Summary Of Who's Raising Baby By Anne R Peirce

Taking Sides: Preschoolers in sports

Social science research is a crucial tool for understanding how humans think, develop, and behave; however, there are many research errors and flaws that can occur in a study. In the article “Who’s Raising Baby,” Anne R Peirce claims that the extracurricular activities children participate in are depriving them of important developmental opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to examine and critique the research methods Anne R Peirce uses in her article “Who’s Raising Baby?”

Summary

According to Anne R Peirce children no longer get to play because they are involved in structured activities, classes, and sports that keep them too busy to play. Before the rise of out-of-home activities for children,

to relax from an over scheduled day. Parents put their children in classes and sports at younger and younger ages due to a fear of their child missing out and being behind. Every parent wants their child to succeed and find something they are good at, so when they see that other families are putting their children in lessons at a young age they conclude that they must begin these activities even earlier to give that child the extra edge. Pierce asserts that by encouraging children to learn skills to early we are providing them with undue stress and destroying their chance to develop into what they want to become. It is hard for children to learn how to be kind when they are competing all day. This and other necessary skills are lost when we take children out of the home.

One such error occurs when claims are made with sufficient data and statistics to back up the claim. Peirce’s article make numerous assumptions about the harm of taking children out of the home too early without providing research data or statistics to back the theories up. For example, Peirce states that by pushing children into formal learning settings too soon it is doing more damage than it is providing benefits (Peirce, 2002). No study or data was provided to give any validity to this statement, nor were any examples given at this point to illustrate the harmful effects of taking children out of the home. If Peirce had studied children entering formal education opportunities at various ages and how thy progressed and developed later her claim that formal education is harmful would have been credible. Another example of this is when she sights Dr. Greenspan in saying that children suffer if they are not given enough emotional learn. This emotional learning comes through interactions with their environment and the people in it to learn basic skills of how to handle emotions and relate to other people (Peirce, 2002). Peirce is saying that by putting children in out-of-home activities while they are developing emotionally they will not be able to interact with their environment in the way they should be and they will not be able to learn social skills to function in society. While the claim might be true,