Caution: Over-Parenting May Be Hazardous to Your Child’s Health!

The biggest difference between our Montessori school and a traditional elementary school is this: we focus on teaching your child with a ‘learn at your own speed’ approach without regard to grades and test scores. 

Education is about expanding children’s knowledge and understanding of the world. Our goal is to guide each student in an individualized way among peers to foster enlightenment and understanding. Our Montessori Method develops your child’s independence so they can monitor and manage their world themselves.

This is in direct conflict with the public elementary school approach—running the first lap in a 12-year race for ‘grades above learning’ and high test scores via standardized and rote learning.

The Montessori Method, developed a century ago by Maria Montessori—Italy’s first female Doctor—applies an elementary school curriculum with teacher supervision that gives children the responsibility for managing their own progress. 

Have you heard of the term "Helicopter Parenting"? It's when an overprotective parent or guardian insists on doing everything for their child, from their homework to science projects, as a way to ensure high marks. This is one effect of the term "grades and scores above all" that we don’t see at Lifetime Montessori School.

Children need to learn to fail. It’s how they learn. But today’s society is unwilling to allow failure. As a result, over-parenting—much like under-parenting—may be hazardous to your child’s independence, intellectual curiosity and long-term business and personal acumen.

Certainly, societal changes over the past several decades have created a different environment for children and their parents. Whereas kids once rode their bikes or walked to school, now they are chaperoned and driven. Whereas parents once let their kids roam free, now they are involved in supervised activities from Little League to soccer to dance. This desire to create a safe environment for children has also created a culture where parents hover above and manage them at every junction.

One blogger recently wrote, “We need more free-range children. Let them stub their toes. It will heal. Just because they roam free doesn’t mean we can’t watch them. But our job as parents is not to tie their shoelaces—or snatch them up before their shoelaces become untied.”

It would behoove the child if parents put children in a position or situation where they can learn—a place where the results of making mistakes won’t permanently damage them. That place is a Montessori School.

Being an involved parent—which we love—is not the same as doing things for a child. We want children to acquire a love for lifetime learning, a sense of self, a sense of the world around us, and a set of academic tools to continue their journey through middle and high school. The biggest problem we see from traditional school students is this: they may get good grades and standardized test scores—but they are unprepared to enter college because their education has been based on memorization rather than critical and analytical thinking.

I have two daughters and a son. I’ll be content with my children being ‘C’ students as long as they can traverse the complexities of adulthood. And one way to ensure that adult life will be difficult is to make childhood too easy. So, we discourage ‘over the top’ parents from trying to be the ‘perfect mommy.’ There is no perfect and children raised in all kinds of ways turn out just fine. You just must do what’s right for the child—let them do it themselves.

Pressure On Parents By Parents Creates Problems

As an outgrowth of today’s social media ‘critical comment’ culture, many moms feel pressure from their own peers about what’s right and wrong. For example, 

• Fostering independence by letting your child walk or bike to work or play may get you labeled as ‘uncaring.’ 
• Allowing them to play unsupervised may earn you a call from CPS. 
• Recognizing that a project was completed by a parent rather than a child and ‘calling that parent out’ may get you shunned. 

Thus, parents may feel that to belong they must go along and get along with the other moms—right or wrong. 

School work should reinforce academic skills but also teach children responsibility, initiative and time management. Helicopter parents—in their drive toward ensuring that their kids get into the best schools—deny children the opportunity to develop those skills. The teachers in Montessori give students the ability to learn these important skills. In other words, we ensure that our children ultimately become responsible for their own progress—in First Grade and in college.

Parents will stop over-parenting when schools stop overemphasizing tests, society stops overemphasizing the importance of institutionalized scores and businesses stop overemphasizing the value of an elite degree. For us at Lifetime Montessori School, we start by underemphasizing tests, scores and grades as the divining rod to overemphasize what students ultimately need as adults—independence, thinking, problem-solving and teamwork.