Time poses the question, “Does Kindergarten Need Cops?” The articles describes a growing problem of outrageous behavior by very young children, partly attributed to a lack of lap time.
Claudia Wallis writes (excerpt):
“Kids aren’t getting enough lap time,” says Karen Bentley, a seasoned elementary school administrator in Miami, who sees increased aggression in young students.
In addition, many educators worry about rising academic pressure in kindergarten and first grade in anticipation of the yearly tests demanded by the No Child Left Behind Act. . . . . “It’s a mistake to focus exclusively on academic readiness,” says Stephen Hinshaw, chair-elect of the psychology department at University of California, Berkeley. “Even more vital than early reading,”he says, “s the learning of play skills, which form the foundation of cognitive skills.”Hinshaw points out that in Europe, kids often aren’ taught to read until age 7. Insisting that they read at 5, he says, “puts undue pressure on a child.”
Hinshaw and other experts on child behavior also point out that aggressive behavior in children has been irrefutably linked to exposure to violence on TV and in movies, video games and other media. “Dozens of studies have shown this link. Probably hundreds,” says psychologist Jerome Singer, co-director of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center. “The size of the effect is almost as strong as the relationship between smoking and cancer.”
There is little doubt that very young children are watching loads of TV before they even reach kindergarten. In October the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a survey of 1,065 parents with children ages 6 months to 6 years. The stunning finding is that 43% of the kids age 2 and younger watched TV on a typical day and that 26% had a TV in their room. The median amount of time spent watching: two hours a day.
And that’s two hours a day that are not spent doing what toddlers most need to do: interacting with people who love them and can teach them how to behave. Parker, in Fort Worth, blames this lack of socialization at home more than anything else for the wild behavior he’s seeing in his district’s youngest students. He recounts, for example, that the mother of an obstreperous 4-year-old told him the child has no formal mealtimes and eats whenever he wants. “If you don’t have to sit down at a dinner table and stay there, how are you going to learn to sit in a seat at school and finish an assignment?” Parker wonders. Kids who are chronologically 6 years old are showing up in school with “emotional experience you would expect of a 3-year-old,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist who works with the nonprofit group ChildTrauma Academy, based in Houston. “Imagine a child with the terrible twos in a 6-year-old body. It’s a huge problem in education and mental-health circles.” This “relational poverty,” he says, affects even the wealthiest kids.
I would like to read this; however, there is a huge black rectangle that covers a lot of it. That is probably why you have not received responses.