For years I have had the idea that parenting could be taught in school to children at a pretty early age. When young, they are experiencing parenting — good or bad — and they are thinking about it. Games, where they pretend to be parents, continue through all the early years — practicing with dolls or role-playing, both boys and girls at some age. They know they are growing bigger — that they will become adults. They would like to be confident adults. They are certainly capable of understanding that their parents want the same thing. My notion that they can learn parenting depends upon this exact point. They cannot learn a lot of behavior at one time but they can learn one thing at a time especially if they understand how it’s going to help them become what they want to be. They will have an intuitive idea of how to be taught something that must be learned or understood.
A syllabus for dealing with different subjects, and different stages of development would need to be created according to the child’s readiness for each presentation. Inherently, each child would come to understand when their parents compared badly with the effective method. Here is the sticking point possibly the point of defeat. Many parents will feel threatened by their children recognizing an error in parenting. Fear of such a situation will be transformed into political resistance when parents get together. If a plan to teach little children parenting were to be…
