salon:My own awakening to the toxicity of the achievement race came the way it does to many parents:
salon:My own awakening to the toxicity of the achievement race came the way it does to many parents: via years of trying to keep up with it.I sensed the problem in my home before I could name it. My daughters, Shelby and Jamey, were in middle school, and Zakary was in third grade. They were still children, in the essential sense of the word. They still played hide-and-seek, treasured their American Girl dolls, and relied on me to make their meals. But their lives had mutated into an adult-like state of busyness that gave our home the air of a corporate command center.Twelve-year-old Jamey, for instance—who still wore braces and fit into children’s clothing sizes—would wake up before seven, cram in some extra studying over breakfast, and rush off to her school day, which lasted the usual seven hours. She’d go straight from there to a violin lesson or soccer practice, return home at six, and commence a daily homework marathon that took her well into the night. I’d see her hunched at her desk past eleven p.m., washed in the yellow lamplight, her long brown hair spilling over her books.We have our kids in an achievement race – it’s bad for their health, and not the way they learn -- source link