The Hurried Child

By David Elkind

Chapter 1: Our Hurried Child

Pg. 6 “If we hurry children to grow up too fast today, then, it is surely not done out of
ignorance.”

Pg. 16 “Stress impairs children’s ability to learn and teacher’s ability to teach.”

Chapter 2: The Dynamics of Hurrying: Parents

Pg. 27 “They – we – are unable to put our knowledge about children into practice. We hurry
children because stress induces us to put our own needs ahead of their needs.”

Chapter 3: The Dynamics of Hurrying: Schools

Pg. 50 “Our children do poorly in school today, in part at least, because they are repeatedly
made aware that what they learn outside of school is more up to date than what they learn
in school.”

Pg. 75 “Departmentalization and rotation at the elementary school level hurries children. It
hurries them both on a day-to-day basis by requiring so many additional adjustments to
new teachers and classrooms, and it hurries them on a long-term basis by depriving them
of a teacher who knows them sufficiently well to reflect back to them their continuity and
wholeness as persons.”

Chapter 4: The Dynamics of Hurrying: The Media

Pg. 79, “Because television information does not require verbal encoding or decoding to
extend our experience, it is very accessible to young children and sometimes hurries them
into witnessing terrifying events never before witnessed by this age group.”

Pg. 80 “Homogenization. Television not only makes information more accessible to the
young and lessens parental control, it also serves to homogenize social class, ethnic,
cultural, and age differences.”

Pg. 87 “Television serves as a way of finding out who and what we are. By identifying with a
television character we find out more about ourselves or try and make ourselves more like
the character we identify with. How children are portrayed to children thus reflects how
society views children and also provides images with whom children identify and seek to
emulate…To children they provide models of emotional and intellectual precocity, thus
constituting a kind of hurrying to behave in wise, mature ways.”

Chapter 5 The Dynamics of Hurrying: Lapware, Brain Research, and the Internet
(Talking about computer programs for infants and toddlers) Pg. 103 “There is a lot of
controversy about the efficacy and value of these programs. Many researches are opposed
to these programs and argue that they are based on misinterpretations of infancy research.
Clifford Nash, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in the interaction between
people and computers, argues that young children learn best when they are playing with
real objects, like puzzles and teddy bears, along with other children and adults. He
contends that it is the tactile and social experiences that are crucial to early development.”

Pg. 103 “Children get all the stimulation they need from things they encounter in the
everyday world – crawling in grass, playing in pots, hearing you speak.”

Pg. 104 “The promoters of these products play on our parental guilt and anxiety about our
children’s ability to compete in an increasingly technological and global economy.”

Pg. 109 Synaptogensis: “at birth, an infant has far fewer synapses (connections between
neurons) than an adult. During the first few years of life, however, synapses proliferate
exponentially, with the result that the brains of infants and young children have vastly
more synapse than the brain of most adults.”
- “ this…period is followed by a period of synaptic pruning, largely regulated by
experience.”
- “Adult brains have fewer synaptic connections than children’s. However, it is the
pattern of connections, rather than the number, that makes adult brains so much
more capable than those of infants.”
Critical Periods: “particular skills and abilities must be acquired during specific age
periods”
Benefits of enriched environments. “animal studies suggest that an environment rich in
sensory stimulation and full of opportunities for motor activity is more conducive to brain
growth than an environment that lacks these possibilities”

Part 2 Hurried Children: Stressed Children

Pg. 119 “Prior to adolescence, children lack the mental abilities to think, reason, judge, and
make decisions in the way adults do. These capacities are developed in stages as well.

Pg. 131 Learned helplessness “when humans or other animals are confronted with a series
of situations over which they have no control and wherein any efforts they make toward
control are ineffectual, they become quiescent and no longer make efforts to master their
environment.”

Chapter 7 Learning to Be Social

Pg. 142 “With respect to children, however, the family is always more than just a haven or a
prison, it is a school of human relations in which children learn how to live within a
society.”
How does a family socialize children?
- “social learning theorists argue that children learn largely by “modeling” adult
behavior.”
- “Behavior modification…socialization comes about as a matter of rewards and
punishments.”
- “social cognition (from Piaget)…rules vary in their logical complexity and some rules
are easier to understand than others”
- “psychoanalysis (freud)…a child becomes socialized by means of identification and
internalization”

Pg. 146 “Parents, recognizing the initial helplessness of infants, expect that as children
grow they will progressively be able to take responsibility for their own behavior. But the
parents must sensitively monitor the child’s level of intellectual, social, and emotional
development in order to provide the appropriate freedoms and opportunities for the
exercise of responsibility.”

Realities constructed between parents and children: freedom – responsibility, achievement

Chapter 8 Stressed Children

Pg. 171 “in the one-parent home of today, children have to assume parental
responsibilities. Such responsibilities are a lot for young people to carry and forces them to
call again and again upon adaptation energy reserves.”

- responsibility overload
- change overload
- emotional overload

Pg. 178 “Schools also hurry and stress children when the teachers and administrators
operate on the basis of stereotypes and false expectancies, which place children in fixed
compartments of behavior and thought that are often alien to the child’s own inclinations.”

Pg. 178 “Teachers and administrators, for example, frequently expect that a child from a
divorced family is going to have problems. Likewise, any difficulty the child does encounter
is immediately attributed to the family problem without any consideration of possible
other problems such as, say, poor vision.”

Pg. 179 “Many young children, for example, are diagnosed as learning disabled or retarded
when in fact they may have limited vision or hearing or come from a bilingual home and
have limited command of English. It is much easier for teachers and administrators to label
such children and to relegate them to some special program than to deal with their special
needs….Branded and put into special classes early, many children decide, “If you have the
name, you might as well play the game,“ and become what they are expected to be:
retarded, learning disabled, or whatever.”
Pg. 179 “Little time is given to actual instruction in classrooms. Management, busywork,
waiting, leaving, and arriving, and other diversions reduce gross instructional time to
around 90 minutes a day…In class, attention to single students may average, per student,
only six hours per year.”

Pg. 179 “A high percentage of failure is expected and accepted.”

Pg. 181 “All school is, you know, is the great time passer. It’s a big invention to keep kids
from becoming anything.”

Pg. 181 “School can stress children by hurrying them into dealing with threats of violence
and crime; into stereotyped roles and attitudes; and into boring, no-end, meaningless
activities. Schools thus often add to rather than subtract from the stress experienced by
children in contemporary society.”

Chapter 9 How Children React to Stress

Pg. 191 “Hurried children may not show serious symptoms in childhood but may carry
with them patterns of emotional response that can lead to serious illness as adults.”

Chapter 10 Helping Hurried Children

Pg. 207 “If we are asking too much and are engaged in calendar or clock hurrying, we can
either cut back on our demands or increase our supports.”

Pg. 207 “Children of about eight years and younger tend to engage in “magical thinking” –
they often believe that their wishes, feelings, or acts bear a casual relationship to parental
acts.”

Pg. 209 “ We need to respond to a child’s feeling more than to his or her intellect.”

Pg. 210 “Being polite to children is very important and may do as much for improving
parent-child relations as many of the more elaborate parental strategies that are currently
being proposed. The essence of good manners is not the ability to say the right words at the
right time, but rather, thoughtfulness and consideration of others.”

Pg. 210 “Politeness is one of the most simple and effective ways of easing stress in children
and of helping them to become thoughtful and sensitive people themselves.”
Pg. 211 “If we summarize the way in which the three age groups react to hurrying, we
might say that young children tend to blame themselves , children tend to blame the world,
and adolescents tend to blame their parents.”