Wow. That is not a comment but a post in it’s own right. I’m somewhat blown away of what to make out of it.
I will try to address the raised points:
1) Our approach to parenting can be classified as authorative/propagative (according to Baumrind’s Three Parenting Styles) but with a non-extreme damand level.
It is rather not Concerted Cultivation (which in our opinion puts to much pressure on the child and has it’s own inefficiencies (and doesn’t really lead to rationality).
Instead we rather fall into the Natural Growth pattern.
We didn’t invent most of the methods we apply. You could say that we did a meta study on parenting and took the best of it.
I will provide a parenting bibliography below.
The lullaby is my own invention, but singing lullabies is one recommended method, as is reading and discussing bed time stories.
Teaching via dialog of wuestion and answer is also a traditional teaching method going back to Socrates I believe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
2) Is parenting a no-win activity? I’m not sure what this is diving at.
I wonder if this takes the view that parenting and education should be left to specialists and that doing parenting oneself is inefficient any way it is done.
Even if that may be true on average there are the following exceptions (some of which apply to our case):
Availability of professional care (we do use a wood kindergarten for outdoor, musical and social education)
Trust into the quality of professional care (compared to the alternatives)
Personal preferrence (our utility functions rank high on affection to our children)
Personal experience (my wife is a teacher)
3) I though much about 1) even before we had children and we compared multiple options regarding 2). Otherwise I’m not sure what to make out of this paragraph.
4) If with ‘onslaught’ my intense advancement of numeracy is meant, then I have to assume that you imply that I am jumping to conclusions by proposing my specific parenting style as a general model. I do not. I recount personal experience. You could call my post an opinion piece.
But I have to stress that this specific style results from very careful and long time planning, continuous adjustment, success control and it is even controlled in so far as we have basically ‘run’ the same ‘program’ with all our four sons so far.
And it appears to be successful for all of them (if one can say that of 2 and 5 year olds).
5) When to move to implementation? I goess this is meant as a question for non-parents. For parents the point is usually the birth.
And I can assure you that my wife has run this program with her usual productivity scheme she uses for all ‘tasks’.
6) The tangible contributions I am just making, or am I? I was pleasantly surprised by our success.
I was prepared to see more or less average achievement by my sons due to regression toward the mean
(but I cannot completely rule out filtered awareness due to parental pride).
And beside ‘success’ on some popular measureables like IQ or grades I see that my children are healthy, balanced and happy.
Our parenting method gives us concrete positive feedback and I assume that it helps making us happy too.
Wow. That is not a comment but a post in it’s own right. I’m somewhat blown away of what to make out of it.
I will try to address the raised points:
1) Our approach to parenting can be classified as authorative/propagative (according to Baumrind’s Three Parenting Styles) but with a non-extreme damand level. It is rather not Concerted Cultivation (which in our opinion puts to much pressure on the child and has it’s own inefficiencies (and doesn’t really lead to rationality). Instead we rather fall into the Natural Growth pattern. We didn’t invent most of the methods we apply. You could say that we did a meta study on parenting and took the best of it. I will provide a parenting bibliography below. The lullaby is my own invention, but singing lullabies is one recommended method, as is reading and discussing bed time stories. Teaching via dialog of wuestion and answer is also a traditional teaching method going back to Socrates I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
2) Is parenting a no-win activity? I’m not sure what this is diving at. I wonder if this takes the view that parenting and education should be left to specialists and that doing parenting oneself is inefficient any way it is done. Even if that may be true on average there are the following exceptions (some of which apply to our case):
Availability of professional care (we do use a wood kindergarten for outdoor, musical and social education)
Trust into the quality of professional care (compared to the alternatives)
Personal preferrence (our utility functions rank high on affection to our children)
Personal experience (my wife is a teacher)
3) I though much about 1) even before we had children and we compared multiple options regarding 2). Otherwise I’m not sure what to make out of this paragraph.
4) If with ‘onslaught’ my intense advancement of numeracy is meant, then I have to assume that you imply that I am jumping to conclusions by proposing my specific parenting style as a general model.
I do not. I recount personal experience. You could call my post an opinion piece. But I have to stress that this specific style results from very careful and long time planning, continuous adjustment, success control and it is even controlled in so far as we have basically ‘run’ the same ‘program’ with all our four sons so far. And it appears to be successful for all of them (if one can say that of 2 and 5 year olds).
5) When to move to implementation? I goess this is meant as a question for non-parents. For parents the point is usually the birth. And I can assure you that my wife has run this program with her usual productivity scheme she uses for all ‘tasks’.
6) The tangible contributions I am just making, or am I? I was pleasantly surprised by our success. I was prepared to see more or less average achievement by my sons due to regression toward the mean (but I cannot completely rule out filtered awareness due to parental pride). And beside ‘success’ on some popular measureables like IQ or grades I see that my children are healthy, balanced and happy. Our parenting method gives us concrete positive feedback and I assume that it helps making us happy too.