Manhattan, home of Wall Street, financial sorcery, hyper-competitiveness—and tutoring for 3 and 4-year-olds.
This story is one of the saddest I’ve read lately.
That is an age when a child should spend time being a child, exploring their world, running around, creating imaginary worlds, friends, situations and enjoying unconditional love.
Instead, they are learning that to please mommy and daddy they have to get a certain teat result and get into a certain school.
…3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and …read more

I have some great links for you today, but I only want you to read them if you hold tight to the Leadership Turn caveat while you do it.
In case you don’t remember, the caveat is that leadership information is useful to you whether you are still in school, a stay-at-home parent, a worker, middle manager, or the person in the corner office. Everyone leads at one time or another, so tweak the information to fit what you need at this moment.
First, some useful information from a book review called 7 Lessons for Navigating the Storm, the 7 actions listed …read more

Last Friday I wrote Narcissism and Leadership and how much narcissism has increased over the last few years.
I’ve never understood the preoccupation with the glitterati, but I have wondered how much our celebrity-worshiping culture affects kids?
According to Drew Pinsky MD, AKA, Dr. Drew on radio and TV, and S. Mark Young, a social scientist it may be especially dangerous for young people, who view celebrities as role models.
“They are the sponges of our culture. Their values are now being set. Are they really the values we want our young people to be absorbing? … It harkens back to the question …read more

On September 25, 1957, 300 United States Army troops escorted nine black children to Central High School in Little Rock after unruly white crowds had forced them to withdraw.
In 1976, the shooting of a 13-year-old sparked a children’s uprising against apartheid that spread across the country to Cape Town, where students from a mixed-race high school, Salt River, marched in solidarity with black schoolchildren.
September 15, 2009, Seattle schools plan to lower the passing grade from C to D, partly match the rest of the state’s districts and partly to keep their funding by keeping kids in school.
On September 24, 2009, …read more

Most of you know that I write a feature every Thursday called Leadership’s Future; it’s the outgrowth of articles written by CandidProf, who guested regularly last year, and is written around education, kids, parents and Millennials.
The trouble is that I find far more articles than I can write about, so today I’m giving you links to the best of them. I hope you take the small amount of time necessary to click through and read them, because they are important to y/our future.
First is a question that has been asked for decades and still has no real agreement. Do advanced …read more

What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.
I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.
18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.
More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.
Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.
On one hand they …read more

Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?
Parents seem to be doing everything possible to avoid exposing their little darlings to a dose of reality.
Quotes in a December post highlighted parental efforts to fill Christmas wish lists and shelter their kids from the tanking economy.
A letter to Malcolm Berko asking for financial advice is another example of the lengths to which parents are willing to go, here is the key part.
“…Our son will graduate high school this May and we don’t have the savings to send him to the University of Florida, his chosen school where his two best …read more

I came across the kind of commentary that so angers me. The post was about how to recognize leadership traits in children.
Of course, parents should encourage their children to grow, but this type of thing furthers the myth of what to look for in those who become ‘leaders’, while those without these traits are destined for a lesser role in life.
“…raise your child to be a winner, a leader and a success rather than another member of the dull rat race.”
The ‘leader’ to which the post and follow-up links refer is the person out front with the big pay …read more

The last half of CandidProf’s post yesterday made me queasy, especially when he said, “In the city where I live, the local suburban school district had a case of a mathematics teacher who was noted for being far tougher than other teachers.  The parents of the students in this teacher’s class complained that their kids were working too hard.  The teacher gave far too much homework.  Too many of her students did not pass.  Eventually she was fired.”
In many cases these are the same parents who babble on about their strong ethical/religious (take your choice of which) principals and moral …read more