THis is a book i read that i highly recommend called
Family Matters by Robert Evans
I emailed portions to my brothers and sisters and i have copied them here, enjoy.
Family Matters
By Robert Evans
Anyone heard or read about this book ?
Txs, manny s.
‘In this book, Rob Evans focuses clearly on troubles in families which interfere with children’s readiness for school and learning. The book is filled with thoughtful reflections on how families have changed, with special attention to the many ways in which parents' energies have been drawn away from home and family.
The book is thoroughly researched, extremely articulate, and a very entertaining read. Evans does not shy away from provocative assertions to support his diagnosis. He is a compassionate advocate for children and their families, and while he respectfully declines from offering simple solutions to complex dilemmas, parents will find much to use here, and educators at all levels will look at their challenges in a new light.”
Review on Amazon.com
Family Matters
By Robert Evans
Executive director of the Human Relations Service in Wellesley, Mass.
Former high school and pre-school teacher and former child and family therapist
Lives near Boston, Mass and has two grown sons
2004
Intro
The evidence is that too few parents now feel a primary responsibility for meeting their children’s emotional needs and teaching them the habits and values vital to successful adulthood; their abdication is often startling and disturbing. And too many parents who do still accept this responsibility have lost confidence in their ability to fulfill it as rapid social, technological, and economic changes have combined to disempower them. (Elkind, 1994 p8)
Educators confront an additional dilemma: the decline of the support parents themselves have traditionally provide to students and to the school…..more and more students arrive at school less ready to learn….and less ready to be students.
Teachers face a decline in fundamentals they used to take for granted: attendance, attention, courtesy, industry, motivation, responsibility……students are more difficult to reach and teach, their concentration and perseverance more fragile, their language and behavior more provocative.
Most of a child’s learning occurs outside of school and what has deteriorated most is not the skills of teachers, but the lives of children.
In most schools, the majority of students and parents are still positive participants and the general tenor of the home-school relationship is still cooperative and respectful.
Parents are finding it more difficult than ever to provide the basics of healthy child development. They are overwhelmed and undermined, caught between rising expectations and rising fears about the future, weaken by economic and social changes.
Ch. 1 Something has gone Way Wrong
Over the past ten years I have spoken with educators from several thousand schools across the country and have visted nearly six hundred schools myself. Without exception, teachers and principals report that students are:
harder to reach and teach,
their attention and motivation harder to sustain,
their language and behavior more provocative,
and at even earlier age.
They also note that parents are increasingly anxious about their children’s success, yet increasingly unavailable to support and guide them, and increasingly distrustful and critical of the school.
The evidence is abundant: schools are facing a cohort of students that is harder to interest, motivate and engage, and cohort of parents that is less effective, supportive, and trusting than any in recent generations. (p15)
Ch.2 The Building blocks of Healthy Growth
Ch.2 The Building blocks of Healthy Growth
By the time children graduate from high school, they have spent barely a tenth (1/10 or 10%) of their lives in school. As important as schooling is , almost all students learn their most essential life-shaping lessons OUTSIDE the formal curriculum-and-instruction context.
It is hard to imagine a subject that has stimulated more theory and research, or been more vulnerable to speculation and fads. Than the raising of the young and role of parents.
Even a casual review of the research…reflected the prevailing prejudices and priorities of the period. Child development professionals remain sharply divided about how to interpret some of the data…
What are the core essentials that have so far stood the test of time:
1. All children need roots and wings
2. These are significantly influenced by the dimensions of the parents’ behavior (nurture, structure and latitude)
3. These in turn are successfully provided in a wide variety of ways in the normal course of childbearing
4. One particular pattern of nurture, structure and latitude seems to lead to the most successful outcomes for children growing up in America.
Roots and Wings
Every theory of child development must, like every parent, come to grips with two fundamental tendencies that lie at eh source of behavior, indeed of lie itself:
The impulse to be connected to others and the impulse to master the world (separately on one’s own).
Variously called attachment and agency, affiliation and autonomy, dependence and independence, the two are seen in different theories as needs that must be met or as drives that assert themselves.
Almost every living organism needs to connect to others – for sustenance at first, for procreation later, and for protection throughout.
And almost every living organism also needs to maser its environment enough to achieve self-sufficiency – to be able to feed itself, fend for itself, find a mate, and so on.
Among humans these twin drives exist not just in the biological level but at the psychological level.
We remain connected to, engaged with, and psychologically dependent upon our parents far beyond childhood and adolescence. And when we move out of our family and into the world we take with us predispositions and ways of treating others that we learned at home, often dealing with coworkers as we did with siblings, and with bosses as we did with parents.
At the same time, all infants are also born as exploring, learning, constructing beings.
We have a primary tendency to reach out, to try out, to experience and master objects and events.
….although adults are more autonomous than infants, they never outgrow their dependent needs….
Females tend to show stronger affiliative and expressive tendencies; males, stronger independent and instrumental inclinations.
….full independence is crucial to true mental health as an adult…
Children need to grow up in and environment that offers them care, connection and protection, yet also urges them to explore, strive, and become self-sufficient.
Nurture
It begins as the affection and attention, the holding and ministering, the care and comfort an infant receives.
(Rosi would like this one) It flows like mother’s milk….we share flesh and blood and we belong to each other
In fact, we never outgrow our need for it, although as we get older we come to receive it in less overt and direct ways. In families with close social bonds, where parents foster reciprocity as a behavioral norm, their children typically show greater compliance and adherence to their values.
Children who are more likely to adopt their parents’ standards for conduct and control their own behavior accordingly. This will in turn earn them more praise and positive response from those outside the family, further buttressing self-esteem. This will make them easier to teach and manage in school.
There is virtual no controversy among experts about the importance to children of growing up in a setting that provides clear norms for how one should behave, treat others, and achieve.
Nearly every school of thought in child development sees structure as both normal and necessary to healthy growth.
Structure involves a dynamic between freedom and responsibility.
Like nurture, structure is a key contributor to social competence and confidence.
This internalized structure is vital to the ability to resist external pressures….
Another enefit of structure, implicit I the very notion of boundaries and limits, guidelines and expectations, is the delay of gratification, learning to defer one own impulses.
In “Emotional Intelligence” Daniel Goleman emphasis how vital this capacity is to success in life.
Structure is also a key contributor to self-esteem.
Conventional wisdom sees it (self esteem) as crucial to personal, social and intellectual maturation.
It makes children feel good about themselves and strengthens their perseverance and resilience and impress their performance.
When a students falls into academic or social difficulty at school, low self-esteem is almost sure to be on the list of potential causes
Successful people have lots of it….it can be fostered b the right kind of upbringing.
Self-esteem can NOT be artificially implanted or boosted.
Self-esteem is like happiness -- pursuing it directly is impossible and self defeating
(manny adds, WOW I did not know that ??)
Mr. Rogers (TV guy) “ Discipline is a kind of love. If children didn’t have limits from those who cared about them, they would never feel that they were loved. If a child ran out into the street, and nobody screamed, that child would think nobody loves me. So, healthy limits, which children understand, are a marvelous way of saying, ‘I care about you”
Some of the most important learning stems from disappointment and loss
Everyone must become a problem solver
Everyone must b able to act on the world, draw conclusions and inferences from the results, and then apply this knowledge.
Think for a minute about the most important lessons you have learned in your life. If you are like most people, you experienced these in a context of disappointment and loss. They are the roots of maturity.
It is no whether we encounter such setbacks, but how we cope with them that defines what we’re made of and that determines our well-being.
Over the course of a lifetime, what builds a feeling of self-worth is choosing to face meaningful problems rather than avoiding them.
….disappointments are a necessary part of growing up and that a child (as an adult) wil be stronger for being able to face them.
Disappointment is a great leveler, a teacher of humility and respect, and opportunity to walk in the shoes of others, and hence an important contributor to the capacity for empathy and to the skills of community membership and democracy.
Managing latitude, letting and helping children learn from experience, requires us to respect children’s different strengths and styles and to let them do their own problem solving where possible in developmentally appropriate ways.
Parents who are overcontrolling value obedience over independence. They tend to be arbitrar and absolutist and to stifle the child’s risk taking, autonomy and expressiveness. Parents who are overprotective also don’t give children sufficient room to grow.
