Our current culture in this 21st century, is all about immediacy. We whatsapp, instagram, tweet, blog, and of course, post on Facebook. We know everything that everyone else has accomplished. It's
easy to see how this trickles down to our kids. My 5-year-old reads science books daily, so, what will I challenge him with next? Do we often pressure our kids to achieve things we couldn't achieve? And what kind of pressure we add to our kids, and even others' kids through all these so called "peer pressures"??!!An incident happened recently, got me think really hard on this topic.
Renzo started spelling test this term in K1. There are 4 English words and 5 Chinese words given each week. I usually need to spend about 10 minutes to review with him on the Chinese spelling list as he knows at least 3 words, if not all 5. So I need to make him write the other 2 words a few times, before testing him again to make sure he could remember all. And for English, I do not need to do anything as he has mastered that with his phonics knowledge, so most of the time he knows all 4 words on the list before I even test him.
I took a deep breath, looked at my happy kid who's enjoying his new Dora DVD I just bought a while ago in front of the TV, I said to him: "Renzo, I believe you need to spend less time on TV and study harder for your spelling test. How can you make so many mistakes when you already knew how to spell all these words?"
He looked totally lost and answered: "I don't know why mummy..."
"But you know in the past you have been scoring full marks all the time!" I then flipped to the previous page, trying to show him how well he did in the past, there, I noticed a full page of corrections requested by his English teacher, and a summary page of "not so satisfying" results:
That very moment, I felt a great relief. But at the same time, I couldn't help but scrutinized every single page of that spelling book, which belongs to another mummy's 5-year-old son. That boy seems to have a bit of struggles here, besides not being able to spell out the words correctly, he seems to reverse his letters, such as writing "p" as "q". I tried to put myself in the that mummy's shoes, and asked myself, what if my son is just not able to get the spelling done at ease each time? And then the smiley face of that cute little boy (the real owner of this spelling book) appeared in my head. He's one of Renzo's good friends in class so I do see him often and know him well, he's chatty, smart, friendly, sociable, sweet, independent, and cheerful all the time in school. His result might not be as good as my son's at the moment, but his life definitely seems not any less fruitful, in any aspect. He's all healthy and happy, isn't that good enough?!
Setting high expectations for kids isn't necessarily a bad thing. But how lofty these goals are has to depend on how our child is responding to them. I start to wonder, do I often put too much pressure on Renzo? If I did feel a little upset and anxious while I first looked at the spelling book, then I guess my answer is, YES.
Later at night, when I showed the spelling book to Daddy Chan without revealing the secret behind, he responded: "Wow, Renzo is so careless this time? He can definitely do much better!!" And Daddy was calm enough to even notice the change in Renzo's handwriting.
We laughed it off when I eventually shared with him about what happened. We were both glad that none of us snapped and lost our cool over such a "big deal". And today when I opened the spelling book that truly belongs to Renzo, just as expected:
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2 thoughts on this article:
Talk about peer pressure. Seeing how much Renzo is enough to make me question how much Sophie knows and can spell. Haha.
Haha dear these are from school so he definitely doesn't know anything more.. and i dun plan to teach anything more either, I'm afraid he will lose his interest in learning if he knows everything before teachers teach...
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