“If your child is at home and there are no demands placed on them, they’re not required to make their beds, they’re not required to set the table, they’re not even required to finish their dinner or even be polite to you, there’s no demands placed on them at home. Then they go off to school and even if no adult places demand on them at school, even if none of the pressure is there, the demand of school is still greater than home because the bell goes, they’ve got to go into class, then it’s break time, then it’s class time again, then they’ve got to go…”
Podcast Transcript
00:01
Hi, I’m Lauren Edmunds, and this is the Lauren Edmunds podcast. I’m talking all things education and parenting for children in the primary school years, but specifically for remedial and special needs children. I hope to give you my insights that I’ve gained over the last 12 years of in-field research, owning a special needs school in Johannesburg, as well as the academic research I’ve been doing for decades. I hope you enjoy it.
00:26
I want to make the case for homework and chores at home from a different point of view, other than just keeping your kids busy and giving them OT development through the chores and giving them practice with homework with academic skills. But I want to make the case for if you.
00:43
If your child is at home and there are no demands placed on them, they’re not required to make their beds, they’re not required to set the table, they’re not even required to finish their dinner or even be polite to you, there’s no demands placed on them at home. Then they go off to school and even if no adult places demand on them at school, even if none of the pressure is there, the demand of school is still greater than home because the bell goes, they’ve got to go into class, then it’s break time, then it’s class time again, then they’ve got to go.
01:13
go off to a drama session perhaps or they’ve got to go and do an extra lesson somewhere. So there’s a structured schedule and that in itself is a demand. There’s the social demands, children don’t want you screaming in their ear as a friend, friends want you to be kind and generous or they don’t want to share something. So school is an outside the home place and it’s typically a higher demand environment just by virtue of what it is. Then if you have no demands
01:43
put the kid in a stressful situation like you’re asking them to do a bit more work than they thought they think they can handle or work that’s a bit harder than what they can handle and the brain is designed to take the path of least resistance. And what happens a lot with children, especially children with academic delays or cognitive delays, their path of least resistance is to ask to go home. And they ask this in various ways.
02:11
They will say they’re too anxious to come to school, or they might say there’s someone at school they don’t like, or they might say they don’t like a teacher, or they might say the work is too hard, or they might say that they’re sick, tummy sore, headache, noses runny, whatever has worked in the past. So they try all these different ploys because the brain is actively seeking the path of least resistance. So if home life has no demand on a child, then the child will automatically…
02:39
naturally seek going home. They want to be at home because it’s the easiest place to be. It’s not a challenge, it doesn’t require them to be more thoughtful, doesn’t require them to develop any of the skills, academic or otherwise. It doesn’t require more social skills from them, it doesn’t require more emotional development from them. So then when the school does require that…
03:04
They want to escape to home because home has no demand. So my advice to parents is to make sure that you’ve got…
03:14
appropriate structure and routine at home to make sure that you are developing your children sufficiently in terms of the ways of the world. Are they involved in chores? Do they know how to look after themselves? Are you reminding them to do things that they should now, at whatever age they are, be able to do on their own? And that gets complicated with diagnoses like ADHD, for example, because we know executive functioning is reduced in people with ADHD. So your executive functioning is your planning and organizing and…
03:44
not procrastinating, getting on with something, setting goals, being task-orientated, not being too impulsive. That’s where your executive functioning, that’s all of those executive functioning skills in the front part of the brain and in ADHD kids, it’s significantly delayed. So now you’ve got a child who’s really averse to the demands, the structure, and then you’ve got a home that sort of gives up on the demands and the structure, and then the child, the
04:14
they have demands on them is at school, they have the path of least resistance so they want to escape school and then we have this idea that perhaps school is a bad place and it’s not, it’s actually just demanding appropriate things of a child and it’s developing those skills that are lacking because that’s how we develop executive functioning skills. We can learn the skill and we learn it by learning the actual skill, what do we say, when do we say it, what do we look for, all of those actual tangible skills and then practicing
04:44
that becomes something that’s automatic. That’s how the brain grows. These synapses, synapse, and then pathways get created and the brain develops. But when we take all of that away, the brain actually doesn’t develop and when we take it away at home, the child tries to escape. So not only is he not developing it, but he’s actively now developing the pathway in his brain of escape, escaping hard work, escaping a challenge. All of learning, absolutely all of learning in life,
05:14
whether you’re learning to water ski, learning to cross the road, learning to chew with your mouth closed. All of that requires some demand and requires practice. And if your child is allowed to escape from all of those demands, they quite literally don’t grow their brain.
