I love that "silent e can be damaging at this age".
She said it to me as a warning: don't let your five-year-old read. Oh well.
When you start talking about giving responsibilities, including practicing piano or keeping your room tidy, when does it become good habits and not allowing a child to be a child?
I think that the line gets crossed when the child feels forced to do non-school, non-chore-related activities solely to meet parental expectations and without any internal motivation. I agree that this is a hard question to answer.
There are the easy-to-read situations, like the parents who yell at their kids during sporting events or parents who go onto a skating rink and crab at their kids for not doing a perfect axel. These cases are the ones where (I think) the parents are living vicariously through the kids, as Azuil said.
Alternatively, it seems to me that this situation isn't at all the same as the story about the boy who wanted to quit baseball because he encountered some difficulty. His parent told him that he had to finish out the season. Sometimes it's good to be made to finish something you start.
I read Ellipses with real interest, especially her phrase, "too many gifties that fail".
People can do poorly for lots of reasons: academically, gifted kids who are never challenged at school can fall apart when they finally encounter challenging material. They can also "fail" if they get pushed too hard and too long to be perfect at something. I think it's important to ask a child --- in a neutral way and maybe by a third party sometimes --- if they really want to do an activity or if they feel forced.
Again, I'm not advocating that kids should be able to quit when something gets tough. I'm saying that when a parent's interests in Joey's athletic performance become more important than Joey's own ideas, it's time to re-evaluate.
If a child is performing just to make a parent happy (yet the child is miserable inside, as Azuil so eloquently described)
the parent isn't letting the child be the child that s/he is. For me, this is the crucial idea. This is the same mistake that teachers and others make when they tell us we're not letting our kids be kids because we let them do algebra when they're nine. We get frustrated because we know we aren't hothousing them:
we're just letting them be the kids that they are, and we wish the schools would respect that.Hope that makes sense.
Val
