FAMILY - CHILDCARE Help Your Child Help Your to Thrive Contemporary public schools focus intensely on academic success. Social-emotional development is given only incidental attention. Families must be prepared to take up the slack. Otherwise students’ emotional growth may be impeded, resulting in diminished social skills, motivation, and ability to cope with stress. This book describes how public schools have changed and provides strategies for helping your child to thrive. Liane Brouillette is an associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine. Drawing on her experience teaching in public schools in the United States and Europe, she explains how budget cuts, along with LIANE BROUI state and federal mandates, have stretched American teachers thin. She urges parents to be proactive in preparing their children with the tools needed to thrive in contemporary classrooms. LL ETTE Help Your Child to Thrive U.S. $XX.XX Making the Best of a Struggling Public Education System LIANE BROUILLETTE Contents Preface .................................................................................................ix Acknowledgments................................................................................xi Chapter 1: Succeeding When Schools May Not ..............................1 • An invitation to Parental Awareness ......................................2 • Gaining insight into your child’s experiences at school ........3 • Playing the “Great Game of High School” .............................6 • Impact of court decisions undercutting the “in loco parentis” doctrine ............................................................7 • The advent of “The Shopping Mall High School” .................9 • Public reaction to “A Nation at Risk” ................................... 10 • Proactive parenting is a shared quest to develop each child’s unique capabilities. .............................. 12 • The role of effective parents: Not necessarily what you’d expect .................................................................. 12 • Putting Yourself in Your Child’s Shoes ................................ 15 • Optional Activity: Taking Time to Gather Your Thoughts ....................................................................... 19 Chapter 2: Developing Confidence ................................................23 • Confidence Begins in Infancy ...............................................25 • The Harry Potter Phenomenon ............................................28 • What can we learn from Harry’s School? ............................30 • Effectively Scaffolding Your Child’s Learning ..................... 32 • Setting Limits .........................................................................34 • How Perception Shapes Reality ............................................ 35 • Making this a shared journey: How confident are you? ..... 38 • Optional Activity: Memories of Childhood ........................42 Chapter 3: Building a Sense of Human Connection ....................44 • A Declining Sense of Social Solidarity .................................46 • What is “social capital”? ........................................................ 47 • “A Christmas Carol” and the Power of Childhood Memories ............................................................49 • Mean Girls ..............................................................................50 • How Educational Policy Transformed Secondary Schools ................................................................. 51 • What do international test scores show? .............................. 52 • If the system does not work, why don’t they change it? ...... 53 • Research on What Parents Can Do ......................................54 • Making the System Work for Your Child ............................. 55 • Testing Your Awareness of What Makes People Happy ......58 • Optional Activity: Family Rituals ........................................60 Chapter 4: Learning from Consequences ......................................64 • Teaching through Offering Choices ..................................... 65 • Helping Your Child Learn from Consequences ...................66 • Taking a Look at Your Parenting Style ................................. 69 • Stopping the Nonsense .......................................................... 72 • The Tragic Story of Michael Jackson .................................... 74 • Talking about Serious Choices in Middle and High School .................................................................... 75 • Grade Point Average vs. Character ....................................... 78 • Talking to Moody Teenagers ................................................. 81 • The Hidden Narrative of Star Wars ...................................... 82 • Analyzing Darth Vader’s Psychological Problems ............... 85 • Differing Critical Responses .................................................86 • Making a Pact with the Devil ............................................... 87 • The Phantom of the Opera: A Female Perspective .............. 89 • Optional Activity: Watching Movies with Children and Teens ................................................................92 Chapter 5: Nurturing Emotional Intelligence............................... 95 • Helping Young People Cope ..................................................96 • Helping Young People Deal with the Media Barrage ........ 100 • The Matrix ........................................................................... 102 • Yearning for a Sense of Human Connection: A Quiz ....... 104 • “The Matrix” as Metaphor .................................................. 109 • What if your child struggles with social skills? ..................111 • Why the great variation among U.S. schools and teachers? ........................................................................ 112 • The Limits of Technology ....................................................116 • Optional Activity: Emotion Coaching ............................... 117 Chapter 6: Fostering a Sense of Agency ....................................... 119 • Social-Emotional Development and School Success ......... 120 • Stories as a Child’s “Language of Possibility ...................... 121 • Commercial Substitutes for Shared Family Stories ........... 122 • How a Child’s Understanding of the World Develops ...... 123 • Learning Oral Language to Age 7. ...................................... 125 • From Age 8 to Age 15. .......................................................... 126 • Age 15 through early 20s. .................................................... 129 • Moving from Knowledge to Wisdom ................................. 132 • The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit .............................. 136 • Making Stories Come to Life in Early Elementary School ............................................................... 139 • The Impact on Classroom Culture ..................................... 140 • Optional Activity: Do You Recall Going through Something Similar? ............................................... 141 Chapter 7: Making Wise Decisions .............................................. 146 • Helping Teens Weigh Post-High School Options .............. 148 • Resisting Social Pressure ..................................................... 149 • Is College Worth the Money? .............................................. 150 • Who Pays for College? ......................................................... 151 • Dealing with the Rigor of College Courses ........................ 153 • Forrest Gump ....................................................................... 154 • Optional Activity: Changing Thought Patterns ................ 157 Endnotes ........................................................................................... 163 Index ................................................................................................ 167 Preface here are inherent contradictions built into public schools. The large number of students to be served forces school districts to adopt a bureaucratic structure. Taxpayers want assurances that their money will be well-spent, so school districts are organized to produce Tpredictable results. However, predictable behavior is not natural to inquiring young minds. Children are born with widely varying talents and develop at differing rates. Given these contradictions, how are public schools to live up to the expectations spelled out in state curriculum guidelines that specify what each child is expected to know and be able to do at the end of each school year? The short answer is that contemporary public schools focus on making sure all students achieve minimum levels of proficiency, as measured by standardized test scores. Social-emotional issues like motivation are largely left to the family. Therefore, much of a student’s success depends on the relationships and preparation experienced at home. From first-day jitters in kindergarten to the excitement of high school graduation, parents do what they can to help their child succeed. Yet it is difficult for parents to know where their help is most needed. This book warns that—since social-emotional development tends to get little attention in school—when families are not prepared to fill in any gaps their child’s emotional growth may be impeded. This, in turn, can hamper a student’s ix development of social skills, industriousness, and the ability to cope with stress. In practical terms, the narrow focus of public schools on preparing students