EmpoweringParents.com

My friends and I all have secret fears about our children. My friend Caroline is deathly afraid her children will get sick. She wakes up at night, heart pounding, wondering if the bruise on her son’s arm is really cancer. My other friend Jaimie worries that her daughter is so socially awkward that she won’t ever make good friends. My secret fear? That my son will be bullied in school, just like I was in 4th grade. (But that’s a topic for another blog post.)

Well, my fears were realized last fall. When I picked Alex up from the playground at pre-school, I saw him playing with some other kids, but as I got closer, I realized that one of the boys was actually throwing rocks at my son. Not only did Alex not say anything, he didn’t even move out of the way. When I ran up to the them, the tears were rolling down my child’s face, and all he said was, “Billy is hurting me.” Ugh. As I hugged him, I felt about 3 inches tall. How could we have raised our son and not taught him how to protect himself? (Never mind how to assert himself!)

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From time to time, kids will say that they’re bored of school. There’s some research that indicates that when some kids are bored, they’re actually mildly angry. And so, I think that kids do get angry with school, it is boring sometimes. They also don’t like the responsibility of all the assignments. As they get older, these assignments don’t appear to prepare them for the adult world and they resent it, and they resent having to do them.

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I have always wondered if people who homeschool should get some kind of teacher training before they start–you know, so they could brush up on school subjects and find out about all the new things being taught out there. I actually briefly considered homeschooling my son, but my lack of math skills has always held me back. You see, I know my son will be more advanced than I am by the time he reaches, oh, 3rd grade. (Seriously. Long division without a calculator sends me into a panic.)

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It’s started already. My son Alex will announce “I hate school!” in the mornings, and then come up with any reason he can think of to stay home. This is often accompanied by crying and screaming. “I don’t feel well. I don’t want to do what the teacher says. School is poopy.” (He’s five—right now, “poopy” is the worst insult he can hurl.) And my favorite, “I can’t go to school because there is a dragon in my belly.” Seriously. When I dropped him off last week, he stood howling at the chain link fence of the playground, screaming my name like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. “Moommmmmmmy! Moooommmmmmmmmy!” You would have thought I was dropping him off at Sing Sing, and not the pre-school he’s loved for 2 years.

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In the news this week, there have been stories of misconduct by teachers, students and other school authority figures, from the teacher who duct taped his student to a desk, to the Pre-K teacher in Texas who was caught on tape saying “You all are stupid kids. If you’re mean to me, that means I get to be mean to you—got it?” And then there was the school bus driver in Phoenix who got into a shoving match with a 15- year-old student. (The student was suspended, the bus driver is now on paid leave pending further investigation.) In this post, James Lehman talks about what’s going on in our schools, and why teachers need training, too.

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When you drive into DeKalb, Illinois, there is a large sign with a flying ear of corn on it—yes, corn with wings—proudly proclaiming “Home of DeKalb Corn.”

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The February issue of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology features a study that says kids with ADHD are more likely to be bullied at school–or to actually be bullies themselves.

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Is paying kids for good grades a good idea? An article in USAToday this week mentioned that some states are getting in on the act–and paying students for good academic results.

In my home, we had a system where if our son got on the honor roll, he got a monetary reward—one we could afford. Not one that was a stretch for us. If he didn’t get on the honor roll, he didn’t get punished. He just didn’t get the reward. And I asked him, “What did you learn from this?” And, “What are you going to do differently next time to make the honor roll?” We focused him on the steps to take to get the reward next time. That fit our family just fine. Yes, we used money. But this is a decision that has to be made on a family by family basis. Read more »

With all the problems we have with kids in school systems today, I’m amazed to find people arguing on the web this week about whether or not we’re misdirecting kids by paying them for good grades. I think it’s a pretty artificial controversy, because the issue is not so much what you offer as a reward, but what your goal is with the child. Read more »