Lenore Skenazy

It's snuggly time with your little one, who is not even in kindergarten yet. His little head rests against your shoulder as you open up a picture book. "See?" you say, pointing not to the furry bunny or diabolical cat or tree that keeps amputating herself. "These are the words on the page. This sentence has seven words. This dot is called a period, and it shows the end of a sentence."

At least, that's what you'd do if you followed the stultifying advice in a Parents magazine piece on how to "Supercharge Every Storytime." It is a classic example of experts telling parents to do more, more, more. And that's what we're here to talk about today: How parents came to believe that, for their kids to thrive, home must be just like school. I'm not talking about homeschooling. I'm talking about the way parents have started to think of themselves as actual teachers and their kids as students.

Haven't parents always taught their kids? Yes, of course, says anthropologist David Lancy, author of "Raising Children: Surprising Insights from Other Cultures." What's different today is that interactions at home are modeled on what goes on in the classroom, where an adult instructs and a student sits and (perhaps even) soaks it up.

That is actually a pretty new teaching method, historically speaking. Until public schools became popular in the 19th century and then ubiquitous in the 20th, kids mostly learned what they needed to know by watching and imitating others. Their teachers were everywhere and everyone, including their friends and siblings. But once school-based education became the norm, we forgot that kids learn from other kids, from helping out and from playing.

Even in the 1950s, when Lancy was growing up, school didn't play such a huge role in children's' lives. Once the bell rang at 3 p.m., pupils could go off and not think about school until the next day. There wasn't much homework. And unless a kid was failing, parents weren't involved with it.

But in the last generation or two, Lancy observes, school has started seeping into the rest of kids' experiences. Instead of playing pickup games, they enroll in organized leagues coached -- taught, really -- by adults. Saturdays, too, are for professionalized activities. Most disturbingly, the new conventional wisdom holds that the parent-child relationship itself can be "optimized" if only the parent acts more like a teacher.

That explains why Parents would publish a two-page spread on how to read to your kid -- something most of us could probably have muddled through without instructions. "I'm a mom and a literacy specialist," the subtitle says, "and I'm here to share my secrets." The "secret" is how to read to your kids like a grimly determined teacher.

Thanks to articles like this one, and a million educational toys, and a mound of homework that parents are supposed to oversee from kindergarten through college, adults are getting the message that it's not enough to be a plain old parent.

"There's a cultural idea that that is how you should treat kids, and it's reinforced everywhere," says behavioral scientist Dorsa Amir. "It is really hard to make changes at the household level when there's an entire cultural apparatus suggesting something else."

Lancy, who has traveled the world studying how kids learn on their own, is now a granddad. His daughter, like everyone else, is buying brain-boosting toys for her toddler. She sits on the floor with the girl, says Lancy, "and she's telling her what the shapes are and demonstrating how they go in..." This is not evil or cruel. It is simply what today's parents believe they must do: make every second into school.

Something most of us would have hated.

The alternative is to recognize that our kids' innate curiosity is the greatest education engine ever. And, at least sometimes, to get out of its way.

Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a contributing writer at Reason.com, and author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?"

Image by Juraj Varga from Pixabay