The Crucial Role of Parents as Teachers and Educators to Their Children

Parents play an instrumental part in the education and development of their children. It is parents who are their children's first and primary teachers and educators. It is they who instruct their child as to how to walk, talk, and to perform other tasks.

Parents also impart to their children how to behave and instill in them what the sociocultural expectations are. They further impart family culture, history, and traditions. Educators and educational psychologists have maintained how highly important it is for parents to consistently and constantly interact qualitatively with their children if the latter is to develop properly.

Studies have endlessly substantiated that children who interact with their parents on a constant basis, whether it is spending family time together, discussing daily events such as school events and occurrences, books, and/or cultural activities, tend to develop the fastest. When parents consistently read to their children, they develop a higher vocabulary and become intellectually aware.

This explains why oldest children, on the average, are smarter than latter born children. Parents spend more time with their oldest children than they do succedent children. They interface with their children, teaching them and talking to them. The more quality time a parents spend with a child, the more intellectually developed the child becomes.

Oldest children oftentimes have higher IQs because they have spent more time in the company of adults, absorbing adult language. The same thing that applies to oldest children applies to only children. Only children grow up in an adult environment. Their main interactors are their parents, not other siblings. As a result of growing up with parents, only children have adult mannerisms which include an advanced vocabulary and a maturity beyond their years. The average only child is highly mature, self-contained, and intellectually precocious.

Children who interact primarily with their parents are more advanced than children who primarily interact with their siblings. Parents are adults. Adults usually have more education, experience, and knowledge that they can impart to their children. They are more likely to devote the emotional, mental, and psychological time necessary properly raising and educating a child.

Siblings are children themselves. For the most part, they do not possess the prerequisite experience, expertise, and knowledge to teach, let alone raise another child. They are also not emotionally, mentally, and psychologically developed enough to raise a child. They are still developing children themselves.

The very idea that siblings are instrumental to a child's development is totally illogical and implausible to say the least. Children simply cannot teach other children. Even if a child is older, he/she does not have the knowledge and experience that an adult has. If a child teaches another child, it would be only at the rudimentary level. In other words, the knowledge conveyed would not be at an advanced level.

Family size is influential regarding a child's development. Studies have repeatedly confirmed that children from small families(1-2 children) tend to be advanced intellectually because there is more parental interaction in the home. Conversely, children from large families( 6 and more children) tend to be not to be intellectually advanced because their primary interactors are other siblings.

John R. Holdren, top science adviser to President Obama, stated that children from large families tend to have lower IQs. He further asserted that the most successful people tended to be either oldest or only children. He relayed that children of large families, on the average, performed less well in school and show lower IQ scores than their counterparts from small families.

In a way this is true. In my elementary and high school, the children who were at the top of their classes tend to be from small families. This is because our parents taught us and we had books and other intellectual paraphernalia in our homes. Children from large families were the ones who were at the lowest rung in the class. Their parents never interacted with them. Their primary interactors were other siblings, who knew only a little more than they did. They also did not have books and other intellectual paraphernalia in the home.

Small families, on the whole, valued the higher human needs of life such as culture and education. Parents of small families stress to their children that there is more to life than just mere survival and the rudiments. Large families did not place much value on the higher human needs, they are just concerned with barely surviving and the rudiments of life. Anything beyond the rudiments is viewed as superfluous in the large family environment.

Robert Zajonc, a social psychologist, in an article, Dumber by the Dozen, maintained the larger the family, the lower the child's IQ and the more intellectually immature he/she is. He explained that when children primarily interact with other siblings, they do not acquire advanced language skills and vocabulary because siblings are on the same or similar par with them. In large families, parental attention is little to none. Children raising themselves is a commonplace occurrence in large families.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, eminent psychologist, maintain that children from small families are brighter which is the end result of individualized and more interactive parental attention. In the small family environment, parents are proactive and take interest in their children. In the large family environment, parents are oftentimes uninvolved and show little or no interest in their children. They often delegate those duties to the oldest and/or older children.

Since the oldest and/or older children are children themselves, there is only so much the younger children could learn from them. They do not have the extensive education, experience, and/or knowledge that parents have. Children who are raised by other children do not advance and/or develop as quickly as children who are raised by their parents. This is basic logic and common sense.

This also explains why later born children tend to be have lower IQs and are not as intellectually advanced as the oldest child. While oldest children had intense parental interaction in their formative years, the younger children have less parental interaction. It is oftentimes the oldest and/or older children who teach and/or otherwise interact with the younger/youngest child/children.

The oldest child and/or older children are mere children themselves and are developing. They are not adults although some parents believe that they should be. They are chronological children and do not have as advanced knowledge as the parent. So the younger/youngest child/children are not going to be as developmentally and/or intellectually advanced as a child who was taught by his/her parents.

Yes, there are parents of the school that children should teach themselves and/or their older siblings should teach them. I have heard a parent stating that parents are too tired to teach their children and it is the oldest and/or older siblings' responsibility to teach the child. There are other parents who believe that children learn best without their "interference" and they should learn on their own and if they cannot, it is too bad.

Well, children cannot learn by themselves, especially in the early formative stage. They must have competent adults i.e. parents to teach them properly. Adults supposedly have the knowledge and the emotional capacity to raise and impart educational values to a child. They have more experience and education which to do so. Children, on the other hand, no matter if they are the oldest or older, are children themselves. They oftentimes do not have the emotional, mental, and psychological mechanisms to teach and/or other raise younger siblings. They also do not the advanced knowledge that adults have.

Parents who consistently interact qualitatively with their children tend to have children who are more developmentally and intellectually proficient. Parents who have little or no interaction with their children have children who are not intellectually nor developmentally proficient. Children who raise themselves and/or each other tend not to be as advanced developmentally and intellectually.

In summation, parents are the main and primary educators and teachers for their children. It is they who teach and impart to their children skills such as walking and talking. They also inculcate to their children the importance of family culture and traditions. Constant parental interaction is an instrumental part in a child's development. Children who interact consistently and qualitatively with their parents tend to develop quicker than children who have little or no parental interaction.

That explains why oldest and only children tend to develop quicker. This is because they had more parental interaction in their formative years than succedent children who are oftentimes taught by and interact primarily with oldest and/or older siblings who are children themselves. Siblings, because they are children themselves, do not have as advanced knowledge as parents do.

Family size is also another variable in a child's development. Children in small families(1-2 children) have more parental interaction because of the small number of children per family. This parental interaction causes children to be exposed to adult language and mannerism which results in the latter developing faster intellectually and in other ways.

Children in large families(6 and more children) have little or no parental involvement. They also do not receive the prerequisite parental attention crucial to proper development. Their primary interactors are other children. Children are incapable of imparting knowledge in the fashion that adults can. Such children are developmentally and intellectually less developed as a result.

Parents are the ones who should raise and teach their children. As adults, they have the mechanisms to do this. Children simply cannot and should not teach and/or raise other children. That is beyond their purview. Parents are the ones who are the most important components in a child's development, not siblings.