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What we’d like to start with is the discrepancy between the aims and wishes parents have for their kids and what their children are in fact ready and willing to achieve. There are tremendous gaps in between which cause a lot of unhappiness and way too much unnecessary grief on both sides. Richard St. John writes in his much acclaimed best selling book “8 to be great” - a compelling analysis of how and why successful people got where they are now - something parents might want to consider before putting their kids in the hothouse:

In today’s world, kids are being pushed harder and harder to become overachievers, academically and in
every other way. So I’m sitting here looking at my research and wondering why we want kids to overachieve,
when so many successful people started out as underachievers.” ... 
“Today’s kids can turn into tomorrow’s Einsteins, Gates, Camerons ... once they find their passion.”
... ... ...                                                                                                                                                                                                              Clip: 3 1/2 min.

And now for some topical reading - getting to the same point from the other side:

Excerpt no 1: Daily Telegraph - “Slow parenting: Gently does it with the parent whisperer”

Carl Honoré, champion of the Slow Movement, has a new crusade - to save children from their hyper-active,
over-ambitious parents. He talks to Cassandra Jardine about the moment he vowed to stop being a pushy dad.

... this global movement for the destruction of childhood has crept up on us so insidiously, and is now so deeply
embedded, that most of us scarcely know we are part of it until we have an "Aha" moment. Here’s the link.

... and the film:

From taking time for bedtime stories comes a lot of good.
Better living, better loving, better parenting and a best selling book.

Excerpt no 2: Daily Telegraph - “Idle parenting means happy children”

Cancel all clubs, ditch the after-school activities and leave those kids alone, urges Tom Hodgkinson

An unhealthy dose of the work ethic is threatening to wreck childhood. Under a tyrannical work-obsessed government, years that should be devoted to play and joyful learning are being stifled by targets and tests. Leisure time is being invaded by the commercial and escapist virtual worlds of the computer.  Here’s the link to this story !


Excerpt no 3: Daily Telegraph - “ Slow parenting part three: let babies learn to think for themselves”

Being force-fed classical music and foreign languages does not make a child genius. In fact, it can lead
to anxiety and aggression, says author Carl Honoré in our final extract from his new book.

When researchers in the Nineties found that listening to Mozart enhanced university students' spatial reasoning, an entire industry sprang up based on the claim that flooding the nursery with piano concerti could boost a baby's brain.  Link.

Excerpt no 4: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

Consider the fascinating parallels between husbands and exotic animals. It’s in the keeping.
And here’s the link.

CEO John Wood was "an overworked Microsoft Executive looking for the quiet solitude of a trekking vacation". While he was backpacking in the Himalayas, Wood came across a middle-aged Nepalese man who invited him to visit a nearby village school. Jumping at the chance to see the real Nepal, rather than sticking to his tourist's trek, Wood agreed - and the encounter changed his life.
The Nepalese man turned out to be an education resource officer. Wood duly discovered that despite the man's best efforts - which involved crossing high mountain passes on foot to visit schools - he had few resources to offer the schools for which he was responsible.Wood, in short, came face-to-face with a harsh reality facing millions of Nepalese children: there were almost no books. He was shocked to discover that the few books the local school had - "a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs" - were deemed so precious that they were locked up to protect them from the children.
As Wood left the village, the headmaster made a simple request: "Perhaps, Sir, you will some day come back with books." When he got home, Wood e-mailed friends to ask for help in collecting children's books and says he was overwhelmed with the response: "Over three thousand books arrived within two months." The following year, he returned to Nepal, rented a team of six donkeys, and visited the village to deliver the books.
On that trip, he also made a decision to leave the corporate world, which he did in late 1999, to start Room to Read. His goal? To marry the business practices he had learned at Microsoft with his new mission to provide the lifelong gift of education to millions of children in the developing world. In his memoir, 'Leaving Microsoft to Change the World', he explains, "Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?". With 750 million illiterate adults worldwide and 100 million children without access to school, he set out to build the nonprofit venture "with the scalability of Starbucks and the compassion of Mother Teresa."

Wired Magazine has a very popular and truly interesting article by Jonah Lehrer (Sept. 2009): the title says it all ...

To be continued ...

Since this IS a story book and since we ARE in the middle of a financial crisis, we want to offer some insight into the workings of a true capitalist mind, presented by an all-time classic expert on human nature:

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