Meet the parents

It’s hard being a parent these days, what with all the ferrying around from one special class to another.

My friend often leaves work early to take her daughter to something called the Kumon. When she first told me about this, I thought it was some obscure kind of vegetable, the sort of thing yuppie vegans pack into their lunch boxes to impress other yuppie vegans. It turned out to be something quite different. I’ll spare you the suspense — it’s a special kind of school. The kind of school that kids go to when they’re not at their regular school, so they can learn that little extra bit.

All the parents I know love the Kumon programme. Apparently they teach children how to visualise numbers, and as any eight year old can tell you, the one thing kids really want to do is learn how to visualise numbers. They use high tech aids like the abacus, and pictures of sheep jumping over fences. It’s all very complicated and modern. My own math teachers used just one technique, but it was surprisingly effective — visualising a wooden ruler descending on your knuckles if you got the answer wrong.

It’s hard being a parent these days. Between driving their kids from school to soccer to ballet to Kumon to swimming to jazz to tap dancing back to Jazz with some Latin classics and the odd foreign language lesson thrown in just for variety, they’re a harried lot. They even have a fancy word for it. It’s called hyper-parenting, and it’s a lot like hyperventilating, but without the oxygen high at the end of it. Many of these unfortunates often have trouble balancing the demands of being a hyper-parent with a full-time career, but sadly they have no option, since tap dancing lessons don’t come cheap. My friend often complains that both she and her husband have to work as hard as they can to meet the demands of their mortgage and Kumon, and she just cannot see how they could make ends meet if one of them stopped working. Maybe they need to come up with a special class for adults to enable them to visualise just that — a world where sheep are just furry animals, and visualisation aids are what you buy at the optometrist when your eyes are shot from lazing around watching too much TV.

With all the benefit of such full bore parenting, one would imagine that kids today would be little super geniuses, capable of memorising entire encyclopedias, and of proving Fermat’s little theorem while tap dancing to Swan Lake. But the evidence is all to the contrary. Studies increasingly show a decline in reading and math skills, with a corresponding increasing in twitter skills and cell phone aptitude. It makes no sense, unless perhaps one admits to the heresy that maybe hyper-parenting isn’t really very helpful.

It’s a slippery slope, though; you might start with just removing speed reading from the calendar, and before you know it, you’ll be admitting that broccoli isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. One cannot be too careful with these things. Besides, I do know that the math visualisation technique works. I know a man who uses advanced Kumon techniques to shoot craps in Las Vegas. He visualises chips instead of sheep, and claims to win more than he loses.

He tells me he has a system.

(Papi Menon is a writer and technologist based in San Francisco)