Tackling one phase at a time with your child

Watch Video: Tackling one phase at a time with your child by Joel Pelcyger, ...
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Tackling one phase at a time with your child

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If you try to do everything when you're raising a child all at once, you're almost doomed to failure. So I try to spread things out over time and think in terms of three stages of development. There's the engagement phase, there's the achievement and performance phase, and there's the success and fulfillment stage. If you try to do them all at once you fail. You have to start with engagement. If a child is not engaged, if a person is not engaged, they lack all coping skills. Life takes on little meaning for that. The engagement phase happens during the elementary school years. If you push performance and achievement in the elementary school grades, then kids can suffer burnout. They might achieve great success, but at what expense? They might inferior to others and feel they're being judged and that they're less than somebody else. Those are not messages that we given children the first 4-5 years of life. And we shouldn't be giving them that message during their elementary school years. The engagement phase leads to achievement. Achievement doesn't always lead to engagement. But engagement always leads to achievement. I've educated 1000s of kids in 40+ years. Engagement always leads to achievement. After the engagement phase, when we send kids off to middle school, high school, college, I believe that it's important then that they have basic skills, they know more about who they are, they know about their strengths, they know about their stretches. That's when you can be introducing more the concept of performance and achievement. So people, you're in a society that is largely competitive. You don't have to play that competitive game all the time. But it's something to help you in your adjustment. When you have the fundamentals, when you have your love of learning, when you have your life skills down to a certain extent, and you really do - we call them teenage years because that's a crossover kind of period for a reason. We get to that achievement and performance level through your school experience level that's there so you can go out into the world and reach success and fulfillment. But each stage in its own place. Lump them all together - parents want them all for their children, so the tendency is to bunch them all together. The greatest attribute that at teacher can have and a parent can have is patience.

Watch Video: Tackling one phase at a time with your child by Joel Pelcyger, ...

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Joel Pelcyger

Head of School

Joel Pelcyger is the Founder and Head of PS1 Pluralistic School, an elementary school for grades K-6. PS1 was founded in 1971 and is a family-oriented, independent, and non-profit school located in the heart of Santa Monica, CA.

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