly anxious and insomniac. partly about school! she wants drugs. they do make them after all! I said we had to try her psych's bullshit hippie relaxation techniques before we demand Xanax.
|| Plantation wedding turned out just fine. Nice old trees. Band too loud, and they sited us old people right by it, so that was kind of annoying. The walking tour earlier in the day -- which I skipped on account of my ankle -- was apparently very strongly pro-Nullification. |>
164: Hmm, I must have missed where you described an upcoming Plantation wedding (I have been quite busy and not on here much). I am currently in North Carolina to attend a wedding later in the day which while not at an actual Plantation is at some rural venue of more recent vintage which advertises "A Storybook Wedding in a Plantation Setting." It's a bi-racial wedding btw.
It also offers a Man Cave: "Decorated in a masculine style, it's the perfect hang out for the groom and groomsmen while the are getting ready and waiting for the ceremony to begin." Hott!
I read fast. It actually took me longer than many novels, though. Dishwasher remained unemptied & wet clothes not hung up all evening, & I stayed awake reading.
I misspoke and it's girl x who wants the drugs, unsurprisingly...