All work and no play makes junior a stressed out boy. In an effort to give children the absolute best — to give them a leg up in their college search and to prepare them for success in our increasingly competitive society — some parents have turned their children into smaller versions of themselves: overscheduled, anxious and FAR from happy.
Do you dream of little Jacob or Jessica getting into Harvard or Yale? Would you like to see them excel at mathematics and writing and science? Then surely you’ve got the Baby Einstein videos. And you play Mozart to them at bedtime and during meals, right? Have you signed them up for Suzuki violin yet? How about soccer? Karate? Don’t forget religious school and dance lessons!
With all the “doing” going on in the lives of children, most of them don’t have time to really “be” children, says educator Eugene Schwartz.
At the Princeton Waldorf School this Friday, January 21, at 7:30 p.m., Schwartz, author of “Millennial Child,” will address these problems and challenges in “From the Hurried Child to the Worried Child: Does School Have to Be Stressful?”
Schwartz grew up in New York, the child of first-generation Russian immigrants. His father’s parents were murdered during a pogrom in Russia when he was just a baby. The elder Schwartz was primarily raised in an orphanage when his grandmother died not long after arriving with her grandson in the US. “We lived in very tough neighborhoods in very extreme circumstances,” Schwartz says. “Brighton Beach in Brooklyn’s Washington Heights. We wound up in a low income housing project in Woodside, Queens, that was a big step up because they actually had grass.” Schwartz says that “even though we were poor and things were always precarious, my parents generated a feeling of security. They handled things and I got to have a childhood. I felt secure in my home; I felt secure in New York.”
After graduating from the public schools in NY, Schwartz went to college at Columbia and received his bachelors in English in 1962. He then worked for five years with the elderly and the dying in the Fellowship Community, a multi-generational, long-term care community that sprang from the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner. “Having worked with the elderly and the dying, you learn what is really important,” Schwartz reflects, “you learn what things are really going to boil down to.” This work gave Schwartz insight into what was “key for a happy and meaningful life.” And that, he says, was the impetus for turning his attention to childhood education. “Where would you go to have the most impact in order to make old age a positive thing? Teaching young people.” In 1981 Schwartz started with his very first class with the Waldorf School (like the Fellowship Community, inspired by Steiner). Currently working at the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge, NY, Schwartz also lectures and works as a consultant with teachers and parents.
The father of two adult sons, the 59 year old Schwartz is in a second marriage with two school-aged daughters, 7 and 14. “I see a big difference, even between my sons and daughters,” he says. “Children today do things faster, they’re more stressed. They’re less inclined to do things independently and need more reassurance.”
This change, Schwartz asserts, is due to a kind of super-parenting trend. “Life tends to be developed on an adult scale,” he says, but “children are not little adults.” Part of the reason for the high-pressure trend can be traced to the work of “Jerome Bruner who works out of Harvard. He says that cognitive capacity is unlimited at any age.” This thinking had parents signing their infants up for reading workshops and speaking multiple languages in the house in an effort to create ‘super babies.’ “Another powerful influence was the Better Baby Institute in Philadelphia,” says Schwartz. “They said that a child at three, five or seven has the same capacity for learning as adults — that they can be taught on near an adult level at any age. The trouble is, learning may have occurred, but no one followed up with how these children were doing as teens. When we try to push children into adulthood intellectually, we’ll be creating adults who are searching for childhood.”
Children who are pushed to the limit show signs of anxiety, says Schwartz. “They’re afraid to be alone — without someone close by. When a child is stressed,” he says, “they aren’t able to evoke something from the inside. A healthy child is able to find joy anywhere. Even in London during the blitz and during the Holocaust, children were able to evoke some childish joy — to find something to be happy about.” If children can’t find joy by themselves “it’s a sign that they have too much coming at them and they don’t have the inner resources to deal with it.”
Stressed children also are more afraid of making mistakes. “They want to be perfect. They don’t have many role models of people who make mistakes and that’s an unrealistic perspective of the world and it creates an intolerance of error. But everyone would agree that we learn from our mistakes.”
Even with all the stress they’re encountering today, children are resilient, says Schwartz. “This is not the end of childhood.” To protect your children from the stresses of the hurried and worried, Schwartz suggests that parents “let a child have a childhood,” and some of the best ways to enable that are:
Playtime, playtime, playtime. “Make sure there is time and space for imaginative play. Unorganized, unsupervised play; not every activity needs a uniform.”
Less TV time. “Media gives the world from an adult perspective,” says Schwartz. If a child wanders into a yard, “they might look at a rock and play. There may be a sunset, a bird but the child doesn’t notice, she plays with what is of greatest interest. But on television, a camera man may focus on the sunset. He’ll tell her what’s important.” Television, Schwartz says, “does all the work for the child. It makes her a passive consumer. If a child plays, they get directly involved and experience things through their own senses.”
Moving time. “Schools have become more and more focused on students sitting and focusing on tasks,” he says. “They’re sitting too long and they get ansty and they want to do something to get it out of their system.” Be sure to let them run around and release that energy.
Face time. “Children need part of the day directed to them.” That might be reading a book before bedtime or family time during meals. The ride to soccer practice doesn’t count.
Bedtime. “Recent studies show that all Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, but children are going to bed too late and they wind up in school barely awake.” Children need regular routines, particularly around sleep, says Schwartz. “Go to sleep at the same time in a calm, quiet way,” he suggests. Turn off the TV long before bedtime too. “Kids can’t go to sleep because they’re all riled up from watching TV,” he says, and that makes it hard for them to get the sleep that they need.
And, Schwartz suggests, find out about your child’s school. Do they “give them enough of a chance to be a child? Do they play? Do they look at things other than computer screens? Is there singing and painting?”
Without play, Schwartz says, children “may be doing well on exams, but they aren’t really learning. And like that famous Princeton resident Einstein once said: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’.”
— Deb Cooperman
“From the Hurried Child to the Worried Child: Does School Have to Be Stressful?”, with Eugene Schwartz, Friday, January 21, 7:30 p.m. Waldorf School, 1062 Cherry Hill Road, Princeton. Register. $10. For more information call 609-466-1970 or visit www.princetonwaldorf.org.
