Nelson – recommendations for parents

I often get asked by parents what recommendations do I have about raising their kids? So let’s start with the following premise: our species has survived a long time without television, without radio, without all sorts of fancy stimulation like Baby Mozart and things like that. So I think the pressure should be off parents to feel like they have to stimulate their baby every possible moment. We have this concept called an expectable environment which is that when a newborn is born, they sort of expect hey, I can’t talk I can’t walk I can’t do much on my own, someone’s going to take care of me. But that doesn’t mean you have to be given horseback riding lessons and language lessons in four different languages. It means that someone’s going to be taking care of you sensitively, consistently, they’re going to meet your physical needs as well: feed you, change you and things like that. As children grow older, what I would recommend to parents is that they get a sense of the things their child is gravitating to. If your children love to have them read to them, then you should read to them. My one concern is kids being over stimulated, and you see that in particular in usually middle to upper middle class families who feel that, the joke we use in Boston is that parent’s think this will be the ticket into getting their kids into Harvard. What I worry about is parents obsessing too much about stimulating their kids too much. If a child learns to read at four versus six, over the lifespan of 85 years, what’s two years going to make a difference? Not very much. And so I think kids need to have fun. They need to play, they need to learn and they need to be loved but they don’t necessarily need the high pressure stimulation that is often coming at them. And the last thing is that our children’s lives are much more structured now even than they were twenty years ago, or more than twenty years ago and I think that works well for some kids but less well for other kids and I think some kids rebel against how structured their lives are.