Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society

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Summary: Reclaiming Childhood
Review: As a family practice resident I am trained to focus on acute physical ailments. Yet so often parents approach me with concerns about their children's behavior and emotional state. Reclaiming Childhood offers a much needed reminder that scholastic achievement is not the sole indicator of healthy development.

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Summary: Help for parents
Review: As a pediatrician, I find that we are putting far too much pressure on children today. this book will help parents relax and appreciate children as they are. It contains outstanding chapters on the child's natural strengths in play, the arts, language, and feelings for the natural world. William Crain has pulled together a considerable amount of research to support his view that we must enable children to grow more spontaneously and naturally.

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Summary: A must read for parents of young children!
Review: As an expectant mother, I was amazed by the number of parenting books on the market that are geared toward preparing your child for the future. Like any parent, I want my child to be successful and confident. But most of all, I want my child to be happy. Luckily, I discovered William Crain's book, Reclaiming Childhood. The book has enlightening chapters on children's inherent ability to develop remarkable artistic, linguistic, and creative skills during their early years. It demonstrates that allowing a child to grow and learn in accordance with his or her own developmental timeline will allow the child to flourish and preserve skills and abilities that are often suppressed in a society obsessed with preparing for the future. Many of my generation have felt the need to be successful in the eyes of others at the expense of pursuing what we truly enjoy. I would hate for this to happen to my son. After reading William Crain's book, I feel confident that by simply introducing my child to his natural surroundings and allowing him to follow his own developmental instincts, I will be doing the right thing.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for parents of young children!
Review: As an expectant mother, I was amazed by the number of parenting books on the market that are geared toward preparing your child for the future. Like any parent, I want my child to be successful and confident. But most of all, I want my child to be happy. Luckily, I discovered William Crain's book, Reclaiming Childhood. The book has enlightening chapters on children's inherent ability to develop remarkable artistic, linguistic, and creative skills during their early years. It demonstrates that allowing a child to grow and learn in accordance with his or her own developmental timeline will allow the child to flourish and preserve skills and abilities that are often suppressed in a society obsessed with preparing for the future. Many of my generation have felt the need to be successful in the eyes of others at the expense of pursuing what we truly enjoy. I would hate for this to happen to my son. After reading William Crain's book, I feel confident that by simply introducing my child to his natural surroundings and allowing him to follow his own developmental instincts, I will be doing the right thing.

Rating:
Summary: Good but goes too far
Review: I agree with the author's complaints that early childhood is not sufficiently appreciated or recognized by educators as something to be nurtured, explored, and extended but I disagree with her continuation of this complaint into later childhood. It's sad that kindergartners are now expected to read, add and subtract, and do homework. But, at some point, children must realize that all learning is predicated upon knowing certain basic facts intuitively such as multiplication tables, some historical dates, historical events and people, grammar basics, and other things that can only be memorized. Learning those is not always fun or creative but it is necessary for a literate population. The author believes otherwise -- she believes that all education must first and foremost begin at each individual child's level and that educators must follow the child, not the child the curriculum. I thought that kind of individualized, do your own thing, education ended after the educational farces of the 60's and 70's when children could be enormously creative but could not read or write.

Children today are not as well educated or informed as children were in our parent's generation. Few, if any, fads du jour have lasted more than a few years. Parents, instead of demanding serious work from their children, belittle homework, tests, and hard work that interferes with their children's extracurricular activities, and TV and computer time. Teachers give in to the parents because, to do otherwise, is to risk losing their jobs because they're "too tough". Spare me! Most educated parents can remember that they learned the most from their toughest, most demanding, teachers, not the ones who gave everyone A's for effort. Parents who enforce appreciation for learning through perspiration tend to have the best educated and most successful children.

Rating:
Summary: Returning childhood to the kids
Review: One of the great strengths of this book is that it reminds the reader of what it really was like to be a child: how imaginative, artistic, and connected to nature kids are naturally. It's hard for me to remember now, but there was a time when my favorite activity was hanging out in the backyard and just looking at leaves and under rocks, sitting quietly, and thinking things over. I could do this for hours.

It also made me recall the year I spent conducting research in preschool classrooms. I visited many wonderful preschools, but I remember being particularly struck by the atmosphere in the Montessori classroom I visited. There was a sense of calm there that I have never seen anywhere else. At first it seemed eerie; surely these kids were being coerced into behaving so quietly and going about their business in such an orderly graceful way. I remember in particular the child who was bringing around a tray of nuts that he had shelled and offering them graciously to the other children. But the longer I stayed, the more I realized that this deep sense of peacefulness originated from the kids' satisfaction in being allowed to choose their own tasks at their own pace.

William Crain reminds us of some of the charateristics of children's development that have fallen by the wayside as the push for academic achievement (as measured by standardized tests) has become stronger and stronger. The child's desire to be connected with nature, to use her imagination, and to produce art and poetry is valued so much less in our schools than the three R's. As a result they are in danger of disappearing from the curriculum completely, especially in schools with limited resources. Yet these activities are precisely what researchers in the last two centuries have observed to be at the very heart of childhood.

The assumption that our children's future is more important than childhood itself has become so commonplace that it is difficult to shake it even for parents who are committed to a parenting style that is child-centered. This book challenges the assumption that academic achievement is a goal unto itself, rather than a by-product of kids who are happy, well-loved, and allowed to grow at their own pace. It will remain a powerful reminder for parents committed to a child-centered parenting style of what childhood is for in the first place.