Just talking and playing with your children can teach them more than flashcards and electronic gadgets ever could, an American education expert said on Wednesday.

"We are generally a world that has forgotten that play is the work of childhood and play is the way that little children learn about math and science and the world they live in," said Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, in a telephone interview with The Royal Gazette. "We are so busy trying to shove facts into the heads of children that we have forgotten that childhood is a journey not a race."

She is the co-author of "Einstein Never Used Flashcards' and the author of "How Babies Talk" and "The Origins of Grammar".

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek will be on the Island next week to give a free public talk at the Bermuda College entitled "Providing a Language Rich Environment for Children During their Earliest Years".

She will also try to debunk some of the myths of how children learn. Her visit is sponsored by the Child Development Programme.

"This is all part of the message that we really want to get out there," said Jennifer Manders, co-ordinator of the Child Development Programme. "Parents should be thinking in terms of how they might stimulate the development of language."

But the talk will have a broader focus than just language and will also touch on the importance of play and learning.

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Temple University, said she is interested in helping parents to disseminate all the information about how children learn.

"I really believe we have marvellous data on how children think and behave," she said. "I think it is time we bridge the gap between what we know and what we are doing."

She said she wants to give childhood back to children, parenthood back to parents and education back to teachers.

She said many of today's kids are so overscheduled, over-structured and pressured to achieve they are actually suffering from burn-out by the time they reach college.

"We have a lot of perfectionists now," she said. "We have a lot of parents who get upset if any little thing is wrong. We are trying the one-size-fits-all approach to education. When I go clothes shopping I find that 'one-size-fits-all' usually translates into one-size-fits-no-one."

She said that kids now spend so much time indoors that researchers are starting to see something that is being dubbed 'nature deficit disorder'.

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said, "Children who aren't getting outside to play aren't getting as much gross motor development and are not breathing in as much fresh air. "We are no longer the explorers and discoverers that we use to be."

She said kids needed to be outside, because the world is a virtual classroom. "Even a small backyard has opportunities to learn about nature, even if it is only counting slugs or picking up leaves," she said. "Even taking a walk around a city block, gives children gross motor skills and opportunity to look at shapes and gives them fresh air."

Lovette Lovell, family co-ordinator of the Child Development Programme, said that free, unstructured time is just as important as organised extra-curricular activities.

"Children need the ability to be free and have free time," Ms Lovell said. "Some of those organised things tend to create deficits in their creativity. If you explore something naturally then automatically your thought processes are that much broader. Structure automatically puts in limits the scope of the fun."

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said free time is an opportunity for children to explore the world, and express themselves creatively. "When everything is scheduled for us we never learn how to fill our own time," she said. "That is big. Nowadays everything is done for us in packagible units. That is not the best way to live. We have become passive learners."

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said the future belongs to those who are creative and who can think critically. She said parents are putting more pressure on their children for a number of reasons, one being the misinterpretation of scientific data.

"We hear that young children have tremendous capabilities to do things like learn language, so we think it is better to teach them language early," she said.

Ms Lovell said it was once popular to play classical music to small children, because parents heard that doing so would make their kid better at math, when actually, there is no concrete research to support this theory.

However, there is more and more data to suggest that the amount of time that a child spends with a nurturing adult is an indicator of the success the child will experience later in life.

Susan Price Barrett speech language pathologist and language progression supervisor at the Child Development Programme said that parent and child interaction is important, but it doesn't have to be a devised situation. "The interaction can be a very natural one," she said. "Sometimes we just plop the child down in a situation and tell them to deal with it, but it is very important to be communicating with the child about shared experiences."

"I think we have a kind of fear that we are falling behind," said Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. "No parent wants to see their child lose that future job or not get into that future college. We operate out of fear that our kids will be behind.

"The third reason is societal pressures on parents to make their kids the best in the class." She said this was partly the result of carefully orchestrated marketing ploys that played on parents' fears.

"Computers and toy companies are offering things to quell the fears," she said. "I was listening to one advertisement the other day that was promising that their educational gadget would help the child's social development. You don't learn social skills from a machine, you learn that from other humans. You don't become trilingual by pushing buttons, you get there by talking and interacting with other humans. You can't buy brains in a box."

She said it sometimes takes courage for parents to step away and let their children be children.

"I just think we have lost our way, but I think we can find it again," she said. "I am an optimist. The best thing we can do is guided play. Kids give a lot to us to and when we look through their eyes we see a world that is enchanted. There is lots we can do to bring back the dash of individuality and inspiration and excitement about learning and still have our children be ready to learn math and reading."

Dr. Hirsh-Pasek well understands the pressures on parents because she herself has three sons ages 22 to 15 years old. "I have three sons. I have one 22 year old who just graduated from college," she said. "He played when he was a kid, and went to his first choice college. I have another kid who is in musical theatre in a college in Michigan. My youngest son is playing goalie in soccer and learning a little math along the way."

She said she felt the same pressures as other parents while her kids were growing up, but she stuck to her guns, and is very proud of how her sons have turned out. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek's words of wisdom are not limited to parents; she will also be lecturing to educators in Bermuda on Tuesday morning at the Bermuda College. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek's public lecture will be at the Bermuda College on Monday at 6.30 p.m. in room G301.