Opting Out of the 'Rug Rat Race'

Being the unique parent of triplets and now a "plus one" if you will I was completely inthralled reading this WSJ piece about what our kids really need to learn.  I'm sure that this is a polarizing discussion and debate within certain social circles, but I completely agree with the point that focusing on a different set of skills could go a long way in helping a child reach their full potential.

It's not about getting in the right prep school or even pre-school or how much homework you are shoving onto a kid's plate.  The real lessons come from challenging a child and how they can learn how to manage adversity, expectations, self-control, and self-confidence.

While I am not discounting the importance of developing one's cognitive skills, I believe that there needs to be a more balanced approach to teaching kids.

• What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.
• Like most economists, he had always believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person's life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their eventual outcomes. What was missing from the equation, Mr. Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits, or noncognitive skills, that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school.

• ...the most valuable thing that parents can do to help their children develop noncognitive skills—which is to say, to develop their character—may be to do nothing. To back off a bit. To let our children face some adversity on their own, to fall down and not be helped back up. When you talk today to teachers and administrators at high-achieving high schools, this is their greatest concern: that their students are so overly protected from adversity, in their homes and at school, that they never develop the crucial ability to overcome real setbacks and in the process to develop strength of character.