Inquiry final draft/blog post 7

Unintelligent Intelligence

            Child prodigies- we’ve all heard of them, the child who speaks at eleven months old or the three year old that can already read. Like most people, when parents hear these stories their brainwaves start formulating a plan of how to make their children just as smart. Nowadays, there are so many games, flashcards, DVDs, etcetera that claim to make your child smarter. However, do these games actually help children or hinder them in the long run? Parents are on a constant pursuit to find ways to help their children get ahead in life, but what happened to the days when a kid could really just be a kid? There was once a time when all children had to do was wake up, eat, go to school, and play. Now children who can barely count to three are involved in pageants, accelerated classes, after school programs, competitive sports, and that’s just the beginning of it. Author Jeffery Kluger brings up a very relevant point in his article The Quest For a SuperKid, quoting, “Trying to pump up children’s IQs in artificial ways may also lead to increased stress on the kids. Keep the brain on edge long enough, and the changes become long-lasting, making learning harder as kids get older” (Kluger 2). Parents, and adults in general, need to realize that children will mature and grow naturally without the over-stimulation of their still developing brains. Not only does over educating a young child deter their enjoyment of childhood, it also slows their social development, hinders their ability to learn later on in life, and adds extra health issues due to stress.

            In today’s world the social realm rules all, it is apparent in everything that goes on. Whether it is the latest celebrity craze, people trying to make it through school, or even the presidential race, a good social standing always takes the upper hand. With that in mind, it is hard to imagine why parents and teachers would want to reduce a child’s play time, making them socially inept. As time goes on, adults are finding less use for child interaction, as it is found obvious in the book Child Development and the Use of Technology. Through researching schools in Los Angeles and New York City authors Laura Case, Kay Reeves, and Elisabeth Conner found that “In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime at all” (Case, Reeves, and Conner 131). This is causing children to not develop social skills as easily as before and affecting their ability to adopt social skills once they grow up. Playtime may seem trivial, but it is the means by which children “move through social, physical, emotional, language, moral, and cognitive realms in order to learn” (Case, Reeves, and Conner 132). The schoolyard is where most children learn how to cope in the real world. By taking this away, we are infiltrating kids’ minds with the idea of how they should behave, act, think, and grow, but not giving them a chance to practice and experience this on their own. This in turn, is causing children to have an awkward social life later on. Due to the fact that only the analytical left-brain is being fed more than the creative right-brain, kid’s lack imagination from the beginning. These kids’ lives are engulfed in an environment that is solely indoors and individual, therefore they do not have so much as a glimpse of social life as child. Parental pressure for child prodigies does not only negatively affect a child’s social game later in life, but their actual intelligence.
            Many schools in China are amongst the top in the nation, and they are deserving of it. In the book Contemporary Debates in Childhood Education and Development, author Yujing Ni explains that the Chinese culture has adopted the method of teaching children educational skills at an early age long before it came to pass in the United States. He notes that while this method does boost children’s factual intelligence, he sees a steady trend of Chinese students not being able to adapt to other learning methods. “Chinese students perform well in mathematics but feel worse than their Western counterparts about their self-concept of mathematics competence and attitude towards learning mathematics” (Suggate and Reese 310). Now we are seeing the same pattern come into play in the United States. Due to the fact that parents and teachers are so focused on forcing their children to learn fast, they forget about the importance of letting nature take its course. When a child is habitually fed information and facts, their brain begins to adapt to this method of learning. They, in turn, stop thinking for themselves. As they grow older, they will rely more on the textbook version of learning and will find it difficult to think outside of the box. Self-teaching is a vital portion of continued intellectual growth. Once a child grows up and is out of school, they need to know how to apply what they have learned to real life situations. When parents, and other adult figures, begin feeding children’s brains with mnemonic educational devices, they are greatly reducing the brain’s opportunity to grow creatively. A child’s brain is in a rapid stage of learning and changing until about age seven, and once this age has arrived the brain’s adaptability levels out. Therefore, if a child has been routinely taught to learn in a specified manner, they will have difficulty understanding topics in other way. Although parents believe that they are doing right by their children, many teachers disagree. Through their many years of experience, teachers have found that children who cope well with social skills are more likely to excel later on in all areas of life. “Kids who come to school with a mastery of these less showy abilities stand a better chance of knocking off not only reading and writing when they are eventually presented but everything else that comes along as well” (Kluger 2). Ironically, all the educational devices said to boost a child’s intelligence is actually hindering it in the long run, but unfortunately, this is not the worst of it all.

            Child diseases have been on the rise in recent times, so parents have been paying particular attention to their children’s eating and exercising habits. What they do not realize, however, is that an important factor in keeping children healthy is their level of stress. When people hear the word stress they rarely think of children, but unfortunately, because of the added pressure in children’s lives, stress has become a very prominent issue. Research has found that “by four or five years old, the brains of stressed kids can start to look an awful lot like the brains of stressed adults, with increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol, the twitchy chemicals that fuel the body’s fight-or-flight response” (Kluger 2). A child’s brain is not equipped to deal with all the educational formulas that parents are burdening them with. While growing, a brain needs time to absorb its surroundings, naturally. By forcing a child’s brain to grow faster than nature was intending, it adds extra stressors. These stressors create more issues than just discomfort for a child. In the book Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development, authors Megan Gunnar and Michelle Loman confirm this idea, “Overwhelming stress in the face of inadequate physical and emotional [growth] appears to pose a risk for human development throughout life” (Gunnar and Loman 106). One of the biggest risks for development that is imposed is on a child’s immune system. As it is known, the immune system is one of the most bodily systems needed for the body to heal itself. Regrettably, a child’s immune system is significantly impacted by immense stress. It never fully has the opportunity to develop properly because of the constant pressure that it is under. The effects on the immune system can be long-term and may end up costing a child a lifetime of health issues.

            Although parents have the best intention in mind when they chose to begin teaching their children at an early age, they need to research the effects that this will really have on their kids. To some, the lack of social development that is caused is enough to make them reconsider it alone. Others find the fact that it hinders their ability to learn later on in life completely defeats the purpose. Add on the extra health issues due to stress and parents are realizing that over-stimulating a child’s brain may actually employ more negative results than positive. No matter how hard a parent tries a boost a child’s intelligence, every kid will eventually settle into their own pace. Nature will automatically take its course at some point in life; parents just have to decide when they are willing to accept it.