Covid Demonstrated a Need to Change- No More Push to Nowhere!

Resilient, self-relient, self-advocates, effective time managers, and excellent communicators are happy empowered children. When a child has strategies they don’t become paralyzed. When children don’t have strategies, they see no recourse and receive no relief.

Covid proved we need to have a different focus on your children’s future education.

The focus on academic achievement got a huge push in the late 1990’s. Schools began adapting their programs to get children ahead. In the 90’s AP courses were offered which pushed college into high schools to get the students ready for the transition. The trickle down affect didn’t take long before more academics became the focus of preschool. The parent peer pressure left the mother of a late bloomer worry because her three year old wasn’t reading yet. Preschool is where children should be finger painting and building sandcastles and using their bodies in a way that would promote healthy brain development. Taking pre-algebra in 5th grade makes no sense, since the pre-frontal cortex of most brains isn’t developed enough to really truly understand it. This push had its negative results. Student coming into my third grade class had already formed a negative self-image about their math ability. They had the aptitude, but they were introduced to concepts before their brains were ready.

I have promoting developmental pre-school through second grade because I have seen the negative impact of focusing on academic over healthy cognitive development.

Covid made it impossible to deliver an academic program to preschoolers or anyone below first grade. I have to admit I was thrilled and recommended that the best way to assure children didn’t get behind was if they got lots of outside creative and unstructured play. I was glad to see children in the park having pick up games of soccer without an adult in sight. They were learning how to get along and make rules that work for all of them. This was the blessing of Covid.

Covid made parents worry about their children getting behind. My question was, “Behind what? They are right were they are supposed to be. While most parents were frantic last summer because they felt their children needed to get caught up, I reassured them that they should simply play outside all summer and enjoy hobbies is all that would be needed.

Covid hit and teachers have to be very focused on what they were teaching. They only had time for the core subjects and needed to teach them in 2 hours a day. Those who were successful found that the results were just as good if not better than when the children were given more work. I spoke with a local elementary school teacher and she confirmed that her school, who took a more low key approach to Covid learning and were more succinct with instruction, actually had better results than the two years prior to Covid.

The proof that your children are not being left behind. They don’t need excessive academic programs to grow into successful adults.

They do need strategies that allow them to be flexible and go with the flow. The flow is going to be taking more abrupt twists and turns than we have ever seen in our lives. They will come more frequent and we can’t predict them, so we need to prepare our children to be independent, self-reliant, and resilient. That means they needs some skills:

  1. How to manage their time and systems of organization
  2. How to manage the addictiveness of device, so they can control the device and not let the device control them.
  3. How to tap into their innate ability to solve any challenge that confronts them without the help of parents or adults. I depended on my students to help me navigate on-line learning, so I wasn’t much help to them. Because they had learned how to tap in and tune into their innate abilities and were able to come up with solutions.
  4. How to become effective self-advocates- how to speak to adults and authority figures.
  5. How to critically evaluate what they read, see, and hear.
  6. How to tackle projects with backwards planning
  7. How to collaborate and delegate effectively, so they don’t end up doing all the work.
  8. How their brain works, so they use their time effectively, deal with stress, and find answers to problems
  9. How to see mistakes as opportunities for positive change.

I predict that not everyone will need to go to college, because the self-education generation is already here. They can learn any skill or trade on-line. There will still need to be colleges for such careers as being a doctor or physical therapist or when one would need a specific hands on experience. So people will be spending their money on programs like Master Mind by Tony Robbins or Mind Valley Vishen Lakhiani.

I will begin my courses that will teach you share how to shift your role as a parent or teacher and give your children the gift that will truly make a difference in their future, while relieving you of the pressure of the responsibilities you feel.

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