Growing up smart and happy. - book reviews

Before a baby is born, his or her parents are already worrying about whether or not their progeny will be able to keep up. Parents, and perhaps especially the better educated ones, are receiving warnings from all sides about their kids--telling them tat if they don't enroll their children in a rigorous program of intellectual self-improvement at birth these babies will begin a long decline into apathy, dullness and general incompetence.

A lot of the pleasure of the natural relationship between baby and parents is being contaminated by the pressure of "teaching" one's child. Parents are often unaware that they are providing their children with valuable learning experiences all the time.

This time in history has often been cited for its tendencies toward both the compartmentalization of jobs, experiences and people, and the alienation felt by 20th century human beings. This fragmentation carries over into our thinking about education. We are often asked to conceptualize the growing child as the sum of his or her parts--the motor part, the cognitive part, the affective part and the social part. As parents and educators we are given one set of exercises to improve intellectual abilities, and another set for dealing with athletic skills. We read books about how to help or children become responsible and well-socialized people, and other books which tell us how to understand or manipulate their feelings. It is as if we are talking about a machine with discrete modules, separately functioning parts that can be worked upon individually.

What research tells us, and sensitive adults have always known, is that the learning child is more than the sum of his or her parts. Each part affects the ongoing development of every other part. Instead of thinking of the child as a circular pie cut into sections, each domain can be imagined as a complete sphere of some transparent material, so that by placing overly upon overlay, each sphere colors the others, and only then does one get the true picture and the true depth of the whole. The younger the person, the less differentiated these parts are--the less one can use phrases like "intertwined" of "developing in concert," the more one must envision a central core of self from which many things blossom and to which many things attach themselves.

Growing Up Smart and Happy by Julius Segal and Zelda Segal is a revolutionary book. Basically, what the Segals daringly propose is that a "successful" person (as traditionally defined by jobs and academic achievements), and the qualities that make up such a person (ability to persevere, to concentrate, to think creatively, etc.) are grounded not in flashcards and computer camps, but in the development of strong human relationships early in life, the opportunitys to explore the world and oneself in one's own style and at one's own pace and the development of a positive self image within the context of a loving and supportive community or family.

Ironically, though, the title will seduce those parents who are feeling the pressure to institute a regime of cognitive stimulation for their children into reading a text which nt only addresses their concerns with sympathy and respect, but points out those areas about which they ought to be concerned. Growing Up Smart . . . emphasizes the richness and expanse of human experience, and indeed it sometimes seems as if the discussion of intellectual growth is simply an occasion for the authors to advise their readers about family life and the travails of growing up in the 1980s.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, each with a brief introduction followed by a question and answer format in which the authors resound the three basic themes which are developed beautifully in their inspiring first chapter. These three themes--"Children Need Their Childhood," "Children Need Someone Who Really Cares" and "It Is Never Too Late For Children to Change"--are the basis of their positive, sensitive and practical approach to raising smart and happy children. The style of writing is direct and comfortable to read, and the authors speak to us as people who have "been there"--as concerned and struggling parents, and as former children. They evoke for us the best parts of our own childhood, make us recall important adults in our lives and pleasurable memories. They bring up the spectre of the cruel teachers who humiliated us and the loving teachers who made us feel like going on. This is not a how-to book, but rather one that teaches the reader to tune in to the meaning of children's experiences.

The Segals have also provided a valuable service by quoting from researchers, parents and grade school teachers throughout their work. (A detailed reference list should make it easy for the reader to track down the source of a statement.)

The text is also broken up with statements made by a wide variety of people--from anthropologist Margaret Mead ("Every child deserves to have someone around who knows what happened yesterday.") to Plato ("No compulsory learning can remain in the soul. In teaching children, train them by a kind of game.") to Jesse Jackson ("No teacher can teach in a moral vacuum. It doesn't matter how high you score on the test, or how many degrees you have or how much tenure you have if you come to school as late as you can, leave as early as you can, make as much as you can and then sit on your can.")

Specific instructions are kept at a minimum, and then are always adjunct to a long exploration of the complexity of the subject. Those lists that are included should prove helpful to any reader--for example, "Five Ground Rules for Fighting Around The Kids," "Checklist of Learning Disability Sympotoms" and "How to Deal with The Suicidal Child."

Growing Up Smart . . . does focus on specific issues related to the academic world as well. The Segals explore, critique and interpret intelligence tests; they discuss in detail the issues of the learning disabled child and the hyperactive child; and they give good advice about achool phobia, television and substance abuse. Particularly helpful for parents whose children are having some kind of a problem is a section on how to go about finding and choosing the right kind of help.

The authors make a pitch for the development of balanced people, ones who are able to find pleasure in their work and in their relationships with others, who feel good about themselves and who are creative and positive in their lives. But more than this, the Segals emphasize that one cannot address intellectual development alone and that it is based in the quality of a child's life.

Two concepts are very important throughout the book: first, relationships between parents and children, teachers and children, and even between children and themselves. How we talk to children, our ability to respect their individual differences, how we take care of our own needs and manage our own lives is repeatedly examined and tied into children's academic success.

The second concept is that of quality. In the name of enrichment, parents often require their children to bear heavy loads of adult-structured stimulation. Children and parents rush from one activity to another--music lessons and dance, movies and puppet shows, private tutoring and infant stimulation programs. Little time is left over for the development of complex and satisfying human relationships, for hanging out together and serendipitous occurrences, for dreaming one's own dreams and sharing them with others. Learning in children only sticks if it is self-motivated and gratifying. What is missing in all this is pleasure. The Segals point out the serious implications of too much pressure, too little interpersonal involvement and too little fun. Their clinical work, and the work of others that they cite, reveals serious depression in even very young children, a feeling of failure and alienation when the basic reationships between adult and child are sacrificed for the development of the child as a "success."

Unfortunately, it's not a perfect book. Perfect books are as hard to find as perfect people. I was dismayed to find that a number of times the Segals state as fact one explanation for a child's behavior without any acknowledgement that there are several possible interpretations. For example, they explain that toddlers become upset at the sight of a broken toy or dirty hands because they are working on internalizing adult standards, and "Even very subtle violations of standards appear to be disturbing." No mention is made of two other important and well-respected theories about this behavior.

The psychoanalytic interpretation (for example, Margaret Mahler) reminds us that children of this age are working on separating from mother and developing a sense of self with clear physical and emotional boundaries. They would interpret this dismay about broken or dirty things as toddlers' recoiling from those objects which mirror for them their own feelings of vulnerability, and that children who are working on establishing an internal sense of body integrity could react in the same way. Jerome Kagan, on the other hand, might say that children who express disturbance about broken or incomplete things are telling us something about their cognitive functioning--it is the discrepancy with what the child now knows is correct, and this sense of incorrectness that jars the child's sensibilities.

My point here is not that one of these explanations is better than another, or even that one must choose between them, but rather than in this example--and a number of others throughout the book--the authors mislead the reader when they don't elaborate their own explanations by including other major points of view.

In general, the authors show their expertise more clearly when they discuss the experiences of school-age children. While there is much to learn from their chapters one the earliest years, the limitations of their understanding of the scope of some of the developmental issues involved here is more apparent.

The drawbacks of this book are heavily outweighed by the gifts that Julius and Zelda Segal have share with us. Professionals who are interested in learning a new way to help parents to understand children's development and to put their childrearing priorities in order, and parents who are looking for a comprehensive approach that makes sense will be very pleased with this book.

COPYRIGHT 1985 U.S. Government Printing Office
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group