You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Among the more important aspects of this new book on how to help children with school is that it is not pedantic, obscure, or too technical to be of practical benefit to the majority of parents. Dr. Chess, out of her extensive personal experience, research, teaching, and training, offers in clear and simple language the major principles of teaching children. Identifiying the areas of greatest importance to children in the process of growth and learning, she illustrates with pertinent case material, and summarizes specific ways to keep curiosity alive, to encourage initiative, and to promote independence, autonomy, and pleasure in learning.
Children, she states, need success and pleasure in achievement. They need approval, respect for effort, encouragement, privacy, possibilities for trial and error—and minimal criticism. While she believes that child learning depends in large measure on temperamental qualities (which she has elaborated in a longitudinal study entitled Temperament and Behavior Disorders in Children), she enlarges on many destructive parental attitudes which effectively “turn off” the process of learning in certain (mainly timid) children and discourage it in difficult children. These deprecatory and detrimental attitudes include parental anxiety about future and college performance, parents’ own humiliation if the chivxmoee not advance satisfactorily, using much pressure, having excessively high expectations, scolding, scoffing, teasing, berating, and giving blistering derogatory criticism.
An important service Dr. Chess performs for all of us who have longed to read Piaget in full and never had the time, is to abstract for us the Piaget timetable of learning and his general principles, namely, that minds cannot outstrip the age-determined level of their perceptual and conceptual development. This relates to comprehension, obeying rules, telling the truth, private property, time concepts, and cause and effect.
As a sequel to this, she describes the “Ame