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The lengths people will go to these days to push their children in education is a questionable debate. Should we be stimulating our 4-month-olds with flash cards, signing up for preschool at age 1 and testing our toddlers? My opinion is to relax a little but then again I’m not a Harvard grad…
In September Boston Magazine’s cover story was on choosing the best pre school. It profiled the best Boston-area schools for parents with 1- and 2-year-olds obsessing over what pre school their kids would get into and – gasp – what horrible fate would befall them if they weren’t accepted into the most promising. I found myself wondering if we were hurting our children by lackadaisically choosing one of the local church-run preschools. We had actually considered a Montessori school but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons – the $10,000 per year tuition notwithstanding, we were more concerned about pushing our child too hard too soon – five days of full school a week seems like a lot to us for a 3-year-old.
But still, Boston Magazine’s article made me wonder if we had made the right decision… did I need to get caught up in the craziness and if I didn’t obsess like the parents in the article, would my children suffer? As a product of a state school and someone who found success more in the classes of life than an ivy league school, I started to wonder.
Then, last week Boston Globe Magazine had an article about whether or not you can make your baby smarter. As a mother who has seen friends obsess about this topic since the moment they took a pregnancy test, the topic was of great interest to me. This particular article profiled families who begin educational programs at birth… regular flash card sessions with the Mona Lisa, Aristotle and Erasmus of Rotterdam, for example…families with pre-school age children speaking of cubism and impressionist composers.
Even more disturbing were the profiles of educational programs from entities such as the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential near Chestnut Hill here in the Boston area that runs the Better Baby Institute program. This program emphasizes what the article calls “early intervention.”

I was relieved to learn from many scientific studies highlighted in the article that just because I didn’t have headphones on my stomach during my pregnancies, my children probably wouldn’t suffer behind their classmates with more obsessive mothers. Apparently all those flash cards and weird practices like putting your newborn in a darkened room and pointing a flashlight at his eyes for a minute, 10 times a day (what?!) won’t necessarily make him or her any smarter than my boys, currently running around with buckets on their heads, pretending to be Buzz Lightyear.
Unstructured play has long been touted as one of the best things for children and their development. In this day and age, with all the pressures from technology advancements and worldwide competition, our children will be overworked and stressed out like the rest of us soon enough. Lighten up – teach by example and hard work and let them enjoy being children. The rest will take care of itself.
More specifically – THE BOSTON RED SOX!!!! Congratulations to the World Series Champs - sweeping the Colorado Rockies on their home field.
I love, love, love them – they were just so great to watch this season and specifically in this Series. I’m still waiting for Papelbon’s aforementioned “jig” promise. Apparently he says it won’t be until he gets back to Boston… so maybe I can skip work tomorrow and see it live (she says knowing that will never happen but wouldn’t it be nice?)!
Yes, Red Sox! Yes Rocktober! Yes Boston! Yeah Beckett, Ellsbuy, Papelbon, Varitek, Manny, Big Papi, Lowell, and all the rest!!
And props to Jordan’s Furniture for either having – or not having – faith in the team with their excellent marketing campaign. Brilliant! And congratulations to all the consumers who get free furniture because of this win, too!
Party safe and sleep tight Red Sox Nation.
…and I should know! Here are a few moments that have shaped who I am today but some of them I could definitely have lived without. (Note – definitely not “commanding” moments here). Try not to spit beer out your nose while laughing.
1. I moved to Boston in a six horse-horse trailer. Uh-huh, that’s right…driving right down Mass. Ave in Cambridge (well, actually my Dad was driving…and this was after college…not for college!). It was like a scene from the freakin’ Beverly Hillbillies. When my new roommates (I was subletting from an older man) came out to help me unpack…well, let’s just say that 40-year-old-German Scientists were not pleased to be pulling boxes out of a stinky horse trailer with some remnants of manure. I’m not kidding.
2. In college I was totally broke. My parents wouldn’t help me with a car and I had a job I needed to get to in order to pay for school. Luckily for me, a coworker got engaged and her boyfriend bought her a shiny new car so she sold hers to me for $25.00! Again, I’m not kidding. It had no muffler but it did have a hole in the floor – I could actually see the road when I was driving! But it worked!
3. The day after homecoming my senior year in high school, I was at work and a classmate came in. When he saw me he yelled – loudly, while pointing –
“Oh my GOD, our homecoming queen works at McDonald’s!”
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