Parenting Without Borders Quotes

“in Japan, buying a lot of stuff for your children is considered indulgent. Wastefulness was frowned upon. Shopping bags should be saved to reuse many times, not recycled after one purchase.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“Finnish education appears paradoxical to outside observers because it seems to break a lot of the rules. In Finland, “less is more.” Children don’t start academics1 until the year they turn seven. They have a lot of recess (ten to fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, even through high school), shorter school hours than we do in the United States (Finnish children spend nearly three hundred fewer hours2 in elementary school per year than Americans), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, few private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests. Yet over the past decade, Finland has consistently performed at the top on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to fifteen-year-olds in nations around the world. While American children3 usually hover around the middle of the pack on this test, Finland’s excel.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“non-intervention was a deliberate strategy based on the notion that children shouldn’t learn how to obey just because adults told them to. Teachers wanted kids to learn self-control for themselves. Even if this took time. “BELIEVE”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“young children are semi-divine, still partly rooted in the spiritual world and thus too young for discipline. Another belief is that babies are born pure11, untainted, and good—even superior to adults. For most of my Japanese friends, it was simply about believing that all children have basically good intentions and that we can best support them in their growth by holding age-appropriate expectations. People don’t curtail young children’s joy and exuberance because they don’t think they need to: children are who they are, not creatures who must be shaped and tamed. Parents”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“Immigrant families aren’t, he notes, “a threat to America’s moral culture.” Rather, “America is a threat to immigrant children’s moral development.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“When people talk only about what they’re protecting their kids from, they’re not thinking about what they’re depriving them of.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“Naperville Community Unit School District 203 in Illinois, profiled in John J. Ratey’s book Spark, is a particularly inspiring example of how physical movement enhances cognitive ability. School officials implemented a district-wide PE curriculum that focuses on fitness as opposed to sports, and then had students take some of their hardest subjects after exercising. As a result, Naperville students achieved stunning results on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a standardized test administered every four years to students worldwide. In 1999 it was given in thirty-eight countries31, and Naperville students scored first in the world in science, and sixth in math—behind only math superstars such as Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. This is remarkable, since Naperville students are a cross-sampling of ordinary American students. The stunning results from Naperville echo other studies suggesting a strong link between exercise and learning. Researchers from Harvard32 and other universities reported in 2009 that the more physical fitness tests children passed, the better they did on academic tests.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“Highly scheduled lives and early academics aren’t what our children’s brains evolved to need.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“(the United States consumes 80 percent of the world’s supply of Ritalin”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“Today, the average American child3 is spending only between four and seven minutes in unstructured outdoor play.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“we wouldn’t offer our child just one kind of book if we wanted him to become an avid reader: we can learn how to do the same with food.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“The Simple Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me About Why Children Need Real Food,”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“A study of nearly four thousand children4 in the UK (where kids are susceptible to similar food temptations as our own) found that eating a fat, sugar, or processed-food diet at age three was directly linked to lower IQ at age eight.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

“corporations have benefited from deregulation against marketing directly to children, which began in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.”
― Christine Gross-Loh, Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us