Do you have smart but dumb parents?

Halogen
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 15:20:03 +0000

Now I understand the stroke point. It’s been debunked.

Okay, a kid can wish his teachers (from school teachers to parents trying to help with homework) were more competent instead of wanting to feel better than them. It’s still a perception issue. Children have a very limited perspective of any given subject and they give undue importance to what they consider the ‘foundation’ of mathematics – what they learn in elementary school – when what they really learn is mostly mental algorithms and a few rules that tide them over until they learn the true foundation of mathematics later in life if they choose.

This leads to the presented scenario: a child who is actively learning arithmetic techniques asks for help from a parent who no longer needs to use those techniques (thanks to calculators); the parent can’t help (or could help, given proper context); the child silently judges the parent to be incompetent.

The same applies to any subject with both depth of specific techniques and breadth of overall understanding, where the child is working on something specific and the parent has a broad understanding.