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To raise a reading child

As parents we have many aspirations for our children. One of my fervent hopes, and one that has been realized, was for mine to be readers. As I write this my daughters are 10 and 12. They are both voracious readers, and even more heartening to me is that they appreciate good writing. When they were younger I helped them choose books, read everything they did and talked about it. I didn’t censor, just talked about why some writing was better than other. Now I can’t keep up with their reading but it pleases me to see that they read a whole lot more than I do, and stay away from the junk without my intervention.

Maybe it all turned out this way because I love books and have a love of language. However, this was not something I was willing to leave to chance and actively tried to inculcate, and here I share my approach on a friend’s request.

I was a voracious reader as a child. I attribute that to boredom. There really wasn’t much other entertainment available. We did not have a TV or video games. My  options for my time outside school were to help around the house, play with friends or read. Reading requires a lot of effort, and is provides much delayed gratification than watching TV. With all the entertainment options available to children these days, and given the basic human nature to exert as little effort as possible, most children do not naturally gravitate towards books.

Working from that basic principle, step one for me was to present reading as an entertainment option to my children. Ever since they were babies, I would sit them in my lap, read them books while pointing at the words. I modeled this as well. I weaned myself off TV, so if we had a quiet moment, when children were playing by themselves I would sit down and read, very easy for me to do as I love reading.

Second step was to limit the entertainment options around the house, so they would naturally gravitate to books. I limited my daughters’ “screen time”, both computer and TV combined, to one hour when they were home and none at all on the days they went to school or daycare. This rule is still in effect years later. Aside from that limited time, TV was not turned on in the house until after kids were in bed. it helped that I dislike TV news, and my husband is not much into sports, and with a DVR we can just tape the shows we like to watch them later. I am a natural homebody, so I did not take the girls out to have “fun”. We just hung around at home - there were toys and there were books, and that was that. I also did not feel compelled to constantly entertain my kids by playing with them. I really did let them get bored and figure out what they wanted to do with themselves. 

I made reading seem fun and special - again not a hard thing for me as I do believe that. On our days home, we had a special “rest” time in the afternoon when we all took our books and cuddled up in bed to read, and then we went downstairs and had tea time. Given that we weren’t running around all the time - a walk to the library became the special event of the week. I hope you are not thinking it all very draconian. With our jobs and two little children, life was hectic enough. I really liked the quiet and peace rest of the time.

As the girls grew older we did not get them hand-held gaming devices and did not install a DVD player in the car. Yes, that meant we did not take many long car trips, and the ones we took were always not that easy. I had to plan games we could play in the car, read aloud to them during our drives, and sill endure some difficult drives. I persevered keeping the long-term goal in mind. Now I have the opposite problem - my kids can’t even take a fifteen minute car ride without a book in hand, when I would like them to look out and pay attention to their surroundings instead.

Simultaneously, I worked on teaching my children to read early. My main source of inspiration was my friend Valerie who had succeeded at this and Sydney Ledson’s book that she recommended. I adapted his ideas and did what worked with my children and their personalities. I took more of “whole word” approach rather than focusing on spelling or the alphabet. I taught them to recognize whole words, and taught sounds that letters made. My approach was definitely more ad-hoc but it worked. By 4, the girls had acquired basic reading skills and after that it was all practice. The more they read, the better they got at it, and since I was providing them ample opportunities to read, practice was easy.  

Seeing my daughters read books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, and enjoy and appreciate them, fills my heart with pride and joy. Maybe it was all inevitable, very much in the same way children of musicians become musicians themselves. Whatever the reason, the end result makes me happy and proud.

To Kumon or not to Kumon

A friend recently asked my opinion on how to help young children improve at reading and math. I wish I had the answers! I have had some success in establishing a love of reading in my children but math continues to be a challenge for me. I will share my experience and the lessons I have learned, and hopefully you’ll find some help or a path forward. My children did Kumon, I believe it helped us and I like the system. I wish we had started earlier than we did.

It took me a while to come to grips with my children’s shortcomings in math and why that bothered me. For a while I justified by thinking that it is fine as long as they know the concepts, or that I did not want to become one of those pushy moms. I wrote about it a little in this post. So when you start thinking about pushing your children in academics, first and foremost, dig deep and ask yourself why is it that you want your child to do well in math. Is it because other children her age are doing better, or is it just a reflexive reaction to your own upbringing that one has to do well in math to be successful in life?

I had to come to grips with all this when I saw my fourth grader counting on her fingers for addition, and found it really bothering me. I finally came to the conclusion that math is important to me because it is a basic building block of education, same as reading. If you can’t do basic math as a child (and you have to decide what ‘basic’ is. For me it is a higher standard than most), you don’t develop analytical skills, and can never go into a scientific field. Whether my daughters become scientists or not, will be eventually their choice but I do want to make sure that the door to that career option stays open for them.

Math is very much like music. Even if you can read notes, and know where the keys on the piano are, you still won’t be able to just sit down on the piano and play. You have to practice, and practice a lot. Practice is not fun, but it is challenging and it is necessary. Same is true for math. You may know all the concepts of multiplication and division, but if you don’t practice, you cannot do them fluently. If you cannot do basic arithmetic fluently, you will struggle with virtually all branches of math - algebra, statistics, even geometry. There are people who think that everybody doesn’t need to learn math. I believe the reason kids struggle with algebra in high school because we do not start math early enough - elementary schools do not have a rigorous enough math curriculum. To get good at math and to grow in it, you have to practice a lot. Yes, I am talking daily drills and they are hard and definitely not “fun”. But then again, I don’t think education needs to be fun all the time. That might be the primary problem with the US education system - everyone trying to make it fun. Believe me, children like a challenge and like to rise up to it. The best I can do is support my children through the challenge by motivating and guiding them. A friend of mine uses a web site to generate daily math drills for her children. I registered mine in Kumon. I do believe Kumon is a good system, and if parents approach it with the right attitude, it can provide a sense of achievement for the child. We did Kumon off and on, setting goals, taking breaks if it got too much for the children or if I was too busy otherwise to be supportive, but in the end my children became fluent in arithmetic. I do think I started too late and wish I had started them in first or second grade. They are in middle school now and use the Saxon math program which I like very much as well - there are no pictures, no fun real-life situations to illustrate concepts, just pure math with a challenge your child must rise to.

If only I had shown the same perseverance with music. Both my children tried and gave up musical instruments. I did not invest enough of my time in supporting and helping them through the daily practice. But then there is only so much I can do. sigh. Math won out over music, sad as that may be.

How mundane becomes exotic

I came across this story in the news about making your own yogurt. It talks about these special “heirloom” cultures from European countries. The story makes yogurt-making sound exotic and wondrous. We Indians can roll our eyes at it, given that making yogurt is an integral a part of our daily lives, but I see an omen of things to come. Our mothers have probably never even thought about how old their yogurt culture is. My mother’s is older than I am for sure, and I have been using the same culture that I brought from India about ten years ago. But in a country where food has been industrialized for many generations now, making yogurt at home becomes a newsworthy item. 

Raw milk is another such thing. When I was growing up, we got raw milk delivered home every day. We boiled it to kill all contamination, drank it the same day, turned the leftover into yogurt, and started the process all over, the next day. In the US, pasteurized and homogenized milk is considered the cause of many dietary and allergy problems by some, but you have to jump through hoops and pay through your nose to get raw milk. Advocacy groups have been established for this once simple thing.

Then there is the ‘eat local’ movement in the US. My Indian friends will remember their parents going to the “sabzi mandi” regularly to buy locally grown seasonal produce without upping their noses and calling themselves ‘locavores’. Specialty, and very expensive, restaurants have opened that profess to serve only locally grown fruits and vegetables. It really is quite difficult to find locally grown and seasonal fruits and vegetables in the US.

Now I see globalization not only bringing convenience foods to India, but actively trying to change dietary habits to sell more breakfast cereal and doughnuts. Modern Indians look forward to be able to buy packaged milk that lasts for a whole week. Children are growing up eating industrially-produced breakfast cereals and fast food, guaranteeing that food habits would have completely changed in just one generation. I want to scream, to shout, “Learn from other people’s mistake. Don’t do it!”. Here I am in a 'developed' country, struggling to feed my family seasonal and fresh food, and fighting an expensive uphill battle to achieve that, and there are people on the other end of the world happily giving that up to be 'modern'! The society in America has already seen what convenience food can do to a culture, the health of a populace and to the environment. It has changed crops to the extent that we have to seek out heirloom seeds to get tomatoes that have some flavor. Food industrialization has destroyed a way of life beyond recovery in the US, and bringing it back has turned into a legal, and political battle. That way of life is still healthy, and not forgotten in other countries, but it will be destroyed even faster in a mad dash towards consumerism and modernization. 

Is obesity and environmental damage an integral part of providing equal opportunities to the children of India? Do things have to come full circle again, if they have already been there once? Do we have to destroy a way of life, and then be forced to discover it as ‘exotic’ once again?

Are the French better parents?

A new year and a new parenting formula! Last year we were told that the Chinese way was better and this year’s hottest parenting methods come from the French via Paula Druckerman in her book Raising up bebe. I haven’t read the book, but read her article in Wall Street Journal. Does this not strike you as ironic, that as per authors of parenting books,  parents in China or France do such an excellent job without ever having read a single book on parenting, and those in the USA have no clue despite the market being glutted with books on the subject. And so we go write more! If you stop and think, maybe the problem is not of having enough advice, but too much of it, that makes us question our values instead of following our inner compass. 

One country’s parenting way in not better than other’s. What is common among any of the “old” countries is that parents there still have a deep sense of their roots, and that combined with the local culture, guides the way for them. If there is a magic formula that produces wonderful children, it is parents with a clear vision of what kind of adults they want their children to grow up into. Ms Druckerman, a helicopter parent by her own admission, went from New York to Paris and was amazed at the fact that the parents actually had some long term goals for their children that they followed up on. They saw themselves as the means for their children’s success instead of wringing their hands in exasperation of having no control on what their children did. French parents actually exerted their parental authority! Ms Druckerman could have as well gone to a small mid-western town in the US, or any other country in the world and made the exact same discovery. “How mid-western US parents are better than neurotic New York parents” doesn’t make a very good book title though. 

The problem is not that American parents are bad or that the French have discovered a secret sauce. It is not at all culture specific - parents who misguidedly look for a secret formula, some magic recipe in a book that will help them parent better, have already ceded their inner authority to be the best guide for their children. 

In most other countries of the world, parenting is driven by culture, not by research or parenting books. Parents are guided by a deep set of values imbibed form the culture they live in and the culture as a whole instills these values in their children. Sometimes parenting is driven simply by “what will people say”, because the culture clearly defines right and wrong. In India, where I grew up, a child would get a dressing down for making her parents look bad in front of neighbors and extended family by behaving badly. It was very deeply instilled that your behavior reflects on the entire family going back many generations, and you better not mess that up. My parents did not learn that from a book.  They did not have to explicitly teach it either - we met enough role models daily to emulate from.

America is a different country. Individual is more important than the collective family. The country is a melting pot, and there is no set of uniform cultural values that we are judged by. Here we raise our children in an isolated environment. We rarely meet our neighbors or extended family, so that constant threat of somebody watching and judging is removed. This isolation also mean that neither the parents nor the children see any regular real time role models to emulate. And lacking our own inner compass, we go trudging through books and newspapers to find that magic formula.


On a side note, it is bizarre that WSJ is the new outlet for parenting advice - even the 'tiger mother' article was published there!

Tiger Mother

The "Tiger mother" has been the target of everyone's hate in the US. Not having read the memoir or the controversial Wall Street Journal article, I did not want to write a knee-jerk reaction, based purely on what I read in the media. I have finally read the article, and now feel ready to express an opinion.

I am well aware that in here the terms "western" and "Chinese" parents refer to stereotypes. There are many bad parents in the east and many good parents in the western society. This is more of a general discussion of parenting values most common in each culture.

Surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with most of what Ms Chua had to say. She says "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." I absolutely agree - you cannot enjoy something unless you are accomplished at it. To get really good at something you have to go through a phase of absolute frustration and boredom where you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again until it clicks, and it is a rare child that will be willing to work through that on their own. Most will quit. However, if the child does work through that frustration, and attain mastery, the experience will forever be a source of self-confidence to help work through other difficulties in life. Many such successful experiences, stacked together will constitute resilience and perseverance - qualities very hard to instill. I also agree that western parents are often too concerned about their child's self-confidence, not realizing that "there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't." Confidence comes from true accomplishment, not false praise.

In all the criticism of Ms Chua, there seems to be an underlying assumption that she does not love her children. Do only lax mothers love their children? I would argue that a mother who is willing to let go of short-term gratification that comes from her children liking her the next day, in favor of their long term success, loves her children even more. Ms Chua talks about cuddling and hugging her children. She is not all tough and no love. How the techniques used by Ms Chua affect a child depends heavily on whether the child feels loved, whether she realizes that her mother truly cares for her and will do anything for her. If Ms Chua had her daughter practice "The little white donkey" for hours, do not forget that Ms. Chua was right there with her for all those hours as well. She didn't just threaten her child, leave her with the piano and go shopping! Not many parents have that kind of staying power and would have resorted to bribing and then eventually given up. You have to care enough about your child's future to spend that kind of time with them, and I am sure that the child can see that caring in their day to day life. As Ms Chua says "For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly." I know many women from eastern countries who give up a social life, stay on in bad marriages and sacrifice luxuries, just so that their child can become a successful adult with a secure future. Whereas many western mothers use the mantra "happy mothers make happy babies" to justify all kinds of ill-advised behavior.

As far as academics go, the constant effort these days in schools to make learning "fun" and, then providing all kinds of external motivations to get the ever distracted children to learn, annoys me no end. The purpose of education, especially the kind taught up to middle school, is not entertainment, but is to establish a basic foundation on which higher education can be based. If you don’t have arithmetic down in elementary school, and your parents don't care enough to ensure that you do, there is an extremely small chance you will ever be able to study advance math or engineering. Basic education - reading, writing and math is a lot of boring drill work. It is a myth that children will not do anything unless it is "fun". They will surely not, if left to themselves, but working with parents with the right attitude and who set correct expectations, you will be surprised what children are capable of. By setting the misguided expectation that learning should be "fun", we end up making school seem even more boring. Have you ever met a child who did not enjoy rising up to a challenge, meeting it, and basking in the glow of that success! However, helping a child through boring work and sticking with it until they get it, is hard work. In my opinion, efforts to make learning "fun" are really grown-ups way of copping out hoping that maybe children would just learn on their own.

In criticism of Tiger Mother, many have pointed out that despite all their academic accomplishments, eastern children often lack leadership skills. That has less to do with parenting skills and everything to do with assimilation. Social skills are learned from parents by osmosis, and unlike math there is no easy drill to instill those. Immigrant parents are not comfortable in the western society and usually have a hard time relating to and socializing with westerners. As a result their children lack that skill and pay the price in the work environment. They still get much ahead in the workplace because of their accomplishments, than the lack of assimilation skills would allow, and that is credit to their work-ethic and their parents' hard work.

Yes, I agree that this sometimes goes to the extreme, with too much being expected of children, and absolutely no freedom to fail. You can't set high expectations and then leave the children to fend for themselves through them. You have to be there helping, encouraging, guiding and pushing, as necessary. And then be eventually ready to back off.

My children barely watch TV and have no video games. I rarely take them out for "entertainment". We do go for movies, and to fairs and museums but I am not their perpetual activity-planner. They are not paid for chores and no disrespect to elders is tolerated. The only time I buy them non-essential items (toys, trinkets, etc.) is on their birthdays. This does not mean that my house is run like a military camp, or that my kids are not loved or praised, or a parent doesn't sit with them for hours to listen to their worries. They know their parents will be there behind them all the way, but they have to hold up their end too. Does that make me a "Tiger mother". Maybe it does.

Make it legal

My home state of Arizona recently passed a law which in effect lets police catch illegal immigrants and put them in jail. On the surface it seems like the typical xenophobic law from a conservative state where whites are scared that foreigners might take over. I was mostly annoyed by this law until I came across this story on NPR. Traditionally immigration violations are handled by the INS and illegal immigrants are housed in INS prisons to be eventually deported. These prisons are run by the government. However, the state prisons in Arizona, where the criminals caught by state police are incarcerated, are run by private companies. In exchange for managing these prisons, they get to use the prisoners as a low cost labor force. According the npr story, guess who helped write the law that now allows state police not the federal INS agents, catch illegal immigrants and put them in the privately run jails - the prison companies.

As a legal immigrant who went through the right channels, waited for years, paid the fees, and underwent all manner of scrutiny, I do not condone illegal immigration. Just because you happened to pop-over in this country without getting caught and now have been here many years, you shouldn't automatically get citizenship. But try as I may, I cannot get the the diabolical implications of this law out of my head. Arizona prison companies are about to get a huge labor force, consisting of illegal immigrants who have absolutely no rights in this country and hence no access to any due process. They don't vote so the politicians do not care, and in any case given the strong anti-immigration view of most Arizonans, no politician from this state will ever stand up for the rights of illegal immigrants. We now have indentured labor, some would even call slavery, in this state, something that would be frowned upon in any other country. In the US however, prison companies made sure that they first made this legal. They might be doing something despicable but they are not breaking any laws, right?

Herein lies the simple way all illegal acts are committed in the US - if you have enough clout you make sure you get a law passed that makes your despicable act legal, and the then do it. Dylan Ratigan, a TV host, helped create this video to explain how Wall Street perpetrated the crime of the century, brought the entire world economy to its knees but can still claim that they didn't do anything illegal. They made sure they had the laws changed first. But really, this applies to everything. Bribing politicians is illegal and is frowned upon all over the world. However it is completely legal in the US, and is carried on under the guise of lobbying and campaign financing. Indentured labor has been legalized in Arizona and the prison companies are working on doing the same in many other states.

Do you know of any other examples?