Who do you want your child to be?
Perhaps consciously playing on the title Who Do You Think You Are? which has also featured comedian David Baddiel in a serious role, last night’s Horizon saw Baddiel investigating the British education system and asking whether it can maximise both a child’s intellectual potential and their happiness at the same time.
A worthy question and one that anyone with children, particularly those starting out on the great education experiment, would love to know the answer to. Baddiel’s own kids are seven and four.
There was lots in this programme to love and little to hate. Love or hate the technique, but celebrity is the perfect way into this kind of subject. We got some of Baddiel’s own story - his mixed experiences of school (he did well but “hated” it); his spell in hospital as a confused teenager; his progression to Cambridge and his fear of the nine-to-five work ethic which presumably led him to become a stand-up comedian.
We also met Baddiel’s brother, who remembers consistently being in the bottom sixth of the class at primary school and is these days a taxi driver in New York after an apparently chequered working history. We even got to meet Baddiel’s father, who Baddiel remembers saying the choice of English and History A’ Levels was “a waste of a brain”. Now in his 70s or 80s, Baddiel’s father admits he was being “unkind”. Ah, the differences between intention, perception and the passage of 30-odd years.
There was science as well as personal anecdote. The loving repetition of a 1970s Stanford University experiment in which a four-year-old child is given four marshamallows with the promise of more if he or she can resist eating any of them for a full 10 minutes. The child is then left alone for that time and must devise distracting strategies in order to resist the immediate temptation of the marshamallows on the table. Subsequent research has shown that those who did resist the sweets did better at school than those who crumbled, were ill less often and were even less likely to divorce as adults.
I love this sort of stuff. Just like I loved the idea that kids shown how to solve a puzzle tend to give up earlier on problems than children who are left alone to play with the puzzle, who tend to be more flexible and creative in their solutions. This plays well to the faint air of neglect in all my parenting. I like to give the kids some freedom and they’ll thank me for it in the end.
The killer finding, though, was that you can spoil your child’s chances of academic and presumably life success with just three words. “You’re so clever.” (Forget the ellipse of you and are. Pointing that out is not big or clever.) Baddiel didn’t say so on camera but he must join me in thinking oh god, here’s yet another ‘DONT’ for the angsty, guilt-ridden, liberal-minded parent who just wants their kids to be happy.
These days it’s all about being specific in your praise. Baddiel’s answer to his daughter’s full marks at a spellin test is to say something like “You must have worked really hard for that.” Mine is to say “Great work on the spelling. Now set the table for tea, why don’t you?”
