Katie is currently extremely fond of saying “Just a minute.” Only she doesn’t say it, she wails it: “JUST A MINUTE!!!!!!”
She’s extremely impatient, which is fairly normal for a three year old. She’s also very busy. She always has something to do, somewhere to go. Of course, most of this is in her imagination. Other than the occasional play date and rare doctor’s visit, she’s got a pretty open schedule.
And therein lies the problem. Apparently, we’re behind the curve.
Katie does not have violin lessons. She has not mastered Latin (or even pig Latin, for that matter). She doesn’t make par on the golf course. She has not made a soufflé from scratch or composed a symphony.
She’ll never get into Harvard at this rate.
A friend of mine had already enrolled her son in an exclusive preschool before he was even born. She was horrified that I had not even started looking until Katie was almost a year. “You’ll never get her in anyplace good.”
Anyplace good? She was 2. As long as they had cookies and a slide, she was pretty much okay.
But that’s not the conventional wisdom these days. I’ve been told that I must get my child into the best preschool possible, or she won’t be able to get into a good private school and thus, won’t get into college. A pretty sobering thought considering that, at her last school, she was making art with macaroni and glue.
Another friend recently prepped her child for an entrance interview – to Montessori. He was two years old. He didn’t get in. She was shattered. Where had they gone wrong?
She has, however, enrolled him in several camps this summer. Perhaps those will beef up his resume enough to get into “somewhere good.” I didn’t know that children had resumes.
They do. Resumes are no longer limited to employment. Your resume is, apparently, your key to success, starting at birth. Academic honors are no longer limited to college – “outstanding performance” in fingerpainting may be the ticket to success later in life. And extracurricular activities? Failing to enroll in karate or piano lessons now may condemn your child to a job involving his or her name on her shirt.
The thing is this. Katie tried her hand at gymnastics and it didn’t work. She loves gymnastics but age two was really too young for organized lessons for her – she’s a bit of a free spirit, and like me, she lacks patience. Now that she’s three, we’ve tried to get her signed up for dance lessons (she’s mad about music) but it’s nearly impossible to find a noncompetitive dance class within a 20 mile radius. And we live in Philadelphia, the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country (take that Phoenix!).
As a young kid, I never had any lessons of any kind. We were too poor for any lessons. And there was no pressure on me to perform. In fact, when I was in kindergarten, I heard my friends discussing a pageant that they had signed up for. They had all had tap, ballet, jazz or clogging lessons. I had none. I wanted to enter any way, it sounded like fun. Years later, I read my mom’s entry in my baby book that said, “Kelly came home from school today and wants to be in a pageant. I don’t know what she’ll do as she had no talent.” I won second runner up. Apparently, off-key singing of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” beats canned dance routines hands down.
I was a happy kid. I won awards for doing things I wanted to do. I didn’t feel pressure to do anything special. I played the sports that I wanted to play, and I just had fun. There was no sense that the world would end if I couldn’t make a penalty shot in soccer or spike a volleyball. And yet I graduated from a good college (the first in my family to graduate), went on to the law school of my choice and got my postgraduate degree. All without a Harvard prep preschool.
Many of my friends shake their heads and say it’s a different world now. They claim that my failure to push my child now will spell failure later. And that’s a little scary.
But for now, she really just wants to play with her toys and sing songs that she hears on the radio. She’s learning Spanish from Dora the Explorer, not Berlitz. And I think she’s going to be okay.
