<p>My wife would kinda make fun of me because she had this musical high chair and every morning I would dance in front of her for five or ten minutes to “Frere Jacques” and a bunch of other tunes that I don’t really know…so I took credit for her dancing interest, but my wife says she thinks it may have been her sister who danced a lot with her in Brazil. Anyway…“dancing” might be overstating what she does, but she most definitely loves music and I will most definitely follow the advice of all to coddle this. </p>
<p>I read that 18 months is absolutely within the normal range for walking.</p>
<p>S1 screamed “moo, moo” at 7 months. It turned out he wanted music. More specifically, he wanted the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. So for a while, we sat down to dinner to the opening bars of the Fifth, feeling rather ridiculous eating our very very simple meals to such grandiloquent musical accompaniement. He later on switched his allegiance to other music, which was a relief.
Both my boys love hiking, so being a bit late to walk did no harm.</p>
<p>BedHead, you sound like a loving dad. Be sure to read, and as she gets older read more interesting books. We had books titled “Stories for Three-Year-Olds”, and for four, five, and so on, that were well beyond my kid’s reading ability but appropriate for her listening ability.</p>
<p>Play music instead of the TV sometimes.</p>
<p>Another great idea that I heard somewhere is to write with your child. When they begin to tell stories, write them down and read them back to them - they’ll think they wrote a story. Later on, they will write their own stories, at first by dictating them to you and later independently, and while they won’t have good mechanics, etc. they’ll get used to writing. This was a great way to spend time together and really helped my kid’s writing (I only made one or two corrections to later efforts to nudge improvements along, at first I made the stories exactly as dictated).</p>
<p>Bedhead, take your cues from your D. She likes dancing, so keep dancing with & for her. Give her opportunities to dance, like daddy/daughter dances, concerts in the park, dance classes (fun ones). Take her to see dancing - recitals (don’t expect her to sit too long, though), community events with dancing, square dancing, etc. </p>
<p>Read to her a lot!!! If she really gets interested in a particular book, read it over & over. My kids each had a favorite, which was read at least twice a day for years. Take her to the library … even if her favorite part is the puppets (hopefully, your library has a puppet area!). Play lots of music for her (Sharon,Lois, & Bram - Raffi - other cool kid singers are fun). Take her to science museums & art museums. Go to art fairs, community fairs, playgrounds. Take walks (in the woods, if possible). TALK TO HER … like she’s a real person … kids can have amazing vocabularies if you help them out. Play in the yard with her. Let her help you … cook, wash dishes, pick up the house. Give her play dough, finger paints, watercolors, stuff to make freeform art projects … and fix up a work space so she can get messy. Let her cut paper up. Let her try to “write” if she wants to do that. Encourage her to color (don’t ask her to stay within the lines, though!). Encourage her to ride a bike (without training wheels, when the time comes!). </p>
<p>Above all, enjoy her. She will sense that and grow into a secure individual.</p>
<p>As I read books to my son when he was little, I recorded me reading them (and got his little voice in there too). At bedtime, (after reading more to him), he would go to bed with that tape player reading those stories back to him. I ended up with many tapes. I put one on recently and it brought tears to my eyes little to it, me reading him talking in that little 2-4 year old voice…</p>
<p>I wonder if in-home intervention would be more effective than mandatory preschool. A poster above listed an appalling amount of things her kindergarteners didn’t know. </p>
<p>These “children having children” make lousy parents, as we know, and have no clue about reading to their children, speaking to them in sentences, taking them places…it makes me want to cry. </p>
<p>The brain is like a sponge from birth to 6 years, and these children are living in a desert.</p>
<p>In-home intervention would not work and would be far more costly than daycare since it would have to be done child by child instead of bringing the children in one place for a few adults to care for. They need sustained exposure to such things as books, being read to, interacting with others. A lot of time, the children suffer not from parental neglect as such, but from parents needing to work and entrusting their children to the care of older children or elderly parents without the energy to truly engage the children.</p>
<p>^ Maybe what is holding back Head Start from being truly impactful is that it is preschool vs. daycare ?</p>
<p>I understand how getting at-risk kids out of dangerous chaotic home environments is going to help them. Why not tone down the “educational” aspect of Head Start and just focus on bringing such kids into well-implemented day care for longer and more consistant periods of time?</p>
<p>Probably a lot more expensive, I guess.</p>
<p>The ABCs and counting to 10 just aren’t that big a deal, IMO, at that age. Being read to and talked with by a kindly adult is very important. Of course, I’m just going by my own kids here. I really don’t remember them “learning” to read or count. They just suddenly did. Somewhere in kindergarten for both. I really don’t think the “lessons” in day care or preschool had a thing to do with it.</p>
<p>In-home intervention will work if parents can do the job of the preschool educators. Many parents successfully homeschool their kids. Off course the kids need play groups, peer interraction,…</p>
<p>On ther hand, preschool or any kind of school alone will not help the kids much if parents don’t care.</p>
<p>If the parents can homeschool, there is no need for in-home intervention. We’re talking about parents whose kids don’t even know what a book is, not parents who are ready to be educators!</p>
<p>Head Start has been shown to help the neediest kids. That’s what it’s for.</p>
<p>I see. I did not read all backlog posts. I did not see “In-home intervention” as teachers coming to parents’ houses. No, this is bad idea. No money.</p>
<p>I have a lot of respect for the WSJ and subscribe to it. But not necessarily for its editorial page, and not for every op ed piece it publishes. This article did NOT characterize the Perry Project research accurately at all! It says at the end that it produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent. What the Heckman et al. study showed was that it produced at 16% return over time. That’s an excellent rate of return. It is easily consistent with the claim that every dollar invested gets $10 back, since the social and economic benefits don’t show up for years later.</p>
<p>Also, the Perry Project was not technically Head Start, but was closely related to Head Start and based on the same model, plus weekly home visits by social workers. There is other long-term Head Start research that is consistent with the Perry Project data, although the Perry Project data are more extensive.</p>
<p>There is no research, none, that shows that preschool is BAD for rich kids. It simply hasn’t been studied as intensely as Head Start, and some of the potential gains are much smaller (e.g., reduction in criminality). No one is suggesting that the government rip your children out of your arms and put them in an institution. I think people would be very happy if free or subsidized preschool were universally available; mandatory preschool may be a bit much.</p>
<p>What set me off above, though, was your reference to the outdated Head Start study, which appears like clockwork in right-wing anti-early education screeds. You may think that you are a liberal, but you are swallowing some conservative swill somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>In any event, this isn’t really a liberal-conservative issue. </p>
<p>Daycare/preschool is a matter of labelling. The people who care about this are trying to get all providers to upgrade their own training and awareness, and the quality of the services and facilities they provide. “Daycare” providers, many of whom care deeply about children, tend to be grateful if they are offered training and help with upgrading their facilities, as long as they can afford it and they can see the benefits for children (and themselves) that flow from it.</p>
<p>I knew I could count on you, JHS, for your usual depth and insight on the topic. </p>
<p>For me, the big flaw in the WSJ piece as I’ve mulled it over is the total dismissal of the economic reality of the vast majority of American families: Mom and Dad must work and a domestic at-home infancy and toddlerhood is not an option for most kids. That was certainly true of us. We managed it occasionally, but for most of those years it was a crazy quilt of “solutions.” </p>
<p>The WSJ piece caught my attention and resonated with me because my kids - unlike most of those described on this thread - really hated daycare and preschool. They just wanted to be at home with one of us and we only occasionally could give them that. </p>
<p>I admit to a bit of antagonism toward Head Start. Our older D actually attended a Head Start preschool program for a little while housed at the University where I finished my graduate degree. We actually met the income criteria!! It really wasn’t too good. Of course, she was a kid coming from a house (well, apartment) full of books and two parents who read to her constantly. But honestly, it felt kind of lousy to me at the time. The best gig we ever found was a Montessori program that we just couldn’t afford. Managed to send D1 for two years but not D2. Have always felt about that.</p>
<p>We do our best. I think most parents do. Just don’t know how we can make life fair for all these kids. The only real way would be Soviet in nature - take them all at birth and put them in a state run facility and give them all equal amounts of love and stimulation. No one wants that, of course. We muddle along.</p>
<p>You don’t need to go to the Soviet Union (which no longer exists anyway). France has free or nearly free daycare from infancy to kindergarten. Of course, taxes are higher than here!</p>
<p>Pre school can be good for parents as well. My 3 attended a ‘cooperative preschool’ which in this busy era may have become an anachronism. Costs were kept down by having a parent helper for each 3 hour class session. Committee work was also required. </p>
<p>The parental benefit? Finding a community of like minded parents and kids at an early age. I had just moved to my current city, and many of those started in preschool friendships are now 2 decades old for both parent and ‘child.’ In addition, it started a routine of involvement in the schools for all of us, which continued through HS. I find myself wanting to volunteer at my Ds nearby college as well, but clasp my hands together instead, so as not to embarrass either of us. The leaders in many of the volunteer projects though HS started volunteering with their kids at age 2 to 3. </p>
<p>Some of this argument for and against preschool is also based on the state of the community the child lives in. If a neighborhood is friendly, involved with each other, and kids are outside interacting, running in and out of homes, the socialization is provided. If a child has frequent contact with extended family and relationships with many other adults, they learn to trust other people besides just parents. But how many of our communities offer such an environment?</p>
<p>Community colleges in our area offer neighborhood cooperative preschools which are very affordable ( Infant groups are held at the college)
For instance in the pre-three classroom, kids attend twice a week, one session half the parents work in the classroom & the other half attend a class with a parent educator.</p>
<p>Both my kids attended the preschools through the college & my oldest also attended a cooperative NAEYC accredited child care center
(which was a fabulous experience, it was so helpful to have the modeling of the other families- although I did come to see that while my oldest thrived in that environment, much depends on the parents & frequent transition of adults in the classroom as well as uneven parenting skills made it a hit or miss proposition for kids & younger D’s co-op programs didn’t mesh quite so well)</p>
<p>D#1 also went on to attend a co-operative 5’s program, when our neighborhood kindergarten teacher suggested I find an alternative classroom for her.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, when I was looking for D#2 when she had aged out of the neighborhood co-op, the choices weren’t as attractive and ran on a lottery basis & I had to dig to even find a private school to try.</p>