Friday, October 30, 2020

Lessons from Elementary School

This week's article summary is Let's Read, Listen, and Connect to Bridge Political Differences.

As we still have a few more days remaining of this acrimonious presidential election, this essay from the President of NAIS is not only timely but also provides pragmatic suggestions for how we as a country can begin to move beyond the current climate of fanatical partisanship that divides and separates us.

In my classroom-teaching days whenever a presidential election came along, I would discuss with my 8th-grade students the differences between the Republican and Democrat political parties. I’d start by drawing a horizontal line entitled Forms of Government on the classroom whiteboard; on one end I’d write ‘Anarchy’ and on the other ‘Totalitarianism.’ I’d ask my students to give me examples of each, and they typically focused on anarchy’s absence of government and unlimited individual freedoms and totalitarianism’s complete government control and severe restriction of individual freedoms. 8th graders quickly saw the disadvantages of either extreme.

Then I’d asked them to place Democracy, which tries to find that delicate balance between an effective government that ensures individual rights, on the horizontal line. Democracy isn’t perfect—think of Churchill’s famous quote “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”—but my students understood its ideals. 

Then I’d ask them about what they knew or had heard about the platforms of the Republican and Democrat parties in America. They brought up taxes, social services, gay rights, prayer in school, military spending, abortion, etc. 

Finally, I had them place both parties on the whiteboard’s horizontal line. Invariably the class agreed that both parties were very close to the middle where they had placed Democracy. Their collective a-ha moment was the realization that Democrats and Republicans were much more similar than different when compared to other forms of government.

As you’ll see in the article, our entire country needs an a-ha moment.

And maybe what we do in elementary school can lead the way.

We teach our students to listen and to have respectful, civil discussions. We guide them to think using multiple perspectives. We help them see that the world is not a binary—with only zero/sum, either/or choices--but a kaleidoscope of difference, variety, and nuance. We encourage them to have an open mind, to withhold judgment, and to remain life-long learners on a continual search for truth. We ask them to seek commonalities and to celebrate differences. We guide them to be fair, honest, responsible, and kind. And most importantly we challenge ourselves and their parents to role model all the above in not only our words but our actions.

It’s been challenging to remain positive and upbeat as we continue to live through this pandemic and this vitriolic presidential election. (Won’t we all breathe a collective sigh of relief when political ads stop?)

Still, the reason I teach and the reason I love elementary school is our focus is on hope, optimism, and possibilities!

Joe

-----

I grew up in an era when arguing about politics over dinner was a friendly family sport. Although these discussions were often passionate, we would always end amicably, agreeing to disagree. The arguments did not focus on political party positions but rather on issues. Today, political tensions are at an all-time high, and what used to be friendly banter can now devolve into heated debates that rip families, friends, and colleagues apart. 

USC has measured the change over time in political polarization, specifically the number of Republicans who lie to the right of the most right-leaning Democrats and the number of Democrats who lie to the left of the most left-leaning Republicans. Currently, the overlap is close to zero while in the 1960s it was about 50%; ideological moderates in both parties have seemingly disappeared.

Are we really so divided on issues though? Or could this be more perception than reality? A new report by the University of Pennsylvania suggests that "Democrats and Republicans both think that the divide between them is more than twice what it actually is." The study reveals “an opportunity to address a range of false beliefs that Americans hold about each other that lead to fear, distrust, and hostility.” 

Opinion leaders can begin to stop the spread of polarizing rhetoric and do much to change hearts and minds. Community leaders can create awareness campaigns about partisan misperceptions through voter’s guides and outreach to faith and cultural communities. Individually, we need to really listen to those who see issues differently than us and find areas of agreement.

In our school communities, we can and must work to facilitate effective dialogue so that we can create healthy cultures for students and adults. Moral Reframing is one technique. The way people typically approach political persuasion is that they talk about their own reasons for holding given political positions, but this neglects the fact that the person you’re talking with often has very different moral values, very different psychological makeup, and a very different social background. Moral  Reframing is rooted in empathy: if you want to begin to change someone’s mind, you should make your argument from an understanding of their values, not your own. This technique can bring people together on a range of issues, like economic inequality, environmental protection, and same-sex marriage.

Today, people tend to read and watch those sources that confirm their point of view; by doing so, we’re training ourselves to struggle speaking with someone with different values. We can begin by reading as much as possible on views that are opposing to our own.

Many schools are already doing this work successfully, but we must continue to grow if we are to become communities in which respect, empathy, and mutual trust are the foundation. We are learning communities first and foremost. Let’s put that muscle to work in bridging political divides.



Friday, October 23, 2020

Are Textbooks in History Class Outdated?

This week's article summary is Are History Textbooks Worth Using Anymore?

When I lived in Oklahoma, I taught 8th-grade history at a K-12 independent school. I taught World History up to the Renaissance where the 9th-grade history class began.

Every few years the 9th-grade history teachers and I reviewed new textbook options.

Reading the article below reminded me that back then our elusive hope was that our new textbook would be more multicultural, include different viewpoints about important historical events, and not hold back on history’s complexities—its good, bad, and ugly. While there were always a few cursory additions to newer textbooks, the one we ultimately selected never came close to our hopes, as textbook publishers catered to the preferences of large school districts, especially those in Texas, and hence omitted the darker side of history (all the stuff that kids and history teachers find so fascinating!).

Writing one-volume surveys of history is rare today. The most recent—and one I recommend highly—is Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Unlike the blander textbooks I used in 8th grade, Lepore’s history of America is premised on our country being founded on inherent contradictions that we continue to grapple with today: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution both espouse freedom and equality for all under the law yet ignored slavery, negated women’s rights, and allowed for the persecution of Native Americans. While this textbook is replete with the good, bad, and ugly of American history and details the experiences of those often marginalized in other textbooks, the reader nevertheless needs to understand that Lepore has a particularly strong stance about America, which you might or might not agree with. 

As a whole-to-part learner, I have always liked textbooks because they provide a big-picture overview of the subject. Yet just as Lepore’s textbook has a theme, readers need to ask themselves what may be missing or what else they need to learn to get the complete picture of the subject matter. While the article below recommends using primary sources rather than textbooks, even primary sources are biased and subjective.

Back in Oklahoma, I wish I had taken more time to have my students reflect on what was missing in the textbooks we read, what perspective the author was writing from, and whose voices and experiences were missing. 

Even in Trinity’s elementary school environment, we can guide our students to be more questioning about what they read and see. For me, preparing kids for the future includes developing in them a healthy skepticism and an inquiring mindset about what more they need to know.

Joe
------

Among contemporary education critics, the textbook is a classic and perennial foil—perhaps because its contents are a compromise between experts and politicians, groups with sometimes competing agendas. This is especially true of history texts, which attempt to distill complex and contrasting events into simple, linear narratives, often at the expense of nuance and unpleasant truths. Yet despite these limitations, textbooks are still the most popular way to teach and learn history.

Education historian Diane Ravitch contends that “every textbook has a point of view, despite a facade of neutrality.” Beyond names and dates, she notes, “there is seldom, if ever, a single interpretation of events on which all reputable historians agree. History is anything but agreeable.”

Textbooks pass through innumerable hands before they ever reach a classroom. And states play an outsized role. Textbooks are shaped by state standards, approved by state legislatures, and reviewed by panels of educators appointed by state departments of education, who can request significant revisions from publishers. A recent New York Times analysis detailed how the most influential states, Texas and California, produce markedly different versions of the same texts from publishers “shaded by partisan politics.”

The California version of a popular McGraw-Hill textbook, for example, includes language on redlining and housing discrimination against African Americans after the Second World War; yet the Texas version does not. Depending on what state they’re sold in, textbooks with the same titles either temper or amplify subjects like Reconstruction, LGBTQ rights, and gun control.

“The truth of the matter is education is political,” says Tinisha Shaw, a former history teacher in North Carolina.

Tellingly, although Shaw has helped write standards at the state level—the same ones that influence textbook adoption—she hardly ever used them in her own classroom, due in part to what she sees as flaws in how textbooks are written and adapted, as well as their tendency to overly script curriculum.

“I’m more of the thought of getting rid of the textbooks,” she says. Instead, she suggests that each teacher create curated lists of materials they’ve vetted—“primary sources and secondary sources that hit particular themes that we discuss.” It’s for sure a different approach to teaching history, but one that’s gaining currency with educators who want their students to explore a greater variety of viewpoints.

Of course, history texts across the board have changed significantly over the past half-century, stripping out narratives of European and American exceptionalism along with myths minimizing the impacts and conditions of slavery. And publishers have made at least some effort to add more multicultural and diverse perspectives. Still, too often the story of women and people of color is not woven into the central narrative of the textbook but is relegated to sidebars and special sections.

An even bigger issue is the need to prepare students for an uncertain and protean future—the so-called fourth industrial revolution. They need strong critical-thinking skills, and just teaching to the textbook is not enough.

Despite the fact that history isn’t made from any one source, textbooks can only teach students how to digest a narrow synthesis of history written from a single perspective, which may be as untenable as it is undesirable. What students really need is to encourage students to work with primary sources themselves. That way they’re doing the work of historians—following an approach known as historiography--contrasting various points of view and coming to their own conclusions. In essence, not trying to teach students what they should think but how to think.


 

Friday, October 16, 2020

Letting Boys Be Emotional

If you asked people what’s the most important goal in their life, the most common response would be ‘to be happy’.

And happiness extends to our emotional state--we all want to be feel good and be happy most, if not all,  of the time.
 
If you’re familiar with the Buddha’s life, you know that for his first 20 years he was a pampered prince, never experiencing or even seeing any sadness or heartache; in the cloistered protection of his palace, he was shielded from the real world--its ills, pain, suffering, and ugliness. 
 
Not surprisingly, Buddha at some point had to leave this utopia and experience the real world. 
 
His story is an allegory for all of us. As we all know, experiencing only continuous joy and happiness is unrealistic and ultimately unwanted. Yes, we want to experience happiness but we also need to embrace a full range of emotions that result from the vicissitudes of our life.
 
As the article explains, parents/teachers encourage the full range of emotions with all myriad nuances in girls, yet don’t do the same with boys. Experiencing all our emotions and learning how to deal and react with them takes practice, reflection, and guidance. We do a disservice to boys by limiting their range of emotions to societal expectations for males—being stoic and unemotional. Consequently, boys/men are often more emotionally distant than girls/women because they haven’t been afforded the opportunity to experience their full emotional range.
 
The story of Buddha reminds us that perpetual happiness is an impossibility. We can dream of perpetually sipping a bottomless margarita on a Caribbean beach under a cloudless, azure sky, yet deep down we know that’s an unfulfilling existence. We all need to experience all life has to offer including its pain and suffering and employ our full range of emotions to handle the ups and downs of life.
 
Joe
 
----
Psychologists have long championed the importance of cultivating positive emotions as one path towards optimizing well-being, resilience to stressors, and salutary physical health outcomes. Not surprisingly, when people are asked what emotions they want to feel, we place a heavy emphasis on wanting to feel primarily positive emotions.
 
However, research suggests the choice may no longer be a straightforward one. Recent work by psychologists reveals the once hidden benefits of experiencing a diversity of emotions, both positive and negative. 
 
This is consistent with what we have long known about emotions; namely, those emotions serve as a guidepost on the map of human experience, drawing our attention to the important markers in our environments—the warning signs, or things that need to be noticed, changed, or processed and understood. 
 
If having lots of different emotions is good for our health as adults, then shouldn't we be fostering the experience of a diverse range of emotions in young children as well? 
 
Research suggests we are not fostering emotional diversity from a young age, especially when it comes to raising young boys. As early as infancy, boys’ and girls’ emotional landscape differs. One study reported that when watching an infant being startled by a jack-in-the-box toy, adults who were told the infant was a boy versus a girl were more likely to perceive the infant as experiencing anger, regardless of whether the infant was actually a boy. Gender differences in the diversity of emotion words parents use in conversations with young boys and girls also emerge. Another study examining conversations between mothers and young children, mothers interacting with daughters employ emotion vocabulary of greater density and depth, whereas conversations with sons tended to focus primarily on a single emotion—you guessed it, anger. 
 
Regardless of whether gender differences in adult behavior arise from conscious or unconscious psychological processes, one thing is clear: boys grow up in a world inhabited by a narrower range of emotions, one in which their experiences of anger are noticed, inferred, and potentially even cultivated. This leaves other emotions—particularly the more vulnerable emotions—sorely ignored or missing in their growing minds.
 
Indeed, a lack of fostering emotional diversity in youth may have long-term problematic consequences. As early as elementary school, the avoidance of strong emotions (besides anger) results in academic underperformance in boys. Later in development, men suppress their emotions more than women; and men, in turn, experience greater depressive symptoms, and resort more often to physical violence. Scientists speculate that trouble regulating emotion may explain the link between restricted emotions and aggressive behavior towards others in men. This seems likely, given that the skills to regulate emotion are gained through practice, which boys may be less likely to have if they do not have permission to experience the full range of emotions.
 
Unfortunately, men’s restriction in emotional expression extends to the home—men are also less likely to share their own vulnerable emotions with partners and are less open to these experiences in their partners.
 
Experiencing the full range of emotions may not only benefit young boys’ psychological health but have far-reaching benefits for society at large.



Friday, October 9, 2020

Unlocking Students' Internal Drive for Learning

This week’s article summary is How to Unlock Students' Internal Drive for Learning.

 

Daniel Pink’s book Drive posits that three needs motivate adults in both their personal and professional lives: autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives), mastery (the dedication to improve in areas that matter to us), and purpose (the need to contribute to something bigger than ourselves).


In schools, student motivation is typically separated into intrinsic (from within) and extrinsic (from outside). While parents/teachers strive for their children/students to develop intrinsic motivation, we invariably resort to providing extrinsic incentives and punishments.

 

As the article explores, though, the problem with extrinsic motivators like grades, praise, and rewards is they don’t support children developing agency, self-confidence, and the fortitude to handle challenges and missteps, and too often even lead to loss of engagement and inquisitiveness—with the reward the goal, not the learning. At our Admissions Open Houses, prospective parents are surprised when I tell them that kids often lose interest in school as early as 3rd grade when school becomes a chore to be endured rather than an unfolding adventure of discovery. 

 

When we provide a classroom and learning experiences that foster intrinsic motivation, our students, as the article says, work harder, learn more deeply, and voluntarily and eagerly take on tougher challenges (cue to our Program Pillars!). By giving more student voice and choice, by emphasizing the process as much as the final product of learning, by including student self-reflection, teachers help maintain student interest, support their agency development, and foster intrinsic motivation.

 

Realistically, extrinsic motivators won’t ever disappear: for parents and teachers sometimes they are easier and more convenient to use. Yet both parents and teachers need to make sure they’re providing opportunities that foster intrinsic motivation development.


Joe

---

 

When Destiny Reyes started elementary school, she felt highly motivated. Like most young children, she liked learning new things, and she excelled at school. She got good grades and reveled in her success. She was at the top of her class, and she proved herself further by testing into a competitive, private middle school. But there it wasn’t as easy to be at the top of the class, and her excitement about school – and learning – subsided. Eventually, she says, nothing motivated her. She went to school because she had to.

 

Destiny, 18, is like most students in the United States. Surveys reveal a steady decline in student engagement throughout middle and high school, a trend that Gallup deemed the “school engagement cliff.” The most recent data found that 74% of fifth graders felt engaged, while the same was true of just 32% percent of high school juniors.

 

One of the key components of engagement is students’ excitement about what they learn. Yet most schools extinguish that excitement.

 

It all comes down to motivation. In many schools, students do their work because their teachers tell them to. For students like Destiny, getting a good grade and outshining their peers – not learning itself – becomes the goal of school. For other students, they need minimum grades to be on sports teams or participate in extracurricular activities or please their parents, and that becomes their motivation. Students who do their work because they’re genuinely interested in learning the material are few and far between.

But that’s exactly backwards.

Decades of research, both about educational best practice and the way the human brain works, say extrinsic motivators are dangerous. Offering students rewards for learning creates reliance on the reward. If they becomes less interesting to the student or disappear entirely, the motivation does, too. That’s what happened to Destiny in middle school when she no longer got the reward of being celebrated as the top of her class.

 

Inspiring students’ intrinsic motivation to learn is a more effective strategy to get and keep students interested. Students actually learn better when motivated this way. They put forth more effort, tackle more challenging tasks, and end up gaining a more profound understanding of the concepts they study.  

Still, Deborah Stipek, a Stanford University professor of education and author of the book “Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice,” is pragmatic about the role of extrinsic motivation.

The problem is that the balance, in most schools, is way off. While some schools around the country are trying to personalize learning and, in doing so, to tap into students’ interests, Stipek estimates that most teaching minimizes students’ internal desire to learn.

That’s not the case everywhere, though. Destiny’s trajectory of diminishing engagement took a turn in high school. Instead of getting increasingly uninterested and disconnected from school, she became more engaged. That’s because she enrolled in the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a public high school district in Rhode Island. The Met is at the extreme when it comes to tapping into intrinsic motivation. Students don’t take traditional classes. They spend virtually all of their time learning independently, with support from advisors or at internships. Students all have individual learning plans and accumulate credits toward traditional subject areas through projects, self-directed study, internship experience and dual enrollment with local colleges. Almost everything they do, all day, connects to a personal goal or something they’re interested in.

Education researchers have been studying student motivation for decades, identifying the best classroom strategies to promote an intrinsic drive to learn. The Met puts many of them to use: Students learn through real-world, hands-on problem-solving:

  • They tackle open-ended assignments that require sustained effort
  • They get the power to choose what and how they learn
  • They finish projects with something to show for their learning in portfolios and concrete products; they set their own academic goals
  • They need never focus more on a grade than the process of learning because they don’t get traditional grades. 

All of these things come straight out of playbooks for inspiring intrinsic motivation. And the impact on students can be profound.

One challenge for schools trying to spark intrinsic motivation is to make sure that fun, engaging lessons also bring academic rigor. Several studies have found that projects and hands-on activities can be effective at intrinsically motivating students, but don’t actually result in substantive learning.

This comes down to teacher preparation and school design. Teachers aren’t trained to design academically rigorous lessons that motivate students in the right way. And schools aren’t set up to give teachers the time to do so. It is possible, though. 

And because it’s hard, it’s necessarily risky. Many teachers are afraid to experiment with this work. The accountability movement, where states hold schools to strict standards for student performance on standardized tests, put a damper on teaching methods that prioritize intrinsic motivation. Accountability is important but has prompted teachers to focus on test prep. That prioritizes the testing outcome – the grade – rather than the learning process, a surefire way to kill students’ sense of intrinsic motivation.

Researchers have found that one consequence of using grades to motivate students is that they stop challenging themselves for fear of trying something hard and failing at it.

Students don’t do particularly well on standardized tests at The Met. Rhode Island gives every school a star rating based on test scores, graduation rates and other metrics. The Met graduates more students than the state average (90 percent vs. 84 percent), but its rating, just two out of five stars, is dragged down by student achievement on state tests. School leaders, though, don’t pay much attention to test scores. They prefer to keep track of state survey data about student engagement, parent feedback about their children’s progress, student behavior, graduation rates and student performance in college courses. 

 

Friday, October 2, 2020

This week's article summary is Does Parenting Even Matter?

I liked this article because it provides the historical context of how parenting in America transitioned from ‘kids should be seen and not heard’ to ‘child-centered parenting’, beginning in the late 1950s.
 
We’re all aware of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. This article posits that nature (our genetic make-up) vastly outweighs environmental influences.
 
When my kids were in middle school, I tried to set a good example of being studious, organized, proactive, and focused by having quiet time after dinner for the entire family: no TV, music, or electronics from 7:30-9:00. My hope was my kids would be positively influenced by this structured home learning environment and by the positive adult role modeling of my wife and me and thus develop good study and organizational habits for the increased work load of high school.
 
Did it work? Hardly. More an epic disaster! All my kids learned was how to passively-aggressively wait me out until I was frustrated with their lack of effort and focus and with me getting bored reading or doing school work. 
 
My evening quiet-time experiment ended after one dismal week, after which my kids went back to going to their rooms after dinner to multitask and my wishful hope that they were completing their homework and maybe even reviewing their notes. (What a dimwitted parent I was!)
 
Eventually, though, my kids did become pretty good students and today are responsible adults. Yet, as the article attests, this was more because my wife and I passed them genes of being pretty good students and responsible adults, not because of our parenting style or my naïve attempt to create a studious environment to influence them.
 
The reality, of course, is parenting does matter. Having parents who provide love and support and set appropriate parameters certainly helps children grow and develop and gain confidence and assurance. Yet we shouldn't overestimate our influence on them and hence give them ample them room to make choices within the adult-established parameters of expected behavior. 
 
Trust them and their genes!
 
Joe

-----

In 1980, a popular news story swept the US media. It was about three college-age boys—Eddy, David and Bobby—who, through a series of coincidences, had discovered they were identical triplets who’d been separated at birth and adopted. 
 
After being joyfully reunited, the handsome, affable teenagers were caught up in a whirlwind of public attention. They did the daytime talk-show circuit and laughed as interviewers marveled over their similarities: They all smoked the same brand of cigarettes, had the same favorite color and even liked similar women. They were, in many ways, seemingly indistinguishable, despite having grown up in entirely different families on different sides of the country.
 
But as a recent documentary, Three Identical Strangers, explores, it turns out there was a chilling secret at the heart of this feel-good story. The boys were being used as subjects in a sociological experiment aimed at testing the age-old question of which matters more: Nature or nurture?
 
Have you ever agonized over whether you should even bother nagging an unmusical child to practice piano? Or wondered why two siblings raised in the same home can turn out to be so wildly different? Perhaps you’re starting to suspect that all those hours you spent straining organic parsnips, attending sing-and-sign classes, and smiling over flash cards didn’t actually make much difference to the person your kid is turning out to be.
 
As modern parents, most of us believe we have significant control over who our kids become and that, by extension, their future successes or failures ride largely on our shoulders.
 
But what if that just wasn’t true? What if the most effective thing we could do as loving, responsible parents was to simply sit back and relax?
 
A new body of groundbreaking genetic research points to a glaring truth: As parents, we’re not as important as we think we are.
 
The role of genetics: How people become who they are has been the subject of psychologist and geneticist Robert Plomin’s research for years, and his book Blueprint explores how DNA forms human character. “Parenting matters,” he said, “but not in terms of determining a child’s psychological outcome.” What Plomin means is that while it’s hugely important that we love and care for our kids, other things matter far less. New data shows things like how many books you read them when they’re small and how hard (or if) you push them into certain activities, aren’t likely to have much, if any, effect on who they fundamentally are now, or who they become. Put another way: If your child is defiant and strong-willed, they’re almost certainly going to spend their life challenging authority whether you run your household on a strict military timetable or unschool them in a yurt. 
 
It’s a thought that flies in the face of virtually every piece of parenting advice you’ve likely ever encountered, but Plomin’s research is largely conclusive. He’s concluded that many character traits widely assumed to be the result of environmental factors and social conditioning—like curiosity, diligence, intelligence, fastidiousness, academic inclination and drive—are, in fact, highly heritable. For decades, Plomin writes, sociologists have mistakenly attributed such factors to environment, but breakthroughs in genetics now prove that’s just not the case. You can’t effectively control for genetics, and genetics are the key determining factor in everything we are.
 
The effect of our nurturing instincts: Research shows that while the “extras” of parenting (like music lessons) might not be crucial, the basic care we provide actually matters significantly. Ann Pleshette Murphy, a therapist and parenting counselor who has disagreed with Plomin, says that while she doesn’t dispute the role genetics play, environment is also hugely important and should not be discounted. She points out that in recent years, several key neurological studies have found that the architecture of infants’ brains is demonstrably affected by the often seemingly subtle ways in which they are parented.
 
“Genes matter,” says Pleshette Murphy, “but the house must be built on love. Even if we concede that DNA accounts for 70 percent of our character traits, the remaining 30 percent can make 100 percent of the difference.”
 
The Rise of Child-Centered Parenting: So if love matters but everything else is incidental, how did we get to the point where every day we are bombarded with messages that if we only parented a little harder, a little better or a little differently, we would send our kids down a path of well-adjustment, happiness and prosperity? The act of parenting, in the child-centered sense, didn’t really exist as a marketable concept until the middle of the last century, when Dr. Benjamin Spock published his book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, the first bestseller on the subject. Throughout the late 1960s, the genre proliferated, and a new crop of self-anointed experts began churning out books designed to fill the needs of anxious baby boomer parents who craved baby- and child-rearing advice.
 
Prior to that, most people simply raised their kids by example, and the unique emotional needs of children were, by and large, considered subordinate to the needs of adults. With the rise of youth culture in the ’50s and ’60s, many middle-class baby boomers decided they wanted to do things differently when they had their own families. My parents, for instance, grew up in a time when corporal punishment was widely accepted and school teachers hit students as a matter of course. Like many of their generation, however, they chose not to continue the tradition.
 
While the move toward child-centered parenting has been beneficial for children on a societal level, it also means we have come to substantially overstate the effects (positive, negative or otherwise) of parenting in the home. While our own parents were mostly on their own with Spock, today’s parent are overwhelmed by a tsunami of unsolicited parenting advice. As a consequence, it’s easy to be seized by the notion that every little choice matters hugely as a new parent, but lots of data suggests the opposite is true.
 
Child-centered parenting seems lovely in theory, but what about all the unnecessary guilt and anxiety it has caused parents who fail to live up to its exacting standards? Recent research from Cornell University found that an overwhelming majority of parents thought a hands-on approach to parenting was superior to a ‘natural growth’ approach, where parents set rules but kids have more freedom.
 
Parenting does matter—of course it does—just not in the overly complicated, competitive, anxiety-ridden way most of us have been led to believe. Our kids are born who they are, Plomin says. As parents, it’s our job to love, support, accept and enjoy them. The rest is gravy.