Let’s Just Call This My Anti-Parents-Magazine Rant #2,393

So, it tells parents: make every moment like school. Don’t waste time just hanging out or cuddling! No! Your job is to be a super-uninspired, relentless teacher. Thus:

“In the car or on bus rides, play a game where you ask about an object, and encourage your child to figure out the shape and color of it.”

That sounds SO BORING! Do YOU go around thinking about the shape and color of the seats? Life is so much more interesting than those questions, and SO ARE YOU! Almost any spontaneous topic is more enriching — and fun — for both of you because it is a CONVERSATION, not a QUIZ. And trust me: kids WILL LEARN THEIR SHAPES AND COLORS WITHOUT YOU DOING THIS!

Other questions Parents Mag wants you to ask:

“How many cereal boxes are in the cupboard?” “How many crackers do you have?” “Does the picture look like a square or a triangle?”

Aghh! If a kid doesn’t know square from triangle yet – give it a rest! Or – here’s a wild idea – enjoy the picture book without turning it into a geometry lesson.

These questions are supposedly designed to get your child ahead in pre-k. But why? So, they know their shapes two months before the other kids? Will they be two months ahead till the end of time?

If you wonder why the Surgeon General issued a whole report last year on how incredibly stressed out parents are or why a Pew study found a huge leap in the number of people of childbearing age who don’t even want to BECOME parents – from 37% in 2018 to 47% in 2023 — Parents Mag may be at least part of the answer. Follow its advice, and there is no downtime! There is only non-stop, sing-song schooling and the nagging worry you have to come up with yet another education-boosting comment or question, stat!

What’s crazy is not just that this is stilted and stultifying – it’s also SO UNNECESSARY! Kids have always learned things from their parents — and their world — through CURIOSITY. They look around. They ask questions. (Do they ever!) They mull. They are humans, not Large Language Models to be programmed by some insane, inane, fact-spouting bot. They exist to live, look, and love. They do not require constant drilling!

Please do not trust Parents Magazine. (Trust me, with no degrees in child development, psychology, or pediatrics! But really — do.) The parenting blogs and magazines have to fill their pages with shoulds and musts and warnings, or no one would read them. So, they do! They have figured out how to turn every meal, shopping trip, and bedtime snuggle into a child-success minefield.

Who signed up for the job of grim, 24/7 pre-k teacher? No one! Not even pre-k teachers!

Children learn from us by the fact we are their parents. We care for them. We do stuff that they watch. We are their teachers by virtue of being around them and living our lives with them. Not by virtue of being giant workbooks that hug and drive them places.

Don’t believe the hype that parenting requires you to spend those formative years yakking away about shapes and counting the crackers on the table (and floor). If it’s boring to you, it’s boring to your kid.

Set your sights on plain old living life, and bonus: your kid gets to, too!