43

From the Fast Track to the Fast LaneTo What?

OttoWeininger l

The following is an invitedaddress to an audience of parents, teachers and mental health workers at theGeorgian College, Barrie, Ontario, Canada, October, 1989. La siguiente corresponde a un discurso presentado bajo los auspicios del Georgian

College, en Barrie, Ontario, Canada, en Octubre 1989. Estuvo destinado a una audiencia compuesta de padres, profesores y trabajadores en salud mental. Ce texte correspond Aune presentation adressee sous invitation Aun auditoire de parents, enseignants, et travailleurs en sante mentale au College Georgian, ABarrie, Ontario, Canada, en octobre 1989.

I recently happened to meet the twenty-year-old son of an old friend. As is the custom of the middle-aged talking to those who could be expected to be scrambling through the school system, I asked him how school was going. I expected him to tell me which hard-to-get-into-university he was attending, and what a glorious average he had attained in the essential but

mind-numbing Ontario Accredited Course (OAC) in order to get there. Instead, he looked at me somewhat askance, expecting, perhaps, what must be the usual adult displeasure. "I'm on the slow track," he said, "the six year plan - it won't earn me a place in the fast lane, but I might not crash and burn." I don't think his feelings are unusual -

lOtto Weininger, Ph.D., is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

44

although perhaps his insight and ability to articulate them as metaphor are. As parents and teachers we are part of the best educated, most affluent generation in history. Our generation has lived through neither war nor depression but rather through an increasing spiral of economic activity which has brought both greater wealth and greater poverty with it. Our awareness that life might well provide fewer opportunities for our children has made us nervous that they be as well equipped as possible to utilize those opportunities which do exist. At the same time, massive social change has resulted in more families where both parents must work, more single parent families, fewer intergenerational families living near each other to provide emotional support, more children who spend much of their pre-school life in day care of some kind, greater institutionalization of the disabled, disturbed, and elderly, a wider spectrum of cultures and languages in neighbourhoods and schools, greater substance abuse, unwelcoming urban environments. The list seems endless. As a result of these converging realities we have been party to imposing a level of pressure on our children which is probably unparalleled. More children than ever before are being put "on the fast track" from birth by parents who are reacting to the pressures they themselves feel in the society around them. The key question is whether in fact this pressure will increase our children's capacity to cope with, manipulate, and survive in the world we have created - or whether the children will "crash and burn"?

FASTlRACK

And the corollary seems to be whether, as more and more of us are locked into a life style ourselves which seems only to be speeding up and leading to emotional and physical symptoms of stress, we have either the desire or the ability to change the process by which we raise and educate our young. The adults' resentment of the young - partially borne of envy at what seems like a wider, more luxurious world, partially because of perhaps unrecognized sorrow for our own lost youth - has been around, probably, since a middle-aged caveman realized his son could roll that new stone wheel farther and faster. James Joyce, in Ulysses, said," His growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy" (p. 207). And, of course, the parental "when I was a child I had to walk forty miles to school through ten foot snowdrifts" as a reply to adolescent demands is older than any of us! What is new is the very young age at which pressure for achievement now begins in some families. A recent article by Anthony DeCasper called The Hurried Fetus focuses on the trend to provide extra stimulation and special learning experiences to children still in the womb. Such activities are supposed to "enhance, facilitate, or accelerate their cognitive development"and the media love the photo opportunities such a story provides. The picture of a pregnant woman with an acoustic device strapped to her abdomen which plays a recorded message to her unborn child may seem delightfully futuristic to some, but to me it has disturbing echoes of Brave New World. DeCasper makes the point that research results are often distorted to seem

WEININGER

like support for such "learning experiences" but that there is, in fact, no evidence that enhanced language development, vocabulary, maternal attachment, emotional stability or intellectual advancement result from such activities. This trend, of course, might be the logical result of the move toward teaching a second language, music lessons, computer skills, reading and math skills in nursery schools which has been escalating since the early 1970s. Jerome Bruner's thesis that "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any children at any stage of development" was instrumental in supporting the push to early academic learning for children. This was partly the result of the disenchantment with schooling, as society discovered to its dismay that schools couldn't solve all the world's problems in the first ftve years while turning every child into a future Einstein or neurosurgeon. Then it became fashionable to blame not the teachers but the parents, who, so the line went, were not adequately preparing their children for school in the pre-school years. The fact that such encouragement of early academic education flies in the face of virtually everything we do know about human emotional and intellectual development was ignored in the rush to enrich and enhance. The work of Piaget and Gesell in exploring how children learn was ignored in this rush toward academic learning at an early age. Much of Piaget's work focused on the way children learn concepts by manipulating the materials of their environment. Gesell had pioneered work on the

45

concept of "readiness" - the idea that a biological readiness for leaming to read, for example, might exist which is closer to 7 years than to the 6 years at which we normally start trying to teach children to read. These concepts were treated as obsolete theories by the ''new experts." But perhaps the greatest damage done to children by the push to ''teach'' them things in pre-school has been the loss of time to play. Play is the child's way of learning about his world, and it is the one absolutely indispensable activity of early childhood. His ability to play, to have fun, to enjoy himself, sets down a very important life pattern - one that says it is O.K. to enjoy yourself, one that says happiness and security and fun can be created from within and do not need to be given to you by someone else. Through children's play with objects, each other, and words, they discover their increasing power over the largely unpredictable world around them. Each day the growing, playing child runs smack into more concepts and ideas about space, movement, texture, weight, size relationships, and people than we could possibly ''teach'' if we started from scratch. In fact, in many cases we have not been able to ftnd effective ways to teach elementary school children the same concepts that they absorb naturally in their pre-school play. Through the early school years, many children seem to like to be "programmed" by their parents and teachers to be busy almost as if it takes the pressure off them to develop creative ways to ftll their own time. Playing alone becomes an unusual activity for many children, and they seem to lose the

46

ability and desire to do so when they are programmed too much. Instead, they sit in front of the TV for hours. Far fewer children seem to engage in reading or art or craft work for pleasure. These activities are possibly so closely related to school, or to the inevitable lessons, that children no longer perceive them as relaxing or fun, but as one more area in which they are pressured to participate and achieve success by someone else's standards. The result of all this imposed structure is that the child's character becomes rigid as a defense to prevent the anxiety which accompanies too many expectations and too little chance to develop a' capacity for improvising, for change, and thus, ultimately, for personality growth. In response to the child's aimlessness and inability to plan for his own spare time, parents may feel compelled to sign their children up for even more activities so that they won't be "wasting valuable time." And so a cycle is created as more and more of children' traditional play activities are turned into lessons for which one's parents pay and in which certain expectations must be met. And often the lessons bear more relationship to the parents' interests, or to what they feel will be useful or socially desirable skills, than these lessons do to the individual child's interests. Frequently, not long after the expensive equipment has been purchased and the lessons paid for, the child seems to lose interest, and the parents become annoyed and begin to see the child as lacking in responsibility; often the parents give up and let the child drop the activity. This conditions many children to a life as a

FASTTRACK

dilettante - try it, don't commit to it, and drop it if it starts to require hard work or self-discipline. This is, of course, the opposite lesson to that most often cited by parents as a reason for involving their children in a steady stream of programmed activities. The increasing academic pressure exerted in the pre-school years and in elementary schools, the loss of play time, and the provision of a rigid extracurricular structure for children result in much of the stress felt by children. Another change in the way we raise children seems innocuous by comparison: the tendency to dress and groom children as miniature adults. The ultimate is perhaps embodied in an article from an English newspaper which I saw this summer about a new line of French toiletries for babies - perfumes, trendy soaps, specially packaged hair gel - all with fancy names like ''Tartioe et Chocolat" and fancier prices - 20 pounds for a 100 ml bottle. But you don't have to go to England or France, only to the nearest upscale baby store to fmd denim covered rubber pants with designer name-tags for "only" $25, for example. Magazine photos of little girls posed in alluring positions in hundreds of dollars' worth of silk and lace, with salon hair-dos, makeup, and jewelry, are reminiscent of earlier centuries when wealthy children wore scaled-down versions of uncomfortable formal adult clothing and were expected to look and behave like adults. It is perhaps no coincidence that those children really had no childhood either - they were trained at a very young age for life at court, for marriage, or warfare, and became adults,

WEININGER

and often parents, by the time they were 12-14. However, "society" was very compressed then - people died young, 30-40 years of age, children were expected to marry and have babies when they were 12-15 years old. Perhaps the "hurried" children - David Elkind's term - have been created in part also as a result of stresses on their parents. Working, commuting parents trying to cope with the financial needs of urban life have very little time to allow their children to be children - it is more important that the children become independent and selfsufficient as early as possible so that their parents don't have to worry about them or do so many things for them. A busy working single mother may need to know that her children can fix their own breakfast and lunch and take on household tasks which were once hers - the only other choice is often burnout for her. Many adults have time for few real peer friendships any more, or are separated from their own adult families, and their children are expected at a young age to take up the slack as someone to talk to and share with. In some cases parents ask children to take on the discomforting weight of understanding and accepting contemporary adult behaviours divorce, taking a lover, having a much younger mate or a new baby after many years, blending two sets of children in a remarriage - with very little emotional support to the children. Far too often parents' self-esteem is tied up in their children's success: the notas-successful-as-he-would-like-to-be father who can preen himself around the other

47

men because of his son's athletic prowess; the mother who never felt attractive who can dress up her pretty pre-teen daughter and vicariously live the teen years all over through her child's social life; the dissatisfied parent who needs the child to become the academic and professional success - the doctor or lawyer or engineer - which he or she could not, for a variety of reasons, achieve. In pursuit of this goal, some adolescents' schedules resemble that of royalty in training: swim classes, dance and/or music lessons, second language or religion classes, a myriad of organized athletics, tutors to insure academic success, the mandatory orthodontic appointments and later driver's education, swim instruction, or camp counsellor training, and, of course, the part time job ''to teach them the value of money." Far too many children from the age of about 12 up have very little time to enjoy themselves or just be with their friends and families, let alone relax, read for pleasure, or just daydream. And many parents operate the most elaborate car pool and chauffeur schedules this side of the diplomatic corps - with no time between arriving home and bedtime for meals together, reading the paper, discussion about anything except the schedule, or a social life of their own. The omnipresent TV and VCR provide almost the only relaxation for many families - but it is seldom time spent together, or talking about what is being seen - it's just there, and on, as babysitter for younger children and as filler between obligations. But this pervasive visitor in most

48

homes is not benign: the media exert their own pressures on children. TV drowns children in information, ideas, and behaviours which they are often not yet ready to integrate; they see not only fictionalized versions of murder, rape, robbery, sexual perversion, and war, but the daily doses of violence and moral degeneracy which surround us in real life - and which are far more powerful in their impact on children's ideas about what the world is like. To what extent does absorption of such violence induce, or at least harden children to, violent behaviour? This has been the subject of vast, and inconclusive, research. But far more important, to what extent does seeing the world as it is undermine a child's belief in adult rationality and control, in the capacity of adults to protect them from chaos, in the possibility of a safe world and a hopeful future? A great deal I think. Too often, TV and films also make what were once adult "secrets" - about sexual relationships or difficulties, marital and family problems, depression, disease, death - common knowledge among the very young. For generations adults have tried to protect children from information which might overwhelm them or make them feel powerless. The process of becoming an adult was of knowing what questions to ask, of becoming privy to such secrets. Not since the Middle Ages, when everyone lived fairly communally and adulthood came quickly and was often short, painful, and violent, have children known as much about adult life as now. Our children, through the media, know everything we know - for bet-

FASTlRACK

ter or worse. Nothing is left as mysterious, awesome, or as information to be claimed as a boon of adulthood. The television industry claims today's children are better informed than any previous group of children. Neil Postman maintains that this is not, in fact, a sign of progress. He concludes, in The Disappearance of Childhood, that, "in having access to the previously hidden fruit of adult information, children are expelled from the garden of childhood." In addition, popular music, videos, TV, books, magazines and films all show young people more and more frequently in explicit sexual or manipulative situations, which increase the pressure on young adolescents to feel that if they don't have similar feelings or experiences they must be abnormal. Pushed to grow up fast by these very powerful forces in society, coupled with their own very active hormones and needs for rebellion, they assume that all of what they see as "adult" prerogatives should be theirs - smoking, use of obscene language anywhere, drinking, drug use, driving, large chunks of disposable income, total independence from rules, and participation in all kinds of sexual activities - without concern for the consequences inherent in any of these. It is only surprising to someone who hasn't spent much time with adolescents to find that perhaps as much as 50% of boys and 30% of girls in grade nine - 14 and 15 years old - are already sexually active enough to have had intercourse. And, of course, since adult society by and large prefers to ignore this reality, very few of these children get much help in handling the often confusing, unhappy, and

WEININGER

angry feelings which result from indulging in behaviours with a large potential for emotional or physical disaster even amongst adults. Information about pregnancy, birth control, venereal disease, and AIDS is disseminated, if at all, with a clinical distancing which makes asking questions very difficult for most children. There are still many adults who should know better parents and teachers - who cling to the ridiculous notion that by discussing sex with adolescents, or making birth control available, they are encouraging an interest in sexuality which otherwise would not exist An interesting concept in a world where until this century most children were conceived by parents who were teenagers themselves! By late adolescence betrayal is not an uncommon feeling among children - they feel, quite rightly, that society has pushed them hard and fast to look, and behave, and achieve, like adults - while trying to keep them children, and powerless, at the same time. The attitude and tone of most high schools, for example, which treat 18- and 19-year-olds as if they should have little or no choice in either the structure or content of their schooling, or even in the largely cosmetic social rules and regulations of the school, cannot help but breed resentment if not outright rebellion. The idiocy of asking people who in any other culture would be functioning adults to account for an absence from a class with a note justifying their absence, or to return a permission form for a trip even though they are legally able to sign it themselves after 18 - is apparent to all but those who attempt to enforce it.

49

Sheleff puts it well in Generations Apart: "The ultimate tragedy of the modem school system may lie not in its cruelties and harsh disciplinary measures but in its omissions in denying to the young the rich and rewarding experience of the joy of discovery, selflearning, and constructive work" (p.22?). An interesting side effect to this intense academic pressure is that not as many students are "fast tracking" - the term for getting all 30 credits in 4 years, rather than 4 1/2 years or more - as they realize that marks are often lowered by the impact of the heavy workload. Some, wisely, are even beginning to object to the removal from their lives of arts courses, extracurricular activities, and a social life in order to be able to balance the academic workload and the nearly inevitable part time job. The astronomical expenses of clothing, bus fares, school supplies, and recreation have virtually all high school students working part time to help cover the costs and to save for postsecondary education. University has become so expensive that most middle class families find it difficult to stretch their income to send even one child to school unless he has saved several thousand dollars himself. And university is rapidly becoming an impossibility for the children of working class or single parents. The pressure on adolescents that the only suitable post-secondary goal is university, as opposed to community colleges, apprenticeship programs, or jobs after high school, has increased the tension in children' lives enormously. It is very sad to see so many children who really have nei-

50

ther the interest nor the ability to handle university work slogging through OAC classes, often more than once each, in order to achieve a goal their parents insist upon and whose values they have internalized. Too many children who dislike reading and writing, are bored or baffled by academic courses, and are stressed out by endless studying continue to trudge toward university, unable to realize that if they bate learning in higb school, university is likely to be worse. And on the other end of the high school achievement spectrum, is it any wonder that so many children drop out, when the message society sends very early is that the only success in life comes from completing university? Those who understand early that they do not master traditional academic subjects easily, or are simply Dot interested in them, or that they will not be able to afford university, have a choice of sitting in boring classrooms which are felt by students and teachers alike to be dead end if not aimed at university, or of dropping out. Any sane person would drop out under these circumstances - and one third of young people drop out before the end of grade 12. It's not the high drop out rate which astounds me, but rather the fact that it isn't higher! It's like the huge drop off rate in amateur hockey after boys have reached the age of 15. By then, boys (and their fathers) are no longer allowed to dream that they will reach the National Hockey League (NHL) unless they're already playing Triple A hockey; and rather than be perceived as failures by staying on house league teams, even if they really en-

FAST TRACK

joy playing, many pretend they don't care and give up, becoming armchair goalies. The idea that an activity could be pleasurable, or that learning could be intrinsically interesting, unrelated to its function in ensuring success in the fast lane of adult life, is no longer alive and well in this society. The stress of being pushed and pulled by parents, schools, society, and the media into fitting into an acceptable pattern of achievement from earliest childhood has resulted in a "sleeper" effect which may not show up until adolescence, and then often, at first, it is only seen as typically rebellious adolescent behaviour which escalates until it is out of the control of both children and the adults in their lives: children suddenly dropping activities, like sports or lessons, which they have always loved, but where the pressure is no longer worth the pleasure; a sudden change in social group behaviour toward a wilder, more visibly anti-social crowd; increased truancy and decreased attention to school work; an increase in stressrelated ailments such as tension headaches, migraines, backaches, stomach aches, ulcers, allergic reactions, colitis; the increase in substance use or abuse - tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drugs such as tranquilizers - may all be a very visible part of this pattern. The most shockingly visible symptom, of course, is suicide. The American Academy of Pediatrics states that "for most adolescents suicide represents an attempt to resolve a difficult conflict, escape an intolerable living arrangement or punish important individuals in their lives." Suicide

WEININGER

is the third leading cause of death in North American teenagers - one out of 1000 adolescents attempts suicide every year and far more boys than girls succeed in killing themselves in the U.S.A. alone. And they are not all teenagers - in 1976, for example, 158 children below the age of 14 died by suicide. That children as young as 10 would perceive their lives as so hopeless that suicide represents the only viable choice is terribly depressing to me. Seemingly less drastic, perhaps, are the effects on long term personality development of extreme stress in childhood and adolescence. A teen-ager may feel he can do anything and everything he wants to without negative consequences - the car accident, drug overdose. failure in school all happen to someone else; he may be very impulsive, unable to postpone gratification of any felt need, and egocentric, uninterested in anyone else's feelings or needs; or he may be unable to form adequate relationships and not know how to maintain them if they are formed. She may have a poor sense of personal identity and weak self esteem because she has never been allowed to discover for herself who she is, or has never been able to live up to the expectations imposed by others and then internalized. She may have very stereotyped roles and attitudes, including a surprising number of conservative "parent type" values and beliefs about wealth, personal success, and the rights of the majority, coupled with a surprising degree of racial, religious, and ethnic intolerance. He may have very hostile feelings toward parents, teachers, and adult society in general, and very cynical

51

beliefs about the political process and the responsibility or possibility of a person making changes within society. He may see crime and violence, including sexual violence, as permissible means to an end and the satisfaction of one's own immediate needs as the single most important determinant of action. These weak or negative personality characteristics, formed quite effectively in childhood and adolescence, are not likely to change by themselves in a positive direction during adulthood. Sadly, the ramifications of a society producing large numbers of exceedingly self-centred. narrow. and immature adults will be felt not only throughout their adulthood, but in their capacity to mold their world and to raise the next generation. As a personal, emotional reaction to stress, children often report feeling that they can't stop the bouncing around in their head of feelings they can't even begin to identify or understand; they have a high level of free-floating anxiety, a tendency to restlessness and irritability , an inability to concentrate or set priorities, a loss of enthusiasm and interest in everything, either a loss of appetite or constant hunger, insomnia or the need to sleep for most of the day, listlessness, apathy and physical fatigue, withdrawal from most relationships or an obsession with one relationship, a lack of a sense of where they are going or why, a pervasive sadness and easy arousal to anger or tears, a feeling that there is no safe, secure harbour, and worst of all, the sense that they must wear a cheerful mask and play the game, because there is no one they can confide in or rely on.

52

Sometimes these feelings escalate until children feel totally out of control, and often their emotional lives are thrown severely off-track for as much as a year or two. The failure in school and parental anger which inevitably result may lead to a teenager running away from home, or being thrown out of the house by outraged parents. The downtowns of most major cities harbour many emotional refugees from the pressures of middle class adolescent and family life; unfortunately, the dangers far outweigh the advantages of being away from home in such cases. And by now we have all heard about so many cases of ordinary adolescents from happy families ending up on the streets that we have begun to accept it as normal, somehow, and anyway, not our problem. These adolescents are not, however, experiencing a normal reaction to growing up; many of the feelings and behaviours described are the classic symptoms of clinical depression which may result from loss, such as that of a parent by death or divorce, or from some other massive upset in a young child's life. It seems to me that many of these young adults are, in fact, mourning a loss - the loss of the childhood which they dido't have a chance to enjoy in the rush to adulthood on the fast track. And it is our problem, although comparatively few of these children come to the attention of helping professionals, perhaps because so many parents, teachers and children have come to regard such behaviours and feelings as almost a normal part of contemporary adolescent rebellion. And few of the children who are seen by

FAST1RACK

therapists or counsellors report being helped by the process; rather it seems like they just have to drag themselves through it, sometimes with a little help from their friends, a parent or a trusted teacher, but most often on their own. And many of them do make it back to what we like to see as "normal" behaviour - and in many cases they climb back on to the fast track, go to university, pursue a career, have families, and proceed to lead the lives for which their childhood has so adequately prepared them - as stressed-out adults. In some ways the child who has been pushed his whole life is a strange amalgam of childish selfishness and thoughtlessness and adult cynicism and rigidity; what has disappeared in too many cases is the transitional stage between these two extreme mind sets, the idealism and hopefulness with which the young have traditionally faced the world, troubled although it has always been. Unfortunately the loss of the capacity for idealism not only has major ramifications for a person's personal growth, but also for the well being of the society of which that person is a part. What we see, then, is that if the very young child is hurried toward adulthood and can't do it all, he blames himself; the slightly older child blames the world and turns away or burns out; and of course the adolescent, more cognizant of the source of the pressure, blames parents and the society, and rebels against them The major question with which I began, then, seems to me to be answered in the negative: the pressures to which we are subjecting children today are not helping

53

WEININGER

them to be able to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Too few of them can get off the fast track without crashing and burning; too many of them are headed for the fast lane, the emotionally and physically unhealthy lifestyle in which too many of us are already travelling. Now for the corollary: can we change the way we raise and educate our children? I guess that depends on whether we truly want to; very many people in this society still ''buy'' the stress-laden lifestyle toward which we are pushing so many children. Perhaps the answer ultimately depends on reaching a psychological understanding of why we are so determined to hurry our children into a life so much like ours. And some of the !!linking I have been doing about this is not, perhaps, what you will want to hear. Maybe as a society we don't really like children very much. We talk a lot about children being "our most precious commodity" - but the very use of that word, with its connotations of something which can be bought and sold and traded for things of real worth - troubles me. Let's just look for a moment at what we too often do, rather than what we so often say: • We don't have time even for our babies - from our busy lives we take just enough time to have them before we pass them off to a succession of others to be raised and educated - even when the quality of the care may be questionable. • We want our little children to become independent, to grow

up quickly, to be self-sufficient, so we don't have to take as much time from our busy lives to care for them, talk to them, or just be with them. • We program our children into myriad time consuming activities, not so that they can enjoy themselves, but so that they can improve themselves - like hybrid crops which will endure and sell better. • We talk a lot about going ''back to the basics" in schools, although most of us, if honest, will admit that school was very boring as ''the basics" - and that it certainly didn't prepare most of us for adulthood well. • We keep children in school, if they will put up with it, for nearly twenty years, which relieves us of the constant responsibilities for their care; and many children go to camp all summer, or have some other time-consuming activity as well; and now we are talking about year-round school! • We label, segregate, or institutionalize any children with problems which might somehow keep them from being the achievers we value - so that it can clearly be seen as "not being our fault" if they don't "succeed." • We create a juvenile court system whose goal is to establish

54

FAST TRACK

an acceptable framework for controlling troublesome children as opposed to being concernedabouttheirneeds. • We penalizechildren for their parents' poverty: eachmonth, in Metro Toronto alone,84,000 peopledependon a food bank for sustenance - 46% of these are childrenunder 18;20%are childrenunder5. Hungry childrendo not learneasilyin school - but they are learning quicklythat they are notvalued members of their society. • We make surethat hungry childrenalso live in substandard, overcrowded housing because we continue to allow governments and private developers to keep on churning outmonsterhomes, condos and luxuryoffices,whilerestricting "affordable" housing. Nearly 18,000 families whomust dependon foodbankslivein privaterental housing and have an averageof $23 a weekto live on after payingrent. More of us are NIMBYS (''notin my backyard"), and fewerof us are ashamedto admitit, thanever before - a selfish, bitterheritage to pass on to our young. • We are actively hostile - because it might damage our property values • to the concept of providing even a placeto stay in a temporary hostel, much less longerterm

residence and treatment, for the adolescent children of our own middleclass communities who cannotlive at homeany longer - many for the reasons already enumerated. • We pressureour children to grow up quickly, to achieve early in areas of academics, sports, and socialinteraction, and we forget that there are ''late-bloomers.'' We leaveno roomfor them,rather we make themfeel that if that they haven't achieved in something, even at 6 years of age, then theymust be a failure in their owneyes and in ours as well and this feeling may persistfor life. • We involve children in our wars, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. Because children are so suggestible and because they look for some leadership from adults, they willoftenacceptthe code of martyrdom as an entryinto the adultworld. • Thosechildren whomwe have pushedto grow up quickly wantall the privileges that go along with being grown-up smoking, drinking, driving, sex, and money- and when these so-called rights of adulthood are deniedthem, they feel betrayed and alienated from the very groupthey thinkthey wanted to join. But nowthey

55

WEININGER

don't want to join adults, they join together to get what they want and feel they need, and then the adults ban the teenagers from malls and shopping centers, only further forcing a feeling of needing to fight to get what they want. • We force children to read too early - it seemsthat this is yet another indication of parent and maybe teacher-pressure to have children grow up fast - the pressure is adult, not children's desire. Some children do read early and are not pushed,they learn with help from parents, but they introduce the idea of reading. We knowfor example, that adolescents introducedto reading later, by grade 2 as opposed to grade 1, show more enthusiasm and spontaneityin reading than those introduced to reading early. My workwith 4-year-olds who remained at home, when compared with matched4-year-olds in classrooms, performed as effectively on pre-reading tests (Pintner-Cunningham Primary test). The group withouttraining performed betterthan schoolchildren at the time of the first testing, and at the secondtesting - 8 months later, bothgroupsperformed as well. However, an importantissue emerged- those children who remained at home appeared to have made betteremotional gains, whichI thinkenabled

themto cope more effectively with the demands of formal academic training. • We are facingremarkably high levels of child abuse- both physical and sexual abuse - and yet we have not been able to preventour media, TV, movies, magazines, tapes, from showing sex and violence towards children and women. We may be presenting impulses and behaviour to - adults - whomay not be ableto controltheir impulses and then do whatthey see. Sexual abuse of childrenis unfortunately not new; it was prominentin the past, when parents "owned" children, when we had slaves, and when adults thoughtof children as young adults. However, in our society which is generally an enlightened, rich society, we still haveabuse, and I think this points to our lack of understanding of the needfor care of youngchildren. However, the more we hurt children, the less likely we are to regardthem as people with feelings and the needfor care. By hurting and abusing them we convince ourselvesthat they are less than human and then we must continue to hurt them to keep out of our mindsthat they really are children withfeelings. • We are threatened when our children displaythe independence we say we want them to

56

FAST TRACK

achieve - when they choose a course, or a career, or a friend, or a romance, or clothes, or a hair style, or values, or a lifestyle with which we don't agree; and we are capable of quite dreadful retaliation for these choices. • We want them to have all the things we didn't have and all the opportunities we lacked, but we bitterly resent it when they don't have to work as hard as we did, or don't seem to value what they have, or don't gratefully recognize what we have sacrificed to achieve these for them. • We often do not provide them with adult role models which they can respect, or adult behaviour which is honest, rational, and responsible - but we not only expect, but demand, both respect and eternal gratitude - for just doing our job - parenting. Even when we do not do it very well. Do these sound like the actions of a society which truly loves and values its children? A society which recognizes that "as we sow, so shall we reap?" What kind of adults will these children become? And, looking not very far ahead, as adults will they care to contribute large chunks of their incomes to support the vast number of senior citizens who will make up a substantial proportion of the population by the early decades of the next century - including us? Will they have had lifelong lessons in

caring, compassion, and commitment from us, the role models of the generation ahead of them? I think not. We will have taught them, by our actions, that the only place for those who can't make it in the fast lane is the old car dwnp. We teach our children every day and in every way that only the successful people really matter in this society. Many parents today, I suggest, are more than a little ambivalent toward children, whom they see largely as imposing heavy physical, emotional, fmanciaI, and time-constraints on their own personal search for satisfaction as adults. Perhaps this is just another by-product of the focus on self - "me first, no matter what" - which is currently so pervasive in our society. In some cases this results in an antagonism, often unconscious, towards children, and attitudes which may range from ignorance and indifference, through denial and contempt, to open hostility and ultimately destruction. And thus many of the structures which adults build into the lives of children, serve their own ends, not the needs of children. This is a pretty depressing idea - after all, the human race would have died out long ago if thousands of generations of parents had not had their offspring's needs and protection as the first priority, not only as individuals, but as a tribe or village or society. And I am not saying that all parents, or all adults, react in these ways to children. But it is too easy to get so caught up in the practical realities of busy adult life that we just take the easy way out - and subscribe to the norms and values of

57

WEINlNGER

families around us, of the school system, of the government, and of the media. And in so doing, one almost inevitably is hurrying children toward that fast track which may make their lives far less personally satisfying and meaningful, and the families they have, the children they raise, and society they mold, far less compassionate, safe, curious, playful, loving, and humane. But how do we, personally, get out of the fast lane long enough to keep our children from getting into it? We spend some time - not money. We do things with our children - simple things, like taking the dog for a walk, or going for a bike ride, or mucking about in the garden, or making a cake, or building sand castles, or looking through old family albums, or telling stories about the grandparents we remember and they never knew, or cuddling up together on the couch, or playing a silly card game, or watching a movie and talking about it And not just "whole family" things time, alone and just for them, with each of our children, regularly, doing something we and they enjoy - a visit to a museum, building a lego block city , fiddling with a computer , reading a book aloud , wandering around a mall. Nothing much. Nothing expensive. Nothing structured Nothing which has to fit into just so much time. And while we do these things we talk. Not the "so what are you doing in school these days? So who are your friends? Do they do drugs? Have you decided on a career?" kinds of inquisition. Not nagging. Not giving advice. Just two people who love each other, talking about whatever comes UD, and really listening to what the other is saying, and isn't saying, with no other agenda for that moment in time. And we Slow down the pace of our own lives, and thus our children's. Does it really matter if this task, this bit brought

home from work, gets done tonight? Or that this child gets to this lesson today? Or that the dishes are washed right now? Or that we tidy up before the cleaning lady comes tomorrow? Or that we get to that aerobics class, that squash match, that hockey game? We must find time to just sit down around the dinner table and share what went on in each others' lives today, and talk and laugh and relax and enjoy each other and be a real family together. We can, as thinking, caring adults, change, if not the whole world, at least the world of our own family's life. We can remember that it is people, and our relationships with them, which really matter, not things, or money, or status. The fast lane is not the only way to get to where we, as persons, as families, as a society, want to go - in fact, it may take us somewhere we do not want to be at all. The best road map we can give to our children is one created with our time, our love, ourselves. The only valid destination is one which each child, in time, chooses freely for herself. Beyond the polluted twelve lane super expressway which is a metaphor for contemporary society, may lie a land more peaceful, less stressful. It is a land our children may enter, if only we can let them have the time to play, to learn, to dream, to search - to be children and have the emotional and intellectual experiences associated with childhood.

Don't hurry, why rush; Teach slowly, learn more; Go play.

58

FAST TRACK

References Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Boston: Harvard. DeCasper, A. (1988). The Hurried Fetus.

Child Behaviour and Development Letter, Vol. 4, #1, pp. 1-3. The hurried child: up too fast too soon.

Elkind, D. (1981).

Growing

Cambridge: Addison-Wesley. Gesell, A. (1968). The mental growth ofthe pre-school child. New York: MacMillan. Joyce, J. (1940). Ulysses. Modem Library.

New York:

Piaget, J. (1952). The origin of intelligence in children. New York: International Universities Press. Pintner, R. & Cunningham, B.V., & Durost, W.N. (1966). The PintnerNew Cunningham Primary Test. York: Harcourt Brace. Postman, N. (1982). The disappearance of childhood. New York: Delacorte.

Generations apart: Adult hostility to youth. New York:

Sheleff, L. S. (1981). McGraw-Hill.