When I was a kid I never got help from my parents either and I now think that I would have benefited from a bit of closer attention. I developed a huge spectrum of bad practices and behaviours that I'm inclined to think I could have avoided at least in part. I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there.
A good framework I’ve heard for this is “scaffolding” - as a parent you can provide a little structure to help your child solve problems that might otherwise be out of reach. As the child learns you gradually step down support until they’re able to succeed on their own.
In the working world we call this mentorship. It’s surprising to me that the practice is controversial when applied to children that have so much more to learn.
Me too, I consider my parents good in most respects but the extent of their help was “if you get any Cs on your report card we will take away video games”. I feel like this was pretty normal for average middle class boomer parents and didn’t really know others were different until very late. My guess is the more coastal elite, immigrant or younger your parents are the more they see education as competitive and help.
> I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there.
Even showing a lack of interest in their pointless projects is a life lesson in priorities and individualism.
For example, most of my help was to make sure she took 10 different containers and placed them in different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals. I discussed redundance with her in the context of explaining why some of her friends were not getting results from their single try. I think that these practical thought patterns are extremely valuable, better than creating a miniature jaded adult...
You're doing good. Just cause someone else's childhood sucked and they feel like they learned something from it doesn't mean it's a good thing. You learn a lot more about how to live well from being loved than you learn from being ignored and neglected.
I mean, I sometimes help my kids in very similar way. But, I find it very wrong to judge kids who were truly independent or make such projects into competition between the kids. Because the real competition is here in fact in between adults. Parent knowing that "different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals" is what makes the difference. Parent who makes sure the kid takes 10 containers is what makes difference. As you said, it is not within average kid going by school education to figure it out.
> The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging.
The thing is, the "no one cared" is very unlikely. Those other kids did cared. But they were doing the project as kids do - loosing attention or doing it ineffectively. Forgetting and trying re-over. Having it at bad place and thus having it grow slowly etc. And all that is part of actual doing-projects learning. It is not bad pedagogy to have kids deal with these issues and have them slowly to figure it out. It is bad to then expect the similar result as your daughters had, when the most important decision making was done by you. Or judge those kids as "dont cared".
And this is an actual issue - a kid doing the project the way that is age appropriate and in fact independent ends up labeled as not caring kid. And I think there is value in kids figuring stuff out truly independently.
That's a really good point about the competition. When I was a kid, my siblings and I participated in an annual pinewood derby. It was fun to decorate our cars but we never came close to winning the races. The winners were the kids with parents who knew how to add just enough weight to keep it under the maximum and grease the axles and who knows what other optimizations.
> Even showing a lack of interest in their pointless projects is a life lesson in priorities and individualism.
If you teach your kid the lesson that life sucks and trying is for suckers, don't be surprised when they believe it and don't get anywhere in life because they never try.
Life doesn't suck and trying isn't for suckers but school isn't life. Trying more than the minimum necessary to get what you want out of school is just waste. If you find some cool subject or project at school that you genuinely care about then by all means go all out. But doing great work when excellent will get you an A and all you care about is a grade is a waste of time and energy.
