Parents: Step Away From the Science Projects!

It’s that time of year again: all over Takoma Park children are procrastinating doing their science projects and parents are getting way too involved.

All of you repeat after me: I will not touch my child’s science project.

I first realized that too many parents were way too involved in their children’s projects when my son, then in kindergarten, was assigned to create a dinosaur diorama. My job was to find a shoe box and then help him figure out how to make a little scene of a dinosaur, with its habitat.

He did great. I found clay, made a crappy dinosaur (I’m no Martha Stewart) and helped him figure out what to use for the habitat. He happily reached for my crappy dinosaur to put in the diorama, and I realized my error. I crushed the thing in my fingers, handed him the clay told him to make a dinosaur. He was horrified. He was hoping to do a lot less work. He protested and struggled but finally made one just as crappy as mine and put it in the box.

“What does it eat?” I said.

“Plants,” he said.

“Why not put a plant in its mouth to show that?” I said.

So, he did. And he also got the great idea of making a second dinosaur, a meat-eater, and showing it chomping on his dinosaur’s tail to show that it was preyed on by others.

I was very proud of him.

But when I went to see his diorama among all the other dinosaur dioramas, I was in for a shock. There were dioramas with fancy painted swamps that were not done by a kindergartener’s uncertain hand. A percentage were so fancy that clearly the kindergartener had been a spectator in making his own school project. But my kid couldn’t know that.

I felt him quietly deflate beside me. “Mine sucks, doesn’t it?” he said.

And so began a school career of my quietly pointing out to my children that their projects don’t suck but that they really can’t compete with the adults.

My daughter, aged 10, recently made a Harriet Tubman doll for a Black History Month project. She had guidance and some help with the sewing machine but she’s the only one who touched the project. The result is a cute little doll that is so basic that it doesn’t have arms. But it doesn’t really compete with the Marian Anderson doll that had a recorder sewn inside it to show her singing. I don’t know how much a parent helped with that but I have my concerns.

I’ve talked to parents who are shameless on the subject, saying they “loved” doing a particular assignment. “I couldn’t keep my hands off it,” one told me enthusiastically in discussing a diorama a couple of years ago.

But you can keep your hands off it and you must.

We parents should nag the children into doing their assignments. We should take the kids to the library to do research. We should purchase supplies and provide guidance. We should explain nonsensical jargon like “rubric” when the kid doesn’t get it. We should make late night trips to CVS when the tape runs out just when the last picture is going up on the poster board.

But we should not touch the science project. Not once. Our kids are depending on us to let them succeed on their own.