Sometimes it seems that parents are the worst things to happen to kids. This week’s Time cover story talks about the increasing urge parents have to breed super-duper kids, ones that are smart and athletic and good-looking and career-minded, all by the age of five or so. Somewhere lost in there is the desire for kids to actually be kids: Goofy and young and occasionally disgusting, such as when they discover the existence of boogers and then spend the next few days announcing their discovery to all within earshot.
I certainly have nothing against parents wanting smart, capable children. It beats having them stick ‘em in a hole until kindergarten, and God knows I stuff enough educational crap down Athena’s tender young intellectual gullet. She doesn’t already know how to operate a computer at age two-and-a-half for nothing, you know. On the other hand, over the last couple of months, her desire to use her computer has decreased dramatically. About a year ago, when she first got the thing, she needed to play with it every day, for at least a couple of hours a day. These days, she wants to play with it maybe once or twice a week.
So, what do I do to encourage her to play with the computer more? Not a damned thing. Because, to reiterate: She’s two-and-a-half freakin’ years old. Any parent who would force a two-year-old to stare at a computer when the kid would rather do something else deserves the rough side of a moving chainsaw blade. These days, Athena wants to spend most of her time outside, and what’s not to like about that? So we take her outside and she plays in the yard while Krissy works on the garden, or goes out on the swingset, puts her belly into the seat of the swing, and pretends to be a Powerpuff Girl. She’s having fun, and that’s more important than any concerns I might have that she’s not developing essential computer skills.
(Of course, having just written that, Athena just wandered into my office and declared that she wanted to play with her computer. So we did, for about an hour. Athena seems particularly interested in the part of her Pooh Preschool software where she gets to paint pictures; what’s especially interesting about this is that the color she wants to paint everything is black. That’s my little goth girl!
However, my point here isn’t really compromised—she came in and wanted to play with the computer; I didn’t drag her in and make her do it. And when she wanted to stop playing with it, we did, playing another favorite game of hers instead—the one in which she stands on my stomach and then hops, saying “Up! Down!” as she does it. It’s “Hop on Pop”—the live action version.)
The problem is that parents confuse the means with the ends. Cramming flash cards and French lessons into your kid doesn’t do a thing for them in the long run, except possibly to give them a complex about flash cards and the French in a general sense. The goal shouldn’t be to make your child eat an entire set of encyclopedias by the age of six. The goal should be to encourage your child to be curious—to want to learn about the world, and explore the things that are in it. If you make a child eat a set of encyclopedias, he or she will eventually resent you for it. But if you help them want to read through that same set, your child will always appreciate what you’ve done for them.
As an example, I present to you: My own mother. My mother, bless her heart, had her ups and downs as a parent, as any parent does. However, she did do one thing absolutely as she should have: Even when it became clear I was (how shall we say this) not like the other kids, she never tried to make a trained monkey out of me, sitting me down and attempting to shovel calculus into my skull at age three. Instead, she made sure that when I did show an interest in something, she would help me take my interest as far as I wanted to take it.
For example, when I was six and I showed an interest in the concept of centrifugal force, she gave me a cup and some string and let me whirl them around in the living room (it was the stopping that was the hard part). In the days when my mother would sometimes have to choose between paying the electricity bill or a car payment, she’d literally save pennies to buy me those Scholastic books on volcanoes or planets or whatever (I still remember the author: Patricia Lauber). She let me stay up to watch “Cosmos” with Carl Sagan. She always encouraged me to ask “why” and then find out the answer. She pressed, but she didn’t push. In this respect, she was the model parent of a precocious child, and I give her full marks for getting that aspect of my childhood exactly right.
What my mother had in me, and what I have in my own child, is faith: Faith that the child will, at the right time, in the right fashion, develop into a person of intelligence, curiosity and capability. For one thing, I’m smart, my wife is smart, and we don’t spend all our waking hours sucked into the TV—our habits will rub off on the kid, no matter what. Beyond that, however, faith dictates that we don’t prod Athena onto paths she has absolutely no interest in treading. I think that a lot of the drive to have overachieving children is defensive—the idea of making sure your child is fully armed against all the other kids, whose parents are busy packing their little brains with facts so they can claw their way into the Ivy League over the broken bodies of their classmates.
While this defensive posture surely communicates to the child that parents want the “best” for their kids, it doesn’t really communicate the idea that the parents feel their kid’s own wishes or desires matter a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things. Intentionally or not, parents send the signal that developing one’s own personality takes a back seat to jumping through the hoops society deems are necessary to succeed. The problem with this is that sooner or later, even the most staid and unimaginative person wants to tell society to go screw itself. Normally this is called a “midlife crisis.” I worry that a lot of today’s kids are going to go through their “midlife crisis” at age 24 and never quite recover. That’s not good for them, and not good for us (and, more selfishly, not good for me, since these kids will be presumably paying for my Social Security).
I’m not saying I’m doing the parenting thing right while everyone else is doing it wrong (believe me on this one, folks). And I’m not saying that I’m never going to impress on Athena the value of, say, the occasional good grade over doing one’s thing all the time—structure has its uses, many of them good, even if it doesn’t seem like it when one is 15. All I’m saying is that I doubt that I’m ever going to be the kind of parents who worries that his child is not doing the “right” extracurriculars, or is “wasting” her childhood when actually what she’s doing is simply being a kid.
For the first of these, I doubt Athena will lack enthusiasms. I didn’t, and her mother didn’t—although in both cases, our parents are probably better off not knowing what some of these extracurricular enthusiasms were (and no doubt we will be, too).
For the second of these, now, really. Being a kid is what childhood is for. Life is long. There’s lots of time to be a grownup later. And I like my kid as a kid. I’m going to miss it—going to miss her—when this time of her life is done. No need to rush things. No need at all.