L 203 F

Today the role of the family extremely increases . People understood, that the more stronger is a family, the more stronger is the society. Since one of the main functions of a family is the upbringing of children, now these children in modern families play a more important role than ever. Most of the today's American parents dedicate their lives to their children in the proper sense of the word . Even advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous American pediatrician about child care is not enough for them. With their obsessive ambitions parents want to create brilliant perfect children. Such people like Glenn Doman hasten to help them. Doman studied children for over forty years, and involving in his studyings developmental psychology, neurology and anthropology he developed a new brand of science which helps parents in his Better Baby Institute to learn how to make their children more intelligente . According to Doman parents should begin to educate children when they are not even one year old. Thus by the age of three or four any child will be able to read, to perform mathematical stunts and to distinguish and analyze famous classical literary works and musical compositions. Actually the idea is not so bad and no doubt that there are many parents who like it but I myself would not want my children to be trained like this. My personal opinion is that such parents who give everything best to their children at the beginning and entirely dedicate their life to them ( because nobody and nothing is so important as our child) , later they expect too much from their grown–up child and very often they become so embittered when all their efforts meet with failure . In these cases it is not so difficult for a parent to become a tyrann of his child and to become his enemy number one . These parents can not understand and believe that how they could bring up so " undutiful " child. Not to mention about the position of the child himself. Since not every parent is able to pay hundreds of dollars for the seminars in the Better Baby Institute, it means that later at school these perfect marvellous children will study together with ordinary children. At best their classmates will accept them in and these children will have many friends, in other case they will stay alone because nobody will understand them. Other children will envy and hate them because of their intelligence. Once my mother told me a sad story of her classmate who was really very talented and clever and who one day left his home and nobody have seen him since then. Maybe at that time teachers and other children of that class were not prepared for such things yet and it became a tragedy for that poor boy.

Last year I have read some extracts from the famous letters written by Earl Chesterfield to his only but illegitimate child. This man spent a half of his life writing letters to his lovely son. Now these letters became an invaluable pattern of parental biddings. He also wanted to bring up a kind of perfect child. Unfortunately he failed. He was so sure that he did right because he wished only the best to his son, that he totally forgot about the individuality of his child. As a result of it, he " lost" his son and the latter " lost " a father forever.

Of course i would like my children to be intelligent and well–educated but I will try to reach it not with so extreme method as Glenn Doman proposes.