Basic HTML Version
Success Begins
by
Age
Why do
sorne
parents
rear
competent children and
others foil? What makes
an
excellent parent? Here is
new
understanding that al/ parents vital/y need.
by
Clifford
C.
Marcussen
M
ODERN PARENl'S
have been
inundated with theories of
child psychology. They
have been warned about everything
from potty training to supposedly
inevitable stages of increasing delin–
quency. But too often, parents have
not been told what positive actions
they can take to help their cltildren
develop to the fullest.
Why this lack ofknowledge?
Surprisingly, it's because psy–
chologists haven't really known
what an excellent parent does. Most
child psychology theories remain
unproved - and a great many of
these try to explain abnormal devel–
opment , rather than to ídentify what
goes into optimal child rearing.
"Little is actually known," claíms
Harvard's Burton Whíte, "about the
age range, six days to two-and-a–
half years" - a rather upsetting
statement in the midst of an ex–
plosion of writing on early child de–
velopment.
Isn't it time we began to have an–
swers to parents' unanswered ques–
tions?
What the Harvard Pre-School
Project Found
Dr. Wltite, happily, is one of the
few psychologists tuming out sorne
hard evidence about just what an
outstanding parent does and does
not do. For over seven years, Dr.
22
White and his team of researchers
have been workíng toward a goal
"maddeningly simple to express" -
to learn how to structure the experi–
ence of the first six years of life to
encourage maximum development
of human competence.
Dr. White and his staff started
with a careful study of sorne 400
three-, four-, and five-year-old chil–
dren. They wanted to determine
which abilities allow sorne children
to cope in a superior fashion with
any situation, day in and day out.
The researchers found that most of
the qualities which distinguish an
outstanding six-year-old began to
appear around age one. By age
three, they were strikingly evident,
revealing that during the 10- to 36-
month period, children develop
many of the attributes that will bless
them or curse them throughout life.
Since then, Dr. White has been
studying the dífferences between
homes where one- to three-year-old
children are developing superior
abilities and homes where otherwise
normal children are developing very
poorly.
The children developing superior
abilities were labeled "A" chiJdren,
the others, "C" children. ln
or~er
to
discover the essential differences be–
tween the two sets of families, ob–
servers regularly visited each home,
recordíng the child's activities in de-
tail. The children were also tested at
regular intervals to keep close check
on their developing abilities.
Differences were strikíng. The two
sets of mothers had created mark–
edly different environments for their
children.
In addition, the span from 10
months to 18 months proved to be
particularly crucial. "At this time of
life, for most children," White says,
"severa! extremely important devel–
opments seem to coalesce and force
a test of each farnily's capacity to
rear children."
The quality of the parents' child
rearing largely rests on how they
meet this crisis at age one.
The lmportance of Language
The first critica! trend to emerge
in the young child, beginning about
8 or 9 months after birth, is the un–
derstanding of language.
Sometime late in the first year,
the excellent mothers became aware
of their chíld's increasíng language
capacity and began to feed his
growing interest in language. They
went out of their way to talk a great
deal to their children. Often, they
carefully selected words and phrases
which centered on the child's inter–
est at the moment.
This generous diet of language
not onJy fueled the infant's mental
development, but also revealed
PLAIN TRUTH Febtuaty 1973