Cookie Cutter Kids — they don't fit the mold

Cookie Cutter Kids — they don’t fit the mold

 

“Today’s children, and those who teach them, are presented with the unprecedented task of assimilating a more formidable amount of knowledge than any other generation before them.”

 

I wrote those words twenty years ago, and the amount of knowledge and technology has since increased exponentially!  What I call the ‘cookie cutter’ approach in a right-wrong, one-answer-only world is producing a generation of confused, distraught, and often very depressed children.  Teenage suicides were on the increase twenty years ago, and sadly they are the third leading cause of teenage death today.  Psychologists are alarmed by the large per centage of elementary aged children who think about ending their lives out of frustration, loneliness, and feelings of personal anguish.  Parents are even more astonished than the professionals to find that their children feel this way.  The majority of these children are not hoodlums ‘acting out,’ or ‘problem’ children who are incorrigible.  Most come from stable homes where parents love and care about them.  But it’s a busy world, and our schools have schedules and rules and deadlines and homework.  Parents have busy schedules and are often shuffling through work and the essentials of living.  Time is the commodity that looms scarce in all our daily lives.

 

Covid-19 has afforded us a slow-down.  It has it’s own set of stressors to be sure, yet it is a wake-up to everyone that there are other ways of doing things.  More innovative, yes, and maybe better.  One is ‘take time.’  

 

There are tools to learning, and handwriting is the key!  Handwriting models our thinking patterns and reinforces not only our approach to the world around us, but also our innate skills to work in that world.  The ‘basic’ in learning is thinking.  Thinking involves asking questions, making observations, taking action to solve problems, reassessing, and concluding.  Often in our educational system, young people are hooked into finding and reciting answers, and they miss the learning that comes from arriving at solutions.  

 

Albert Einstein put it this way:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend 

the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the 

proper question, I could solve the problem in less that five minutes.”

 

Make time to look up at the stars, time to inspect what lies in blades of grass, time to enjoy the myriad shapes and colors of plants and flowers.  Take time to listen to a child’s view of the world.  What pulls his or her attention?  Find the fascination in a slow motion walk through an afternoon with your child.  Listen.  Offer insights, yet resist the urge to lecture or ‘tell’ … listen.  Encourage a journal account of such adventures — writing down the experience.  No child is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ person.  Each is unique.  Take time to celebrate that uniqueness — keep your own journal and write it down!