Parenthood Training Promoted | Oregon Social Learning Center

by Carolyn Kortge of The Register-Guard

Although far more students are likely to become parents than computer programmers, most schools offer far more instruction in computer operations than they do in preparation for the profession of parenthood, says an Oregon State University professor who believes educational priorities should be revised.

“You find very few schools today without computer programs,” says David Andrews, a member of the OSU department of Human Development and Family Studies (and later post-doctoral fellow at the Oregon Social Learning Center). “When you buy a personal computer with the basics, you get two or three notebooks of information on how to operate it.”

“You can’t tell me a computer is more sophisticated than a baby, but we are giving children virtually no preparation to be parents. Very few schools have as much parent training as computer training. It makes you wonder where our priorities are.”

Andrews emphasized the need to provide early education for young people in the skills that will help them raise children during a symposium on parenting education at Lane Community College early this month. The event was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Lane County, the Child Development Program at LCC and the March of Dimes.

Without educational programs in child development and parenting, Andrews says, many young parents never “get a fighting chance to be successful parents.” As a consequence, society must focus its attention on providing crisis intervention for children of unsuccessful parenting efforts.

If schools and community organizations approach parenthood as a professional endeavor, it might be possible to lessen the social costs of the mistakes that are made by uneducated and unprepared parents, he says.

“Having a child is like an artist having a very precious material to work with and sculpt something from,” says Andrews. “It can’t be thrown away if you mess it up. If a gem-maker has a large, precious stone, the first cut determines the future shape. It can’t be undone.”

Although Andrews believes that parenthood should have the educational and social status of any other important profession, he warns that it is different from other professions in a number of significant ways.

First, parenthood is long-term commitment. Parents don’t have the option of trying the job to see how they like it and then changing jobs if it isn’t working out, he says.

Parenthood doesn’t offer an internship where beginners learn the skills by working with experts for a couple of years. Instead, new parents need their skills immediately, he says.

“The first two weeks of bonding after birth are essential to emotional and cognitive development for the rest of the child’s life,” says Andrews. “There is evidence that lots of adolescents just don’t have realistic expectations of what to expect from a child at that time.”

Parenthood also differs from other professions in the durability of the product that is produced, he says. A child is a product that is going to be around for a long time and the information that the child receives will probably be passed on and will endure for more than one generation.

An absence of systematic training and a lack of quality-control standards are additional problems in the parenthood profession, he says. The only requirement for entry into the profession is a baby; the only measure of how successful a parent has been tend to come after the child is grown.

Because of the mobility of American families, the need for educational programs in parenthood skills has increased in recent years, says Andrews. Few new parents today live next door to parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who can be models for parenthood skills and sources of information on the normal developmental stages of childhood.

At the same time, knowledge of good parenthood skills and an awareness of the importance of those skills have increased, he says.

“We know more now about what it takes to be a good parent than we did 20 to 30 years ago,” says Andrews. “We have more knowledge now, so why not use it? Until two or three years ago, no one felt a burning need to have a personal computer and now, nobody questions why we use computers. We have the same kind of new knowledge in parenting. Why not use it?”