Hunched over a small table at a West Los Angeles learning center, Sehajpal Singh is a study in concentration as he figures out that the dots on his work sheet add up to 10.
Sehajpal is 3, but he already has a good grasp of counting, simple words and sentences and taking directions. After a half-hour of work, he stretches and yawns, then seems eager to jump back into his lesson.
Sehajpal represents a growing trend of preschool-age children putting away the toys and picking up a pencil for private tutoring sessions. Driven by increasing competition to keep up with the baby Einsteins, parents are doing whatever it takes to give children an advantage they hope can be parlayed into better grades, better schools and better futures.
"I want my son to get a scholarship," said Monika Singh, Sehajpal's mother. She sat in a waiting room recently, watching through a window as Sehajpal peered at a picture of a fox and then pointed to the name of the animal. "I've called around to some private schools, and they said that he can get in if he's really good. Here, my son is counting from 1 to 20, he's doing the alphabet, vocabulary, small words. The curriculum here is different, and my son likes to come."
Educators and parents alike say there is greater pressure to begin preparing kids at an earlier age to meet the academic standards demanded by the federal No Child Left Behind education act and state testing. Many states have adopted benchmarks for every grade level, including pre-kindergarten.
As a result, pre-academic preparation -- including homework -- is being shifted to children as young as 3 and 4, while academic skills once expected of first-graders are now being taught to 5-year-olds. A knowledge of phonemic sounds, words, shapes, names of animals and parts of the body are de rigueur these days for incoming kindergarteners, who also are expected to know how to write their names and be able to count to at least 30.
More evidence of a changing landscape: A school superintendent in Prince Georges County, Md., sparked heated debate two years ago when he declared naps for preschoolers a waste of time that could be better spent on academics. Many traditional half-day kindergartens are converting to full-day programs. Many parents are holding boys behind a year before kindergarten to give them time to mature and better compete. And a new satellite television network is offering around-the-clock viewing for infants and toddlers.
