Hot stuff on little kids - Dr Mustard adds spice to the reading wars

It is why Tiger Woods is such a superb golfer - his father had him out in the backyard with a golf stick as a three-year-old trying out different strokes.

Mozart, you remember, not only had music all around him from birth but also had an ambitious father teach him directly, probably before, but certainly after his third birthday.

This chart bears considerable contemplation.

From it we can see how basic dispositions are set earlier than cognitive patterns. After the third birthday it’s going to be harder to change personality style. But parents can look to successfully building foundational language and number skills with relative ease through the third to the sixth or seventh birthday.

In checking the “window” for the central auditory system, we can see why exposing the baby in your arms to the sounds of a second language works to lay the foundations for easy acquisition of that second language when the time comes.

My own observations of young children led me to conclude that teaching children the alphabet and its uses was better begun at three, and that teaching keyboard skills was easiest if you began at four, and these ideas seem to have some support here also (assuming that music and math register in the same part of the brain).

One can also see why “child care” facilities are so fraught for very young children. The “window of opportunity” for maximal comfort in acquiring “peer social skills” doesn’t even open until the third birthday. This is why Fraser Mustard stresses the necessity of involving parents in the early years of any childhood educational program.

He cites the Cuban experience as instructive here. In Cuba Fidel Castro prompted the establishment of family day care centres where parents could go with their children so that both could learn - parents could learn optimum parenting methods, and children could learn from engaging in play-based activities in which their parents actively participated. The results have been astonishing. Cuban children check in with language skills and general competency greater than any other Latin American country.

Fraser Mustard would like the government of any caring society to finance something similar. His experience has been that funding is given grudgingly and withdrawn arbitrarily. He notes the irony of this unfortunate outcome of democracy when compared to the stunning advantages obtained through (benevolent) dictatorship. But the moral for our parents must be that they need to observe, note and act appropriately to ensure the well-being of their own children, since at the moment social provisioning is seriously inadequate.

(The highly successful outcomes of home-schoolers could be noted here as relevant supportive evidence on this. Home-schooled children are now at college and university levels in sufficient numbers for the success of the home-schooling strategy to be visible. In the US tertiary admissions officers now give home-schooled applicants preferred entry status over “normally” schooled high school graduates.)