Prejudice

I suppose I could have entitled the last post "Pride," which would have made this bit kind of high-brow. Heh. Oh well, the opportunities we waste.

There's a deep-rooted sense of "ought to know" in all of us, I think. When a woman is pregnant, she constantly thinks things like "should I be throwing up at this stage? Should I be feeling kicks yet? Is it time to start feeling contractions yet?" Then she has the baby, and all the anxiously-awaited milestones - smiling, rolling over, sitting up, crawling, clapping hands, waving bye-bye, and so on - come and go, according to the child's own inner calendar. If things are a little delayed, worry sets in, because of this rigid sort of in-born sense of what's "supposed to be" happening at this point in time. If you can't learn to let these things go, parenting can be torture.

But it doesn't get any easier. My two older daughters were reading things at the level of Green Eggs and Ham by their fourth birthdays. My third daughter is closing in on five, and she's only half-way through the book we use to teach our children how to read, cleverly entitled Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. Six months ago, I was almost in a panic - she's not reading yet! She hasn't even shown signs of wanting to start, and she's four already! Will she ever learn to read??? It's crazy, I know.

Then there is a whole set of books - What your first grader needs to know, what your second grader needs to know, what your third grader needs to know, and so on. What an enormous responsibility! Your Third Grader NEEDS TO KNOW this much information, or else... or else you're a failure as a parent, I guess.

So my oldest daughter is eight. She should be learning her times tables, right? Sorry, we're still working on subtraction. Why? Because she hates math, and she won't do her math when I tell her she has to do some Math. But she Needs To Know her math, of course. Won't she ever learn her math? What if she never learns her math? Oh my Gosh, what am I going to do if she hasn't learned her math in time for... the time when she's supposed to need her math?

This one, for some reason, is harder to argue against than the reading thing. In the first case, it's easy. Settle down, mamma. Your daughter is four. Most children don't read by their fourth birthday. There's plenty of time for her to learn to love books. However, the Math Thing seems more commonly accepted. Your child Needs To Know her times tables by a set age. Why? because They say so, of course.

So my precious philosophy, Don't Impose What They Aren't Interested In, comes into direct and violent conflict with the school of Needs To Know. I know my philosophical ideas are sound, but the Needs To Know has such a strong moral advantage in this case.

Incidentally, those books, What Your _____ Needs To Know, are in fact terrific books, and my children love them, and read them regularly, under the threat (imagined by them, not me) of not knowing something they Need To Know. Except as it applies to the Mathematical sections, of course.