Anonymous wrote:This is insane to me.

Teach your kids how to tie their shoes.

Also feed them breakfast and lunch and snacks, send them to school with food. Since when is the school system and taxes suppose to feed all your children. Don't have them if you can't afford them or don't have time to teach them to tie their shoes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sure, parents are responsible for spirit days, dress up days, snacks, water bottle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t. I asked DS and plenty of kids don’t bring a water bottle, so I stopped sending it daily. I just don’t need to pack and clean a water bottle daily when they have fountains and provide milk at lunch.

If spirit day and dress up days are important to DC, they should take some responsibility for them.

I'm guessing your DC is not in kindergarten. Once your kid is 8 or 9, this stuff does get easier because you can just say to your kid "if this is important to you, you can handle it." Whether that's bringing a water bottle or participating in spirt days or whatever.

But this thread is about the shift in early childhood education, not elementary grades. It's about what we expect of preschool and kindergarten students, and what we offer them. We started treating 3/4/5 year olds like older kids, and the upshot is that now parents have a much heavier burden with kids this age because they are totally unprepared to behave like upper elementary kids. They need to be practicing tying shoes and button holes and learning the difference between "morning" and "afternoon," but instead they are doing academics that used to start in 1st grade, playing on competitive sports teams, doing after school tutoring, competing in spelling bees, etc. And then they get to 2nd or 3rd and people are like "wait, these kids don't know how to tie their own shoes? they don't know how to tell time?" and everyone points fingers, but it's a collective failure -- schools, parents, the culture at large. We are failing these kids by asking them to run before they can walk.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sure, parents are responsible for spirit days, dress up days, snacks, water bottle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t. I asked DS and plenty of kids don’t bring a water bottle, so I stopped sending it daily. I just don’t need to pack and clean a water bottle daily when they have fountains and provide milk at lunch.

If spirit day and dress up days are important to DC, they should take some responsibility for them.

I'm guessing your DC is not in kindergarten. Once your kid is 8 or 9, this stuff does get easier because you can just say to your kid "if this is important to you, you can handle it." Whether that's bringing a water bottle or participating in spirt days or whatever.

But this thread is about the shift in early childhood education, not elementary grades. It's about what we expect of preschool and kindergarten students, and what we offer them. We started treating 3/4/5 year olds like older kids, and the upshot is that now parents have a much heavier burden with kids this age because they are totally unprepared to behave like upper elementary kids. They need to be practicing tying shoes and button holes and learning the difference between "morning" and "afternoon," but instead they are doing academics that used to start in 1st grade, playing on competitive sports teams, doing after school tutoring, competing in spelling bees, etc. And then they get to 2nd or 3rd and people are like "wait, these kids don't know how to tie their own shoes? they don't know how to tell time?" and everyone points fingers, but it's a collective failure -- schools, parents, the culture at large. We are failing these kids by asking them to run before they can walk.