“We’ve gotten into this mass hysteria that if our children are not making A’s and they’re not getting into Harvard, then they’re failures,” said Cathy Vatterott, assistant professor of education, University of Missouri-St. Louis. “Why are we doing this? Have we just sort of lost sight of what it means to be a happy person?”
From infancy to adolescence, stress plays a crucial role in how children learn.
Studies done as early as the ‘60s and into the ‘80s indicate that school stress and achievement stress are widespread, and may result in academic failure, behavioral or emotional problems, drug abuse, health problems, and even suicide. More recent research about brain development supports these findings.
Remember Robert Fulghum’s 1986 best seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? His list probably sounds innocent and simplistic by today’s standards: Clean up your own mess; Don’t take things that aren’t yours; Wash your hands before you eat; Take a nap every afternoon; Flush. What would that list include in the kindergarten classrooms of 2008? Fulghum’s book stripped life down to essentials—what really is important in life?
Dr. Vatterott asks parents to consider what is important in their children’s lives. What kind of adults do they want their children to become? What educational environments nurture those desires?
It Begins in Infancy
One of the first studies of the effects of stress on infants was done by Megan Gunnar, who followed 33 infants who began life in a 1,000-bed Romanian orphanage. The children were severely traumatized from lack of interaction with caregivers. The 33 infants were adopted by Canadian couples. Twenty-seven Canadian infants were used as a control group. Gunnar found that one group of infants looked normal – normal grades, normal social interactions, normal stress hormone regulation. They were essentially no different from the control group. The other group was antisocial, had bad grades and could not regulate their stress. The difference in the two groups was the age of adoption. The infants who had been adopted before the age of four months fell into the first group. If they were adopted between 8 and 12 months, they fell into the second group.
More recent research, the ACE Study, uncovered how adverse childhood experiences (ACE) such as abuse, neglect and other traumatic stressors are strongly related to development of health and social problems throughout a person’s life. According to the Center for Disease Control’s web site, some of these problems include alcoholism and abuse, depression, fetal death, illicit drug use, multiple sexual partners, smoking and suicide attempts.
What does that mean for us as parents and caregivers? Environment counts. Even for infants. Stable emotional environments are nurturing to infants; stressful environments are toxic, and can have long-term effects.
How Does This Relate to Education?
John Medina, PhD, is founding director of the nonprofit Talaris Research Institute in Seattle. Talaris works to improve the social, emotional and cognitive development of children birth through age 5 by providing parents with tools to raise their children effectively. Medina believes that parents are the key to a child’s ability to learn.
“Designing an education system with first grade aimed at a 6-year-old is too late…a great deal of critical brain activity occurs before 6 years of age, activity that has profound influence on a classroom later.”
Medina says that education should start at birth, not with the child, but with the parents. “By concentrating first on stabilizing the emotional climate of the home, you can build the rest of the curriculum around a baby’s brain, which is more active than it will be at any time during the rest of its life.”
Courtney Linsenmeyer-O’Brien, MHR, a Tulsa therapist, agrees that parenting is crucial to a person’s development throughout life. “Parents first need to get in touch with themselves,” says Linsenmeyer-O’Brien. “To the extent that we can face ourselves, our children will have a model for accepting themselves.”
Recognizing and accepting a child’s unique temperament and personality will nourish a child’s integrity. Linsenmeyer-O’Brien says, “As parents, we can ask ourselves, ‘Am I sending a message to my children that I want them to be different than they are?’ ‘Do I withhold my love and affection when I disagree with them or something they’ve done?’”
Lack of acceptance by parents creates stress in children. Pushing children to become something they are not causes children to “shut down…to hide or deny parts of themselves that they believe are unacceptable, compromising their development.”
She points out that young children “know” through their bodies, and can sense a parent’s stress or anxiety. In a relaxed state, a person’s heartbeat slows and becomes more regular, says Linsenmeyer-O’Brien, resulting in increased Alpha waves, which are associated with deep realization and creativity.
Preschool Learning
In a preschool environment, Dr. Diane Horm, early childhood education director of the Early Childhood Education Institute at OU, says that high quality early childhood programs benefit all children, but especially those living in poverty or stressful conditions.
For young children, a high-quality learning environment should not create frustration and stress in a child. “Preschoolers should have ample opportunity for investigation and peer interaction,” says Horm. “They should have small manipulatives for fine motor skills, dramatic play and an organized, not chaotic, environment with adults who provide gentle and appropriate guidance.”
Dr. Horm says that, partly because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), kindergarten classrooms have become much more structured. She feels that, too often, the onus for learning is placed upon the child, when it should be upon the teacher to teach any 5-year-old who shows up.
“Kindergarten is a particularly ripe time for language learning,” says Horm, “so children should have lots of opportunities for finger plays, songs, rhyme, language games and they should hear appropriate speech from adults. The adults should also be able to turn challenging behaviors into learning opportunities.”
Dr. Horm also points out that parents often don’t realize that even positive events such as moving to a new home, changing jobs, or getting married can be stressors that affect their children. Teachers and parents can watch for signs of stress in children, such as clinginess, reverting to younger behavior, or acting out. During such times, children need more support from adults in their lives.
Grade School and Middle School
Anna America, mom to a 9-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, says that she and her husband only let their children participate in extra activities that they want to do, and would cut back if it seemed to be too much.
While her son’s amount of homework is easily manageable now, she says that she doesn’t look forward to middle school. “Parents of middle-schoolers often say their kids have to do an hour or more of homework a day,” says Anna. “I think that is just crazy. I do think homework is often just ‘busy work,’ and it sometimes runs the risk of making a subject completely unappealing. I even see that happening a little with my son. He has always loved math, and is very good at it, but I think over the years he has lost some of that enthusiasm, because so much of the time, it is just repetitive and boring, and doing pages of problems at home certainly doesn’t help.”
Anna also feels frustrated that schools have been forced into teaching to standardized tests. “Very few people will try to tell you the kids themselves actually benefit from that instruction,” she says, “and it’s frustrating that so much time has to be wasted on something that is so meaningless.”
Kristal Tomshany, mom of a seventh-grader, felt that her daughter’s sixth-grade homework and the expectations surrounding it, were stressful, ultimately contributing to her daughter switching schools.
“My daughter and her friend are excellent students,” said Kristal. “They viewed homework as a responsibility to actually complete.”
Most days, that “responsibility” meant homework until dinnertime, a shower, and maybe an hour of “free” reading time, just to “go to sleep and do it all over again.”
One day she overheard her daughter tell her friend, “Ever since we hit middle school, all they do is keep warning us about how hard high school is and how we have to push and prepare for the future…What’s wrong with just letting us be the age we are? Why do they keep making us feel like where we are isn’t good enough?”
Kristal felt that she had to explain the difference between compliance and responsibility to her daughter. “I wanted to make her aware that there were more important responsibilities than school – like the responsibility of living a balanced life and setting our own boundaries that will ensure a healthy lifestyle.”
As Kristal saw her become more stressed and depressed, she helped her daughter come up with a more reasonable schedule that allowed her to have “down” time, to get outdoors and to learn about herself. “She learned the mantra, ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’,” said Kristal.
Finding a better match for her child in terms of a learning environment has made a huge difference for Kristal and her daughter.
Dr. Vatterott says that many parents have put too high an emphasis on success in school. “I don’t know how people came to be so hysterical,” she said. “The whole trend is really troubling. We’re looking at our children as products, and the marketing aspect is huge. The media really feeds the idea that making the child a product is good business,” Vatterott added. “I watch the Today Show every morning and they have parenting segments such as how to get your child into the top college of your choice — a parent’s self-esteem becomes wrapped up in their child. They become heavily invested in their child being a product.”
Many students, as a result, are learning poor ways to cope with stress, says Vatterott. “They’re using unhealthy things to keep them going such as caffeine or energy drinks or drugs meant to be used for ADHD. We have a trend of looking at ways to de-stress our kids without looking at where the stress is coming from. We’re not looking at why a 15-year-old is stressed out. We’ve lost track of the values of what’s important in life.”
Tom Padalino, principal at Tulsa’s Thoreau Demonstration School, agrees. “In my 35 years in the profession,” he said, “I don’t see a difference in kids, but I see a difference in what they have to deal with. Kids are awfully busy these days. They need downtime from school and organized activities.”
Thoreau is a demonstration school that uses “best practices” in education, including integrating the curriculum and teaching life skill habits that encourage students to do their personal best.
Recognizing that parents are busy and stressed themselves, Thoreau offers an extended day program where students can relax, get help with homework or work on group activities with peers. Classroom instruction emphasizes cooperative learning rather than competition. Light levels in the classrooms are low. Soothing music is played, and students don’t sit in rows. Peers of varying ages get together in social groups called Tribes as a way to connect and build community, taking some of the stress of fear out of middle school interactions.
Much of Thoreau’s practices are designed to support “brain compatible” learning, recognizing the fact that a stressed student can’t learn effectively.
And Thoreau’s low-stress, supportive atmosphere is working. The school does not select students on ability, yet, according to Padalino, Thoreau’s methods are paying off. “We have the highest math and highest writing scores in Tulsa,” said Padalino. “One hundred percent of the kids who took the high school algebra test passed and 99 percent of the kids who took the writing test passed it.”
But Padalino says what goes on socially is as important as academics. He says to ask schools, “What are you doing in meeting those developmental needs? What are you doing to address what is going on socially and emotionally? We know that it affects kids’ academics.”
High School – “Doing School”
Robyn Sanzalone is the mother of two National Merit Scholars who graduated from TPS’s Edison Preparatory School, then went to OU. While both probably could have chosen more “name-brand” universities, her children are happy and productive. Her son is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Irvine and her daughter is majoring in French and Zoology.
Robyn feels that schools would be better off offering students extra mentoring, extending the school day or providing special help to those students who need to master a concept rather than piling on more homework.
“I believe kids are more stressed,” said Robyn. “Many children live in poverty or in stressful home situations. They are labeled failures at school when they are unable to leave those stressful situations behind and do well in school. Motivated, successful students face tremendous stress related to balancing tough curriculums, extracurricular activities and the perceived ‘need’ to be accepted into the ‘best’ schools. Kids do not have much time to simply be kids.”
Dr. Vatterott encourages parents to listen to themselves. “Parents are so busy,” she says, “that they tend to listen to other parents rather than their own gut. It’s okay to be the B student. We don’t talk to kids about what their passion is. We talk about what their grades are and what college they’re going to.” |
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