If they want to play with a child, they sometimes don’t even know how to say, “Can I play with you today?”
So then they’re not resilient later on either because they’re not developing that when they should. They’re coming to school not really ready to learn.
I’m about to do swimming with 23 5-year-olds. I’ve got to help them get their togs on, then get them in the pool, then they’ve got to dry themselves, find their underwear … It is a nightmare because kids literally don’t know how to do it because their parents do it for them every time they have a shower or bath.
Many children have terrible skills when they’re coming to school.
They don’t need to learn how to read, write, any of those things before they come to school, but they need the life skills of how to put their own clothes on, how to get themselves ready for swimming, how to say hello to somebody – the little skills that our kids 25 years ago used to have, many of our kids today just don’t have them at all.
When a child starts school, instead of starting reading and writing, we’re actually teaching them how to put their shoes on, how to tie their shoelaces, what their name looks like, how to say hello to someone, how to even hold a pencil, because they’ve never held a pencil before, because they’ve always clicked the screen or scrolled on an iPad.
So if we’ve got to teach all those basics, when are they actually ready for literacy or maths teaching?
Parents today are busy. But also, back in the day, we would send our kids down the road on their bikes and they’d be climbing trees. Now we’re too risk-averse. We don’t want our child to get hurt, and parents don’t have the time to let their child do stuff. We do it for them because it’s quicker.
So in a way, parents are to blame because we’re not giving kids the opportunity to develop or to fail. We jump in if they’ve got a relationship problem. We jump in if they did something wrong and we rush into the teacher and want to know what’s happened.
One Kiwi teacher thinks parents are not giving their children the chance to learn from failing. Photo / Getty Images
You should get them to ride their bike, go on monkey bars and playgrounds, climb trees. Get them to write, get them to draw. Not with an iPad, but literally with a felt tip or with a pencil because even doing that, it teaches their brain to develop skills. They need to hold it in the right way, not with a dagger grip, we call it, but actually holding it properly.
They don’t need to read before they start school, they don’t need to be able to write, they don’t even need to know how to count to 10. None of that matters. It’s about the pre-skills.
I would say all children should join a team sport. There they learn problem solving, they learn resilience. If they miss the kick, they’ve got to deal with it. If you’re always letting them play by themselves, they’re never learning failure, they’re never learning how to get back up. So team sports are important. Because that’s how they make friendships with people they might normally not.
It’s got to be out of their family as well because it’s a different relationship and team sports just teach them everything. Listening to an adult that’s not their parent. Some days you might get the trophy, some days you won’t. Are you gonna cry about it? Like what are you gonna do about it?
Don’t jump in and fix everything as a parent. Then they’re learning nothing. They’re learning “If I’m in trouble, Mum and Dad are always gonna fix it”.
Most teachers can see when kids need extra help beyond the norm. Sometimes the biggest battle is trying to tell a parent not that their child’s not at the same level as others (normal), but that there’s something else going on, and if we can find out what it is, we can work together to help this child. Sometimes it takes years to persuade the parent to go and ask the doctor for a paediatric assessment, whether it’s for an ADHD assessment, or whether it’s autism, whether it’s hearing, whether it’s memory or processing, or anything.
All they want to hear is that their child is normal and fine, but actually we know there’s something else going on. We can probably tell you within two days of meeting that child that they need another assessment and other supports.
So we do it in the best-meaning way that we can, but most parents just say, “Oh, they’re just being naughty”, or they’re like, “Are they talking today?” Like they think magically it’s gonna fix itself.
They learn so much in their first year of school. That sets them up forever. It’s the foundation of learning. The more you can close the gap then … if the gap gets mucked up or they haven’t learned for whatever reason, the gap just widens and then they’re switched off and they’re going to struggle and fail because it’s too late.
Parents need to trust us because we have seen it. We’re not just going to make something up. But the waitlist to get a paediatric assessment is one year to 18 months. So the sooner we can get the process started, the better.
That might be part of the problem as well. There are many things. If it takes that long to get an assessment for something, they already might be a year behind in academic learning. To make up that year, it might take many, many years.
When Covid hit and we were all doing online learning, the waitlist [for paediatric assessment] went from literally six months to two years, because all the parents were homeschooling, going, “Oh my God, my child can’t do anything. They can’t do what the rest of the class is doing. They don’t even know how to sit down. Like, what’s wrong with my child?”
And they all then went and got their kids referred, because they were like, “My God, is this is what my child is like every day at school?”, and it freaked parents out.
It has eased back a bit, but we are finding more and more neurodiversity or learning difficulties being diagnosed, but it all takes time.