Dr. Robert Needlman
Specialist in pediatric behavior and development.
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 Ask Dr. Needlman
Wanting Your Child to Be above Average | | | QUESTION | | | Dear Dr. Needlman,
My child turned three years old the 25th of January. Most people think that she is SO smart for her age. I think that children of this generation are smarter than those of previous ones. I have searched many places for a chart or some source of information to show me what she should be doing and what would be considered "above average." Please let me know where I can find such information and what your ideas are on this subject.— CuriousMom in Winnfield, La | | | ANSWER |
February 26, 2002 | | | Dear CuriousMom,
You sound very proud of your child, and that's great. I'm not sure that children as a whole are smarter now than they were say a generation ago, but they may be developing verbal skills at an earlier age. For sure, all of the attention being paid to early brain development, and all of the time and money many parents invest in teaching their young children, does seem to result in young children who develop verbal and other skills early. But whether or not that translates into long-term intellectual gains remains to be seen. I'm skeptical.
Faster is not necessarily better. I often think of an experiment my mother carried out years ago, when she was a teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She and some other teachers wanted to know if they could teach children to read while they were still in kindergarten. They worked hard with the children, and many were reading well before the end of the year. However, by the time they were in third or fourth grade, these children weren't any better at reading than the children who learned on the regular schedule. On the other hand, the early readers had missed out on a lot of playtime during kindergarten because they were so busy doing reading drills.
Even though I am a developmental pediatrician, I'm a bit leery of developmental tests for young children. So, although our site does have a page which lists typical developmental milestones, we have chosen to stay away from offering any other tools designed to help parents grade their children, specifically those designed to identify which ones are "advanced." In this, we are following in the footsteps of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who never had such a table in his famous baby book.
I think developmental schedules sometimes do more harm than good. Even though all of us parents would like our children to be smart (or at least "above average" like the make-believe children in Lake Wobegon), there is a price to be paid for such competitiveness: a child who is just average is bound to feel like a failure, and a bright child may worry, lest he slip from his position at the top. Either way, the competitive pressures tend to get in the way of the child's true developmental task, which is to learn and grow at his or her own pace, with plenty of time to play, goof-off, try new things, day-dream, and generally, be a kid. — by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. |
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