Forget the rat race - bring on the kid race

The other day a friend who works in a nursery told me about a conversation she had with a father of one of the children in her group. He mentioned that he was worried about his latest addition to the family (6 month old baby
girl) who was "falling behind" in her development because she wasn't as interactive as other babies in the ante-natal group.

To me this is all wrong - how can a 6-month old baby be behind for lack of interactivity. Obviously I wasn't part of the conversation so I'll give this particular father the benefit of a doubt - perhaps he was just curious to hear my friend's opinion. However I am quite concerned about the level of benchmarking that I am experiencing as a new father (and it's only been 5 months). Depending on who you talk to (midwives, GP, nurses, family, other
parents) most people have an opinion what a baby/child should be able to do at what stage. Or even worse, what their child can already do, or was able to do at a certain age.

OK - there is a place for statistics when it comes to observing the development of children. But I think it shouldn't be used as a yardstick and especially not as a method for comparing children in a competition like race to have the smartest, tallest, most agile, etc. child. If anything I think the idea of competition is completely overplayed in our current education system anyway and it seems to be confronting children earlier and earlier in their development. What happened to "just being a kid"? Letting them work out their talents, ambitions, skills when they are ready to do so.

A while back we had an enquiry in our Spanish school from someone who wanted us to teach her 3-year old Spanish because she wanted her to be "ahead" by the time they have to learn it in school. Obviously there's nothing wrong with exposing kids to another language at an early age - but in a playful way. You never know whether they'll take to it or not. If there is a fixed objective (i.e. to give them an advantage over other kids in school) it can easily turn into a drag rather than a joy for the kid. Obviously in many cases this reflects more the ambitions and ego of the parent rather than the child.

So I've decided to be a relaxed dad about all of this. If my son turns out to be good at languages, maths, poetry or sport - great. If not well, there's plenty of other talents that I'm sure will just show up naturally at some point in his life.

I do like Monty Python's idea of "getting a head" though ... Check out the Attila the Hun show (2min 40 secs in):

-Stef