O'DonnellWeb

Check out this article on violent and aggressive kindergartners. I’ve extracted a few blurbs below.

Not every school district in America is besieged by kamikaze kindergartners, but those who see a problem believe they are witnessing the result of a number of social trends that have come together in a most unfortunate way. Many cite economic stress, which has parents working longer hours than ever before, kids spending more time in day care and everyone coming home too exhausted to engage in the kind of relationships that build social skills. “Kids aren’t getting enough lap time,”

Homeschooled kids aren’t lacking for lap time! Economic stress…which is of course is only made worse by the tax code in this country.

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. In Texas, which has led the nation in embracing such tests, most kindergartens now go the full day, yet some have eliminated recess or limited it to 15 minutes a day.

Kimberly? Kimberly? I don’t think she actually visits here, but I expect she’ll have this article too. Academic pressure certainly should not be applied to 6 year olds, but I doubt it has anything to do with their behavior issues.

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.”

Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. We are talking about 5 and 6 year old here. I don’t think they are playing Grand Theft Auto every night. A six year old would not even want to play many of the violent games – it would not hold their attention for more than about 30 seconds.

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.

Again, it is not the TV that is the problem. It is what the parents allow them to watch. I don’t think it is stunning that the pre-school set is watching TV. There are very good, age appropriate shows for them. This is a parenting issue, not a TV issue.

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.

Public school kids not properly socialized? Who would of thought it? I thought only us homeschoolers were failing to properly socialize our children.

On the front lines in Philadelphia and Fort Worth, schools are trying to teach kids what they have failed to learn at home.

The money quote. For all the PHD’s blathering on about video games and such, it comes down to something much simpler. The parents are completely failing to raise their kids to be civil members of society. And all the government school in the world won’t fix that problem.