Brain researchers: Parents steal children’s most important childhood experience

Spotted an Error?

Many parents want to teach their children as much as possible in order to prepare them for life in the best possible way. Brain researcher Gerald Hüther, however, warns of negative consequences: strong parental intervention could destroy the children’s natural joy of discovery.

Even before a child is born, his parents have an idea of what they want to do better in their upbringing. Better than one’s parents, better than friends, better than neighbors.

Long before the child starts preschool, his parents have already figured out what might become of him. They may even have put up with some effort to pave the way for their child’s future: with early language classes, intelligence-enhancing toys, and regular music lessons.

Some children can recite the ABC by heart or solve small arithmetic problems before they even start school. The parents then pat themselves on the shoulder proudly and believe that they did everything right.

Exciting, but no time right now?

Parents rob children of childhood most important experience

But they misunderstood one thing: it is not up to the parents to shape the mind of a child. Your job is to give the child the opportunity to develop his or her mind independently; to open up his world to himself.

Parents who tell their children exactly what to do, how to play and what to know rob them of the most important aspect of their childhood:

They make the child an object of their own endeavors.

"As long as children open up the world as a subject, everything is fine", Gerald Hüther said in an interview with FOCUS Online. The brain researcher is the author of the recently published book "Save the game!" (Hanser Verlag), in which he, together with Christoph Quarch, pleads for children to be given more free play time.

"Children have an innate joy of discovery – until somebody comes and tells them what to do now", explains Hüther.

How we restrict our children’s development

By teaching and evaluating children, expecting a certain behavior from them and trying to shape them in such a way that we like them, we restrict them in their imagination and development:

Instead of giving them the wide and open view of the world that is innate to them, we restrict their perspective from an early age and thus deprive them of the opportunity to get to know many aspects of our world and their own personality in the first place.

There is a scientific experiment that shows this very impressively.

An experiment that all parents should know

Scientists from several prestigious universities teamed up in 2011 to investigate how child play behavior affects adults when adults intervene.

Two groups of preschool children should engage in a toy. It consisted of several parts and had different functions. One element could honk, one could light up, one made music and one had a hidden mirror.

In one group, an adult intervened in the game and showed the children how the horn worked. The other group of children was left alone with the toy.

The two groups were then compared:

In the first group, the children only played the horn and repeated what the adult had shown them.

In the second group, the children discovered all the functions of the toy on their own and used each one.

So it is obvious what parents should do: instead of showing their children how the world works, they should be given the opportunity to find out for themselves – and to accompany them in a loving way.

The fear that drives parents

Of course, parents who intervene heavily in their children’s lives do not do so out of malice. They want the best for their child and act out of a fear that has increased enormously in recent decades: the fear that their child might lose touch with the globalized educational society.

It is this fear from which parents today resort to early intervention and other measures and thus have an increasing influence on their children’s lives. But by doing so, the different pillars of child development falter.

The three pillars of child development

According to Hüther, these pillars are the acquisition of creativity, the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of ability.

Every child can access all three areas. But very few children are allowed to do that.

Instead, parents and educators tell them exactly what to play and learn and how to behave. And that happens so automatically now that we don’t even notice it anymore.

1. Creativity and imagination

Children learn by playing. "It is known from brain research that completely unintentional gaming ensures the best networking in the brain", says Hüther.

Children also acquire the most important mental power in the game: creativity. When children slip into different roles and get to know new ways of thinking, they open up a wide variety of ways of thinking and strategies.

For this, children do not need an adult to tell them whether their imagination is logical or whether they matter "right" play. The fewer guidelines they get, the more they have to use their imagination.

Children who have been given the opportunity to play freely can later solve problems more easily.

However, free play is not only endangered by adult intervention. Today’s children often have such tight schedules that they hardly have time to play.

2. Acquire knowledge

"You shouldn’t explain anything to a child that they didn’t ask for", says Gerald Hüther. "The moment I explain something to a child, I take away the chance to find out for myself."

The researcher means that parents should not anticipate the answers to questions that their children have not yet asked.

It’s like the experiment: if we explain to a child how an object works, it may never find out what other hidden properties it has.

"The dialogue with a child should be designed so that it never stops asking questions. Because as soon as it gets ready answers, it stops asking", said Huther.

However, this is exactly the case in most schools and educational institutions.

3. Acquire skills

In this field of development, too, children learn fastest when their parents give them the chance to fail – and to learn from their own mistakes.

"The child must not become the object of parental efforts, but should be released with loving care. So that it can open up the world itself and acquire its skills to act itself", said Huther.

"No child can learn how to get up if it never falls. No child can learn to walk if the stones are put away."

Children who have not learned how to deal with frustration or how to solve a conflict on their own often find it difficult as adults.

Our job as parents

As parents, we face the great challenge of resisting the urge and temptation to pave the way for our children. Our task is to provide our children with freedom in a time characterized by time pressure and overstimulation in which they can develop at their own pace and in accordance with their interests and talents.

"We have to let the children have their subjectivity", said Huther. "Only then can they grow optimally in all development areas. Subjectivity is just another word for dignity. And you hurt it when you make another person the object of your own ideas and intentions, your expectations and evaluations, your measures or even orders."

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