The Apprenticeship of Being Human: Why Early Parenting Matters To Everyone by Graham Scharf
The Apprenticeship of Being Human: Why Early Parenting Matters To Everyone by Graham Scharf
- Parents are the chief culture architects of their families
- Four key areas of early child development
- Character
- Competence
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Three significant environmental factors of healthy development
- Love
- Language
- Literature
- Three keys to developing a nurturing home environment
- Reflection
- Resolve
- Repetition
- Current Facts
- Fewer than 7out of 10 students graduate from high school nationally
- Only 25% of students taking the ACT have the appropriate skills for college
- One third of workers checking you out lack the perseverance and skill to complete high school
- 27% of all children under 19 live apart from their fathers
- Brain building
- The human brain grows from 25% to 80% of its adult volume between birth and age three
- The brain grows 90% of its adult volume by age 5
- Brain development is activity dependent – sensory, motor, emotional, cognitive must be triggered
- See page 29 for graph
- Every area of life shapes a child’s experience of normal, those experiences also shape an understanding of normative – what is good and valuable, what is wrong and unacceptable.
- Mastering any skill requires practice in skills as well as virtues
- Repetition-we are what we repeatedly do
- Resolve-we are what we choose to do
- Reflection-is a particular approach to parenting achieving the desired results
- Initiation-early childhood is the initiation of a child into a way of being in the world, early experiences and a big day teach him how to navigate the social context in which he was born
- Indoctrination-in the earliest years, children learn the fundamentals of how to be human
- Learn how to have a conversation, make eye contact, listen carefully, ask clarifying questions, give genuine affirmation
- Teaching values: C.S. Lewis – “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil.”
- Character: the most significant role of early nurture and later formal education is to form the character of children
- Competence: paramount to the flourishing of individuals
- Creativity: in a home where creativity and innovation are intentional, children solve problems in new ways and develop lifelong patterns of innovation
- Collaboration: a team is more than the sum of its parts
- Cultivating character
- Routines & rudiments
- Children are taught the rudiments of being human through their daily routines in the context of their most primary relationships – typical middle class child enters first grade with 1,000-1,700 hours of one on one picture book reading vs a child of low income family with 25
- Poverty of language
- Words are the tools of exploration and creativity, not having many words has a crippling social and economic effect
- Practice and perseverance: cannot master anything without persevering practice
- Three factors that influence brain development
- Love: affirmation builds confidence which leads to taking greater risk resulting in self confidence
- Unconditional love leads to child realizing acceptance does not depend on performance
- Language: by the age of 3, children should have heard 30 million words and have spoken 1,100
- Literature: Dr Seuss-the more you read, the more things you will know. The more you know the more places you will go.
- Love: affirmation builds confidence which leads to taking greater risk resulting in self confidence
- Discipline: involves reflectively choosing to do what is good, thereby forming good habits, which when so much of life is reflexive, we do well rather than poorly
- Parenting: we only become great parents over time, slowly, as we train ourselves, reflect, analyze where we go breitling repliki zegarków wrong and make corrections
- The virtue argument
- Dignity & responsibility: let children know they are important and giving them responsibility enhances their growth
- Courage & character formation:
- Courage is performing good and wise action despite difficulty, pain, opposition and risk
- It takes courageous parents to make character a priority and nurture their child with love, language and literature rather than focus on their own needs and desires
- Educated parents make a difference within and outside their immediate family
- It is within the power of educated parents to influence the virtue and values of their own children
- Educated persons have influence among their families, friends, neighbors, and community to nurture character, competence, creativity, and collaboration
- Educated persons have the abilities and cultural power to find ways to empower and help parents in poverty through friendships, vocation, volunteering, philanthropy, advocacy and policy (page 86)