Has the world – or at least the upper-middle-class parent portion of it – gone completely mad? We're doing tutors for preschoolers now?
Okay, my fellow 30- and 20-something parents, listen to me carefully now: When baby boomers grumble at us about hyper-parenting? This is what they are talking about. And this is the kind of whackdoodle idea that makes it extremely difficult to refute their argument.
I understand wanting your kids to do well, and I live in an incredibly bad school system, so some sort of supplemental education is probably in my kid's future. And, I mean she does go to a nice laid-back Montessori preschool now, versus a regular non-academic daycare while I surf the Web slave away at the computer.
But tutors? That just smacks of the "right preschool-right elementary-right college prep- Ivy League or bust" mentality that I think sucks all the joy out of learning for children and amps up the pressure to incredible levels at an age kids should be thinking about tying their shoes and writing their names.
One of the reasons I love her school is that they are all about capitalizing on a child's natural instincts to explore their world. With my own Montessori experiences as a kid, I knew I was learning, but I was having a blast and figuring things out in my own way. I sucked at math and still do, but sticking with a tutor for an hour a week would have been like torture. Letting me play with the math beads at school? That worked.
And it seems that most of the kids whose parents are doing this are not academically behind (CAN you be academically behind at age 3?), they are just not as ahead as their Type-A parents want them to be. "Normal, happy kid" is not good enough! After all, they'd better jump on the competitive, driven, joyless treadmill now or God forbid, maybe go to a state school….
