Parenting education should begin at high school

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I am writing with reference to the letter ‘Better parenting can curb students’ indiscipline’, published in The Gleaner on October 7.

I believe that better parenting is more likely to occur if child-development science is taught to high-schoolers. If nothing else, it could offer students an idea about whether they’re emotionally suited for the responsibility of parenthood.

It would also teach them about children’s emotional development. Before birth, children are already aware of their mother’s emotions – positive and negative.

As a moral rule, a physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right – along with air, water, food and shelter – as they didn’t ask to be brought into this world. The health of all children needs to be a priority for everyone. Simply ‘minding our own business’ can prove detrimental.

I recently watched in the news a parental protest against some form of proposed, undoubtedly controversial elementary school curriculum. A picket sign read, ‘We don’t coparent with the government’. But maybe a lot of incompetent yet procreative parents nowadays should.

In Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal, Donna Jackson Nakazawa writes that even “well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (Pg 24).

Regarding early-life trauma, people tend to know that they should not loudly quarrel when, for instance, a baby is in the next room; however, do they know about the intricacies of why not? Since it cannot fight or take flight, a baby stuck in a crib on its back hearing parental discord in the next room can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state … . This freeze state is a trauma state” (Pg 123). This causes its brain to improperly develop. It’s like a form of non-physical-impact brain damage.

Also, it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, and not the intensity, that does the most harm? When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic – such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound – the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (Pg 42).

Further, how many of us were aware that since young children completely rely on their parents for protection and sustenance, they are stressed over having their parents angry at them for prolonged periods? It makes me question the wisdom of punishing children by sending them to their room without dinner.

Meanwhile, society perceives and treats human procreative ‘rights’ as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.

FRANK STERLE, JR

White Ro​ck, BC

Canada