simcha's postings about love, connection, parenting & personal growth
Finland’s educational system began a process of transformation some 40 years ago that has turned it into one of the most successful in the world. According to a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine (Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? by Conway & Hancock), this became evident in 2000, from the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues.
More than anything, kids need a little difficulty, some challenge or deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. If we take that opportunity away from them, their education – both at home and at school – is “missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.” We also inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experiences that can lead to character growth.
Marital therapists commonly speak of “relationship dances” when exploring the repetitive patterns of interaction that couples fall into, patterns that greatly limit their capacity to problem-solve. Some of the more common “dance steps” include the following:
Baumrind’s initial study and the many studies that have followed have led to the following (broadly described) conclusions about the impact of these different parenting styles.
The study of parenting patterns and their impact on children has been greatly influenced by research done by psychologist Diana Baumrind in the 1960s, and others in her footsteps.
Using many measures of behavior, she found that parents differed on four important dimensions.
In today’s New York Times editorial (Falser Words Were Never Spoken), Professor Brian Morton*, director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, tells us we can’t have it all. We are misled, he claims, by the “shiny, fabulous, gorgeous makeover” of the teachings of our great thinkers, a makeover that strips their wisdom of its subtlety and complexity, leaving us with only illusion and fantasy. Three examples:
While couples frequently complain that their partners aren’t sensitive to their needs, I have observed many dissatisfied individuals presenting as OVER-sensitive to the other’s needs and feelings. Wanting to avoid hurting or “devastating” the other, they avoid confrontation altogether. In the most sensitive of areas – the sexual realm – couples will live together for decades, so enmeshed in one another’s feelings and in their need to maintain emotional stability, that what needs to be said is never said. And so, naturally, nothing changes.
In this delightful poem, English poet John Kenyon* (1783-1856) mocks the pretentious and complacent 19th-century British traveler who avoids mixing with the local populations, learns little that touches or changes him, then returns home to pontificate on (and brag about) what he has observed from the comfort of his train car. Kenyon reminds us that if we fail to open ourselves emotionally to that which we encounter as we drift around the bay that is our life, we risk becoming like the well-travelled oyster who — “shut within
his sulky shell, he nought hath seen.”