Editing the Script
Becoming the Parents We Want to Be
Every psychologist knows that there is a point in therapy when you and your patient have looked at all the facts, turned over as many stones as you both could find, and analyzed (maybe even overanalyzed), each and every relevant piece of information. There is always a moment when you are sitting across from each other and, whether you’ve sat in the same room together for five months or five years, this fact becomes inescapably clear: you have done the work, the problem is reasonably well understood, and all that remains is whether or not your patient can act on his or her accumulated knowledge. Can the alcoholic executive give up drinking? Can the depressed mom walk away from an abusive relationship? Can the angry teen express herself with words instead of cutting her wrists or throwing up her food? When all is said and done, are they willing and able to make the necessary changes?
If thirty years of being a psychologist has taught me anything, it is that it is much easier to talk about things than to change them. But the potential for change is always present. We are at that moment of change now—with our children, our education system, and our willingness to alter some of our parenting habits in order to protect our children from the worst excesses of our culture. The authentic success we want so desperately for our children can’t possibly come out of a system that feeds itself and starves our children. As you come to the end of this book, you’ve read the statistics around our current education system and its effect on our kids’ well-being. You’ve heard from experts in the fields of education, psychology, and business. You’ve been asked to consider their analysis and how well it fits with what you observe in your own home, in your children’s schools, and in your particular community. And most of all, you’ve heard the voices of many different children and teens, perhaps heard them in ways that make it easier to hear your own child. You’ve met kids who have thrived in the current system but more kids who have been damaged by it. And you’ve been asked to consider your role and your contribution to both the problems and their solutions. You’ve understood that the coping skills in your child’s repertoire must also be in yours.
I’m well aware that being a reader is not the same as being a patient. All kinds of things that nurture change in the therapeutic relationship are missing in the reader-writer relationship. I don’t know your particular story or what challenges you the most. I haven’t met you or your family, looked into your eyes, or walked in your shoes. The best I can do is summon my knowledge and experience and suggest that while all families are different, there are similarities in the challenges they face as they try to make changes. I also know two steps forward and one step back is the rule, not the exception, as people work on change. So, even if you’re convinced that changes need to be made—that you will insist on a good night’s sleep for your child; that you will discuss homework policy with your child’s school and set limits on homework time; that you will encourage play, downtime, and the value of family time; that you will be careful to keep clear the difference between your interests and abilities and those of your child; and that you will refocus on your child’s character and values as you lessen your persistent concern about his or her grades—there are still bound to be moments of uncertainty and backsliding. Education and business researchers call this the “implementation dip”; psychologists call it “regression.” The point is that you should be prepared to find that your good intentions will, from time to time, be frustrated and that this is normal. In order to keep your commitment to change lively and fully charged, you need to expect both opportunity and challenge.
Undertaking a process of change demands several things from us. First, we need to understand and anticipate the kinds of situations that are likely to make us feel uncertain or helpless. We need to inventory our strengths and weaknesses so that we have a pretty good idea of what parts of our psychology slow us down, and what parts get us moving again. Every one of us walks around with emotional vulnerabilities. Some of us are nervous or sad, whether we’re simply the “worried well” or suffer from full-blown anxiety or mood disorders. Some of us don’t trust our own judgment, and fear that we might be holding our children back if we follow our instincts or defy peer or community pressure. And others of us have not yet made our peace with our histories, our “ghosts in the nursery,” whether those were minor missteps of our own parents or full-blown traumas that continue to haunt us. Being human means being vulnerable but it also means having the capacity to modify our responses and to make different choices. This chapter will look at those troubling but commonplace obstacles that get in our way, or even take us by surprise, as we go about our job of parenting. It is also about how we can maintain our own values and authenticity in the face of competing psychological, social, and cultural demands around parenting.
I’m going to start by describing a parenting challenge of my own, and for two reasons. First, everybody runs into parenting problems. Experts are no more likely to be immune from mistakes than anyone else. After all, we also have family histories that play out in our own families, with our own children. As a psychiatrist recently said to me, “We really don’t do much better. We’re just a lot guiltier when we make mistakes.” Sure, it helps to have an understanding of child development; but that’s in our head, and the places we tend to run into trouble usually come from the heart. Second, I’m asking a lot of you. To really dig down deep, to find the places where your own limitations, vulnerabilities, wounds, and defenses keep you from being the best parent you can be. We have much to learn from each other if we are willing to be open and honest about our successes and failures. This example is a little bit of both.
I was eighteen when my forty-seven-year-old father died suddenly of a heart attack. He was a New York City policeman, and I adored him. Neither of my parents had been particularly happy with my decision to go to the University of Buffalo, because it meant being away from home. He died several months into my freshman year. I didn’t make it home in time to say good-bye. This tragedy has in many ways defined my life, in terms of both my anxiety over separation and my choice to work in a helping profession as he did. It certainly has informed my worldview that the moment matters far more than whatever plans you may make for the future. It is hardly surprising that I have devoted a great deal of time and energy in my professional career to encouraging parents to be present with the child right in front of them rather than being overly focused on the future. In this respect, I think I was an effective parent—one who understood that family time was precious, and unrecoverable—and so in my own family a lot of time was spent in family rituals and encouraging each other’s particular skills and interests. When my three sons were young, I had a lot of control over what we did, and where we went. So planning the yearly whitewater rafting trip, or piling everyone in the car for the theater production or the lacrosse playoff was generally well received, kept me happy, and kept my anxiety about separation at bay.
As my sons grew up they naturally became increasingly interested in experiences outside the family. Most of this involved local activities, Indian guides, Boy Scouts, and athletics, and this was all quite comfortable for me. At about nine, my oldest son decided he wanted to go to sleepaway camp. I knew that there was a well-regarded sleepaway camp some twenty minutes from our home and I happily enrolled him. Each of my sons in turn chose to attend this camp, confirming for me that they wanted to be close by and would have been anxious at a distance. It wasn’t until my middle son, Michael, wanted to go to Stagedoor Manor, a well-known performing arts camp on the other side of the country, that I realized the extent of my separation anxiety. My eleven-year-old was excited beyond words at the prospect of being in a place filled with theater geeks just like him. I was panicked beyond all reason. The plane would crash, he’d drown in the lake, or he’d be bitten by a rabid animal in the woods. Although I was accustomed to walking around with high anxiety, even I found my preoccupation with catastrophe unsettling. I was suffering and knew that my anxiety was crushing my son’s enthusiasm. Something had to change.
So, thirty years after my dad died I went back into therapy. I sorted out the distortions I had carried for decades. It was an unfortunate coincidence that my dad died shortly after I left home. No, going away and into one’s own life doesn’t kill anyone. No, I wasn’t protecting my children by keeping them so close. I was actually impairing them by preventing the development of the very skills they would need to manage out in the world, such as independence and confidence. And probably most painful of all, no matter how much control I thought I had over my sons’ destinies, life in fact can be random and unpredictable. Getting a handle on the distortions that had become an invisible but potent part of my parenting was emotionally demanding but ultimately extremely valuable. It helped me transform my father’s legacy from one of fear to something far closer to the zestful and enthusiastic way he had lived his own life.
This honest and difficult example of what gets in the way of our best parenting intentions should have a familiar ring. While your family story may be quite different, it is likely that the things that get in your way share some commonalities with the things that got in mine. Busy raising three children and having a career, I didn’t have time (more accurately, didn’t make time) to think about, let alone work on, my own issues. Because my children were young, they didn’t confront my decisions, something older children or teens might have done. And finally, when we’ve lived a good part of our lives with a particular narrative, it’s very difficult to see it as anything but ordinary. It takes some kind of kick, a major uptick in anxiety like I experienced, perhaps a spouse who reaches the end of his rope, or a child who becomes symptomatic, to shake us up and make us decide that a change is necessary. We will find ourselves most capable of making real change, change that benefits ourselves and our children most directly, but also our families and our communities, if we inventory those things that get in our way and figure out how to turn down their volume so that we are free to act without distraction, distortion, or unnecessary anxiety. Here are some of the most common psychological stumbling blocks that get in our way.
Whenever I speak about the wave of stressors on young people and their often less than optimal coping skills, I ask the following question of my audience: “How many of you don’t really see this as a problem?” Invariably about 10 percent of hands shoot up. When I ask a couple of these parents what they think is different in their house or community, the answer is always the same. “My kid is fine. Likes school. Doesn’t have too much homework. Gets a good night’s sleep. I’m just not seeing any of the symptoms of stress you’re talking about.”
I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of these reports. Increasingly, there are schools that are committed to reviewing homework policy, to limiting AP courses, and to reevaluating things like start times and test schedules. However, these schools are still a small minority, and change comes slowly in educational institutions. More important, there are kids who have the capacity to thrive in highly competitive environments, and parents who are capable of bucking the tide and enforcing reasonable limits that protect their children from excessive stress. Generally this is more easily done when children are younger. But what interests me most about those who don’t see our current system as dysfunctional is the fact that they’re not really looking past their front door. And as soon as our children enter school, much of their day is spent past that front door.
My question is intentionally framed broadly as an invitation for parents to consider their own home as well as the larger world that their children participate in. The end result of not considering everything that affects our children—school, advertising, peers, and culture—is parent after parent sitting in my office, genuinely appalled that a child has become obsessed with her GPA or her chances of getting into a top-tier school. “But we never made an issue out of grades. Never. How can she possibly think it’s the end of the world if she doesn’t get an A in history?”
Your child lives in your house but participates in the larger culture that frames education as a “race to the top,” that emphasizes “right” answers and not good questions, and urges parents to worry ferociously about whether their children need tutors, coaches, or other forms of enrichment. In many middle schools the only list of names in the school’s weekly paper is of the students who have made the honor roll; most high schools give students class rankings. The media and popular culture are obsessed with money, status, and early achievement. An advertisement for a state educational project shows an infant wearing only a diaper, crawling toward an inverted job pyramid with a copy line reading, “The Race for the Best Jobs Starts Earlier Than You Think.”1 So even if you’ve managed to fend off some of the worst offenses to child development, short of keeping your child chained to her bed you cannot fend off all forms of influence, indoctrination, and even coercion.
The point is that our children are not exclusively ours for long. To be unimpressed with the problems in our communities and schools is to leave our children vulnerable to influences few of us would embrace in our homes. It is a form of denial to think that what happens “out there” will leave our children unaffected. On the contrary, if you think that your family really can function as an island of sanity in a sea of crazy, you probably haven’t gathered life jackets. And life jackets, protective factors like resourcefulness and self-control, are exactly what kids need to navigate successfully through intense pressures and conflicting messages. The parents who sit in my office stunned that their daughter is so anxious about her SAT scores that she has started cutting herself, or that their son is staying up late on a combination of Adderall and Red Bull so that he can pass an AP exam, have unwittingly missed the vulnerability of teens to outside influences.
What fuels denial? Most of us are vigilant, often hypervigilant, about our children and their safety. Take a moment to think about some area of your own parenting where you might be pushing aside doubt, where others may have pointed out a problem that you’ve handily dismissed, or where there is an obvious lack of communication between you and your child. Here are some ordinary examples of denial drawn both from my clinical practice and from everyday life in my community.
• The school calls and tells you that your ten-year-old son has been involved in several bullying incidents. You meet with the counselor and while you’re not thrilled to hear that your son is pushing kids around, your husband is irritated at having his day disrupted by this meeting. As you walk out, he shakes his head and says, “Boys will be boys.” There’s so much going on at home right now that you decide there’s nothing urgent here and put the whole incident on the back burner. After all, your son’s a great kid and you’ve never seen him being overly rough with either of his siblings.
• You notice that the level of a couple of bottles of liquor you keep in the house seems to be going down slowly but surely. You ask your twelve-year-old son about this and he suggests that perhaps there’s some “evaporation” going on. You doubt that he would drink; he’s just too young. Besides, you can’t be absolutely sure that evaporation isn’t the problem since the tops are not fully screwed on. You tighten them and forget the incident.
• You bring laundry into your fifteen-year-old daughter’s room and find a birthday card sitting on her desk. You debate whether to open it, but curiosity (and a vague unease) gets the better of you. It’s from her best friend and is essentially covered with sexual references, most of which you need Urban Dictionary to translate. You know your daughter will have a fit if she finds that you’ve been “snooping” in her room. Besides, the two of you have talked about sex previously and she promised to tell you when she becomes sexually active. You opt not to talk to her, fearing that her accusations of not respecting her privacy will derail the conversation.
• Your seventeen-year-old has been cited for speeding. Because she is under eighteen, this means her license will be revoked for a year. She explains that she was speeding because she was going to be late for curfew and didn’t want you to worry. You know that this is not the first time she’s been stopped for the same offense, but unlike several of her friends, she’s never tested positive for alcohol. The drama in the house is too much for you to bear as she believes her entire social life will come to a screeching halt if she loses her license. Besides, you would then have the added burden of taking her to school in the morning. A friend puts you in touch with a lawyer who is “good at getting kids off because cops are too busy to show up in court.” You decide that the punishment is too stiff, and, after all, no one was hurt. So you hire the lawyer to contest the ticket.
When we turn away from evidence that seems relatively straightforward to others we are using denial. Often there is more than meets the eye when we make these choices. For example, the mom who lets her son’s bullying go may be afraid to confront the fact that she is bullied in her marriage, much as she was bullied by her own father. The parent who passes on confronting a child about drinking may have had an alcoholic parent and may have worked overtime on educating her children about the dangers of alcohol abuse. She may find it unbearable that in spite of all this she may not be able to protect him from a genetic disadvantage. And so it goes whenever we suspect that our lack of concern may relate to issues in our own lives that either are unresolved or raise our anxiety so high that we’d just as soon walk away.
It’s important to be aware of the times that we choose not to engage and why. There’s a big difference between deciding to ignore your teen’s T-shirt emblazoned with a marijuana leaf and ignoring a veritable head shop in his bedroom. If you were raised with little warmth, strict rules, and excessive punishment, you may be committed to a more accepting household for your own children. However, we need to be clear enough about our motivation so that we can evaluate whether we’re trying to undo our own past hurts or providing a healthier and more appropriate environment for our children. This ability to see our children clearly, and the world they live in clearly, is the best protection we can offer them against competitive excesses, counterproductive educational and psychological fads, and unrealistic expectations.
The first step in being able to make effective parenting changes is the ability to recognize problems. We need to be alert to the power of our own history in shaping what we pay attention to and what we find difficult to confront. If we can keep this in mind, we are in a far better position not to miss the early, often subtle, warning signs of emotional distress in our children.
When I am invited to speak at schools and parent groups around the country, most often they want help addressing specific problems like cheating or too much homework, or want me to more broadly address the competitive, pressure-cooker atmosphere their kids are trying to manage. Sometimes it is faculty members or school administrators who bring me in, hoping to improve a particular aspect of curriculum or student behavior, such as bullying, or to examine the general climate of the school. Sometimes I’m in Tennessee with a bunch of kids, sometimes in Hawaii with administration and faculty, sometimes in New York with parents. So while I’m never certain what problems my next speaking engagement will address, I am quite certain who will be blamed. If I talk to parents, the teachers and school administrators will be blamed for too much homework and too much pressure. If I talk to teachers and school administrators, the parents will be blamed for being too involved, too anxious, and too competitive. If I talk to parents and school professionals together, they will both attack the college and university selection process, believing that if higher education took a more reasonable position, then schools and parents could as well. The kids? Well, the kids don’t typically blame anyone. They’re too busy trying to keep their heads above water to worry about who’s at fault. They just want me to help them find a way to cope with it all.
It is generally psychologically easier to identify external contributors to a problem than it is to tease out our own contributions. “The homework policy at my kid’s school is just crazy” is simpler than wondering why you tolerate, perhaps even encourage, a “crazy” system. Yet crazy is the word I hear most often when parents talk about homework time, pressure to take multiple AP courses, or the entire college application process. When apples were sprayed with a chemical at my local supermarket, middle-aged moms turned out, picket signs and all, to protest the possible risk to their children’s health. Yet I’ve seen no similar demonstrations about an educational system that has far more research documenting its toxicity. We have bought into this system not because we are bad people or are unconcerned about our children’s well-being, but because we have been convinced that any other point of view will put our children at even greater risk. We assess the problem as being “out there,” which is to say, out of our control. It isn’t.
Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism. When we “project,” we deflect an uncomfortable thought, feeling, or impulse by saying, “I can’t possibly be having this thought, feeling, or impulse; therefore it must be you.” The cheating husband starts to suspect that his wife is having an affair, the depressed shopaholic mom brings her daughter to my office claiming she is “too materialistic,” the insecure dad blames his wife when he takes a wrong turn because men are never directionally challenged—these are all examples of projection. Projection ranges from the devastating to the trivial, but all acts of projection reduce our anxiety and help us keep our image of ourselves intact. Remember that projection is an unconscious way we have of handling distress and anxiety, so we need to be gentle with ourselves when we start investigating the ways in which we protect ourselves from uncomfortable feelings.
So, how exactly do parental projections contribute to the high levels of stress documented among kids? Here are just a few examples from the hundreds I’ve collected in my practice. “My mom thinks I’ll go crazy if I don’t get into Michigan. I really don’t care. Besides, I’d rather go to Wisconsin. What’s with her?” “My dad tells me I’ll be ‘left behind’ if I don’t do better in math. Math just isn’t my thing. Why doesn’t he focus on the subjects I’m good at like English or journalism?” “My parents say I’m afraid to succeed because I’d rather take regular history instead of AP history. They were never into all this competitive stuff but now that I’m a junior they’re acting totally whacked. How can I convince them that I haven’t turned into a slacker, that I’m just giving myself a bit of breathing space?”
The first thing to notice in these examples is the disconnect between what the child is feeling and what the parent assumes the child is feeling. Let’s look at the first example in more detail.
Why does Mom think her kid will “go crazy”? He gives no indication of going crazy so he is confused by Mom’s assessment. If your child is genuinely baffled by something you feel strongly about, think about where your insistence is coming from. In this case, Mom, a conformist by nature, and her two siblings had been Wolverines, and she simply couldn’t imagine that her son could be okay in a school other than Michigan. A “march to his own drummer” kind of kid, her son felt little pressure to continue the family tradition but was quite upset both by his mother’s agitation and by her completely missing the mark about what kind of school he’d prefer (from his point of view, this rightfully means “My mom doesn’t know who I am”). If Mom could understand that she was projecting, she might be less insistent and less off the mark about her son.
Projection always involves some distortion. Make as few assumptions as you can about what is driving your child’s behavior. Don’t assume that your issues are the same as your child’s. “Being team captain was the most important thing in the world to me when I was in high school. I know my son must have been devastated when someone else was picked for the position.” He may have been, but he may just as easily have been relieved. If you’re stuck in your own head, you can’t really get into your child’s.
The best way to avoid projection and distortion is to spend as much time reflecting on our own psychology and motivation as we do on our children’s. As the boundaries between parents and their children have collapsed—“We’re going to the lacrosse finals”; “Is our homework finished?”; “We’re trying to get into Tulane”—so has our ability to differentiate between the needs of our children and our own needs. Rarely are both sets of needs the same. The needs of middle-age adults are quite different from the needs of children or teens. Be alert to signs from your children that you are misreading them. Typically, they are only too happy to let you know. “You don’t get it.” “Earth to Mom.” “What are you talking about?” Once you are alerted to a disconnect between what you think is true and what your child thinks is true, that’s your opportunity to do some deep thinking.
One of my patients had been sexually abused as a young girl. She was certain her sixteen-year-old daughter was terrified to be home alone at night. If Mom had to go out for the evening, she would call home every hour or so to “make sure things were all right.” One day in my office her daughter (who did not know Mom’s history) exploded, saying, “I don’t know what you think is going to happen to me. But you’re making me crazy calling all the time.” Mom’s job then was to make the connection between her own early trauma and the assumptions she was making about her daughter’s state of mind. She had to own the fear she had felt as a terrified young girl, be clear that she and her daughter were two separate people with very different life experiences, decide how much of her history to share with her daughter, and, finally, commit to changing her own behavior.
Over time, and with considerable support and effort, Mom learned techniques to help control her anxiety so that she no longer felt compelled to check in on her daughter inappropriately. Once we’re aware of the ways that we project onto our children, most of us are quite willing to make adjustments. No parent wittingly chooses to traumatize his or her own child.
Not all projections are negative. Our kids may or may not be smart, athletic, musical, or good-looking, but we may see them that way because they remind us of a beloved parent, grandparent, or friend. “You’re just like my grandmother, the kindest lady who ever lived.” But if you’re just like saintly Grandma, it makes it harder to take the last cookie or insist that it’s your turn to choose a movie. The problem with all projections, good, bad, trivial, or significant, is that they confuse the reality of who our child actually is with who we wish him or her to be. Our job is to see our children clearly. Regular, thoughtful introspection is our most potent weapon against the unwitting damage that projection can inflict.
I sit in an office surrounded by books on teenagers. Flip through the index of any one of them and you will find an entry for “peer pressure.” Long thought to be one of the major issues, if not the major issue, of preteens and teens, peer pressure is really a life-span issue. We are, after all, social animals, and so by definition, we are going to be influenced at all ages by the people and the culture around us. What Erik Erikson described as “a uniformity of differing” in the ways teens dress, the music they listen to, and the language they use can just as easily be found in our neighborhood driveways’ propensity toward Ford Explorers, Honda Accords, or BMW 3s. Depending on where we live, we might as well carpool to Target, Macy’s, or Barneys for our jeans and boots. In my community Louis Vuitton “speedy” purses look like they’ve been bought in bulk.
Communities have norms, and there is always an interaction between the places we live and the norms we are expected to follow, from how we dress, to what we drink, to our political leanings, to how we raise our children. Unlike denial and projection, which are largely unconscious, peer pressure is generally experienced consciously. “My daughter enjoys playing piano and she’s definitely talented. My friends think I should send her to a music camp. I have great memories from childhood of my own days at just a regular camp. Do kids always need to ‘specialize’ these days?” “My son’s counselor says kids with B averages are ‘a dime a dozen.’ She thinks we need to get him a tutor so he can bring up his GPA. He’s a great kid, works hard, and is just pretty much a B student. Do I really need to push him harder?” Clearly, these types of norms are typical of middle-class, upper-middle-class, and affluent communities. Some first-generation immigrant communities have even more exacting standards for their children. “I came to this country and worked my whole life so that you could go to college and become a doctor.” “We could have stayed back home if you wanted to be a musician. In this country you will be an engineer.” By contrast, there may be a lack of exacting standards for some inner-city kids. “Don’t give him any big ideas. Nobody here makes it through college.”
The point is that regardless of where we live, most of us and most of our children are aware of what our community values and what it devalues. While my community’s high school offers several courses in building materials, construction, and computer-assisted drawing, it has never gone through the necessary paperwork to make them courses that are counted toward University of California credits. Therefore the hands-on kind of learner, who is likely to do well in courses like these, can’t use his particular strength to bring up his GPA. This makes it painfully clear to the pack of boys who live for these kinds of classes that their strengths and ambitions are out of synch with the values of their community.
It’s one thing to understand teenagers’ vulnerability to peer pressure. After all, they are new to the experience of depending on people outside their family for support, direction, and information. The peer group serves as a kind of way station for teens who are leaving childhood but are not yet young adults. With peer support, teens feel comfortable trying on different identities, considering different choices, and generally distinguishing and separating themselves from their families. But why should peer pressure play that much of a role in our parenting? For the most part we’ve established our identities and have considerably more experience and, hopefully, more confidence in our adult choices than we had in our adolescent choices. Yet many of us still seem overly vulnerable to the opinions of others. The mom who just wants her kid to have a good time at summer camp or the mom who’s perfectly content with her son’s academic performance would be unlikely to struggle with her decision if she lived in a community that shared her values. There is probably no place where we are more vulnerable to criticism than our parenting skills. After all, this is where many of us pour our hearts and souls into doing the best job possible. We read and hover, discuss and keep track of how our kids are “doing,” and unfortunately end up equating our child’s “success” with our own.
And this, of course, is where we run into trouble. A bright young man named Alex is fascinated with cars. When he was young, he and his father spent hours in the garage tinkering with a clunker his dad had bought for a few hundred dollars. Sometimes Alex’s grandfather would join them. He lived locally and had shared the same passion with his own son when Alex’s dad was young. Knowing about cars was a family tradition that bound three generations of these men together. When Alex was younger, he and his dad made “house calls” to help neighbors who had a dead battery or just a finicky car. It was a source of great pride to Alex’s father that his son had such a “knack” for car repair. Fast-forward a few years and Alex is now starting his junior year in high school. He has really good grades but hasn’t lost an iota of his passion for cars. As the college application process nears, Alex seems surprisingly noncommittal about his plans. He mentions “hands-on industrial programs” and his parents are dismissive. His father, a physician, is terrified that Alex will “settle” for being a car mechanic. Dad wants to know what he “did wrong.”
In fact, Dad did everything right. He was close with his son and spent considerably more time with him than most dads do. They had a strong bond, they shared interests, and his son was an awfully nice kid with good grades. Yet Dad was feeling criticism from all sides. His wife accused him of not setting “high standards” for their son. His friends faulted the amount of time they spent in the garage when he could have taken his son “to the hospital for rounds” and thereby encouraged an interest in medicine. The school counselor suggested that they “take it out of Alex’s hands” and insist that he apply to the top-tier schools for which he had the grades. Dad felt that he had “failed” his son by ignoring his potential. Alex became more withdrawn; he was uncomfortable and angry about being the center of so much discussion.
Let’s get a few things straight here. First of all, Alex hasn’t decided where to go to school. But the amount of turmoil he’s experiencing around this decision is not going to make it any easier for him. He’s getting all kinds of messages about the various mistakes he and his dad have made, and no recognition of his passion and competence. He may be a mechanic, or he may be an engineer. He doesn’t know and neither should anyone else assume that his path is set. It’s a rare teenager who has his life plan firmly in place. Alex needs support for who he is in order to go about finding a college that will be a good fit for him. He likes working with his hands, he’s mechanical, he has good visual-spatial abilities (no coincidence that his father, with these same traits, is a surgeon), and he’s curious. He will find his way. His parents will have to disregard the peer pressure that makes them feel that somehow their son is not measuring up, and by extension, that they’re not, either.
The amount of pressure that parents are experiencing to have their children be outstanding performers in multiple areas is positively staggering. Eavesdropping on the conversations at the grocery checkout counter is like entering a parallel universe where all children are uncannily brilliant and preternaturally talented. The oddest part of this is that I know many of the kids who are being discussed. Some are my sons’ friends, some I see in therapy, and some are just neighborhood kids. Most are bright, a few notably so. They certainly have talents, interests, and a few passions. Some of them also have significant problems. One or two might end up at Carnegie Hall; the rest will likely be strumming guitars in their dorm rooms. They are far more likely to play in rec leagues than in the big leagues, and the best thespians among them will be lucky to do community theater. This is not a put-down. I like to think of it as the wisdom accumulated by working and living with kids for more than three decades. It simply is real life. And yet parents everywhere seem to believe that their child is different, more special, smarter, and more talented. Which is to say that they, the procreators of these extraordinary children, are more special, smarter, and more talented.
The poet Khalil Gibran wrote, “Your children are not your children.”2 We delude ourselves when we think that our parenting is the singular engine behind our child’s development. Your children come hardwired with interests, abilities, capacities, and temperament. They will grow, more or less, into the person they are meant to be whether they have one tutor or two, go to math camp or computer camp, work out twice a week or daily. I’m not saying that the opportunities that we provide our children are meaningless. On the contrary, I’m asking you to consider the types of opportunities you are providing, what is motivating you, and how well these opportunities fit with your child’s particular nature. I’m asking you to do all this while putting aside the peer pressures that make you question whether your child’s doing enough, whether you’re doing enough, whether you are enough.
Challenging peer pressure takes courage. It did when we were teens and it still does now that we’re middle-aged. What makes peer pressure such a formidable opponent is the comfort it provides when we go along with the group and the alienation we feel when we take a stand in opposition to the group. The fear of rejection is very powerful for most people, and it drives our constant self-questioning, and often bad parenting decisions, too. Insisting on another AP when your daughter has headaches and stomachaches before school because, in addition to raising her GPA, it secures your position as a mother who has raised a “gifted” child, is not acceptable. This isn’t to say we aren’t entitled to feel some glow around our children’s achievements. Often we have put in a lot of time and effort and money helping our children cultivate their skills. But the operant word is their. Their accomplishments are not our accomplishments. In this respect, it is important to have interests and accomplishments of our own so we don’t need to leech from our children.
If you live in a community where accomplishments mean almost exclusively academic or athletic success, try to think more broadly. Of course we’re proud of our kids when they do well in school, make the honor roll, bring home trophies. Celebrate these accomplishments with them. But every kid has a place where he or she excels. A very important part of our job is to find those places. The workplace is saying look for honesty, character, the ability to get along with people, to be an accurate reader of social environments, to think outside the box, and to find new ways to connect the dots. While peer pressure might suggest that these are “soft” skills and that without a degree from a top-tier school your child will be at a disadvantage, it is much more realistic to say that without creativity, collaboration, integrity, and communication skills, it doesn’t matter where your child goes to school: he or she won’t be optimally prepared for the demands of our new century.
Finally, you will be asking your teenagers over and over again to stand up to peer pressure. You will want them to stay out of cars with drivers who have been drinking, to say no to sex when they’re not ready, to resist easily available drugs and a host of other risky adolescent behaviors that could pose real threats to their well-being. We should be asking no less of ourselves. Question aggressively a system that seems to sanction excessive homework, competition over collaboration, sleep deprivation, and choosing activities based solely on their résumé-enhancing potential. Show your child that values need to be acted on, not just espoused. And just as you tell your teen that there are plenty of kids who don’t do drugs or don’t have casual sex, I can assure you that there are plenty of parents out there who are just as concerned, frustrated, and anxious to change the system as you are. Find them and start exerting a little peer pressure of your own.
I used to think that we inherited a parenting style from our own parents, and that most of us parented much the same as we had been raised. A body of research, called attachment theory, confirmed that if you were securely attached to your mother, your own child was likely to be securely attached both to you and to others. Children develop secure attachments when parents show warmth, support, stability, and emotional attunement. Under these circumstances kids feel confident about venturing out in the world and confident that a secure base awaits them in times of stress. Securely attached kids feel good about themselves and worthy of being loved.
Other, less capable parents formed insecure attachments with their children. These parents were too anxious, unavailable, poorly attuned, or disturbed to provide a secure base for their children. As a result these children were impaired in their ability to form healthy relationships or to feel worthy of being loved. Needless to say, children classified as being insecurely attached were not expected to do well, either in their relationships with others or in their ability to feel good about themselves. This classification system was a rather neat and easy way to think about parenting. It suggested that we are likely to turn out to be more or less the same kind of parent that our own parents had been. And it made the common epiphany “I can’t believe I sound just like my mother” a predictable extension of our particular history.
Attachment theory continues to play a very significant role in the way psychologists understand both how we form relationships in the outside world and how we feel about ourselves in our inside world. However, it is no longer a static system of classification but rather a dynamic one. Our early relationships with our parents do leave strong, often indelible, marks on the person we grow up to be. But life also intervenes in countless ways. Good things happen to insecure children and they evolve into secure kids. They’re smart or talented and some reliable adult takes them under his or her wing and provides the warmth, reliability, and support they’ve been missing. Bad things happen to secure kids and they grow into insecure adults. Throw a secure young child a major curveball in life—a life-threatening illness, the early death of a parent, economic disaster—and that child’s trajectory is likely to falter or be altered. Yes, our parenting style greatly affects our children, but many other factors do as well. This is a painful realization since it means our children can be at risk in ways we can’t even foresee. On the other hand, it also means that nothing is written in stone, and we can change how we parent regardless of our own early experiences.
A friend of mine who is a wonderful mother, loving, supportive, and disciplined, looks for all the world like she inherited the good parenting gene. While she and her husband both attended highly selective universities, I’ve never seen either of them push their kids inappropriately or hover over their schoolwork. This isn’t to say she doesn’t have high standards for her kids. She does. But her two kids are notably different from each other and so the standards are very much in keeping with the temperament, interests, and capacities of each child. Instead of prestige schools for them (of which there are plenty in her community) she has chosen schools that are less pressured, more project based, and decidedly focused on the development of the “whole child.” Her kids have thrived, and while her kids’ interests often didn’t align with hers, she was always enthusiastic even if occasionally baffled. For years I had used her as a parenting model, and a trusted friend to confer with when I faced difficult parenting decisions. I assumed that she had “inherited” a high degree of good “motherliness” from her own mom. As in most friendships during the years of intense mothering, we talked mostly about our kids, our husbands, and our work.
As our kids grew and we had a bit more free time, we found out more about each other’s histories before we had kids. One afternoon over coffee she told me, “My mother never made me feel valued or validated as a person separate and apart from her own hopes and dreams for me. Rather than feeling proud of me for hard-won accomplishments, she seemed much more interested in accruing glory to herself through the kudos she received from friends. I suspect this is because her own role model was an extremely austere mother whose love was both conditional and self-referential.” My mouth dropped in astonishment. One of the best moms I knew had been raised not by an equally competent mom, but by a poorly attuned mom who apparently was following in the footsteps of her own poorly attuned mom. My “hereditary” notions were both confirmed and disproved in a single story. “But you’re so sensitive to your own kids. How did you turn things around?” With the thoughtfulness I had come to appreciate in my friend, she said, “Unless we make a conscious decision to change, it’s all too easy to become prisoners of our past.” No, she’s not a shrink. But she is reflective and introspective and was determined not to repeat a relationship that had served her so poorly.
If warmth, support, stability, and emotional sensitivity are the “magic bullets” of parenting, what if, like my friend, you didn’t grow up in this kind of environment? Maybe your parents had a tumultuous marriage, or your mom was depressed or your dad was an alcoholic. How do you learn to develop the skills that come naturally to parents who came from healthier backgrounds? Is it even possible? The answer is a resounding and reassuring yes. We are never “finished” products. We are always capable of greater understanding and change. We can learn to be warmer, more stable, more supportive, and more attuned to our children regardless of our own backgrounds. This is not easy work, but there are few things you can do as a parent that have a bigger payoff.
All of us have days when all our emotional resources are at our disposal and days when we feel depleted; we are all people in addition to being parents. Perfect is not something parents are, nor something they should strive to be. Striving for perfection is bound to end in disappointment and often in depression. We do, however, want to be the best parent we can be and we don’t want to have our histories necessarily dictate our parenting skills or choices. This means taking an inventory of both the positive and the negative parts of the way you were parented. You are not betraying your parents when you think long and hard about their strengths and weaknesses. It took me years to allow myself a critical thought about my own mother. She was widowed at forty-two; how could I fault anything she did? But I came to understand that in the process of thinking about how I was parented, I was actually doing what my mother would have wanted most: becoming a more capable mother myself.
I hear endlessly from parents that they want their children to have “better” lives than they have. Sometimes this is about money or status. But for most of us, it’s not about having our kids outspend us. We want our kids to be just better—better people, better citizens, better parents. So assume that your parents will bless your work here, and take an objective look at their parenting skills; then take the same objective look at your own. Write down your thoughts. Identify one or two things that you feel compromise your parenting most. Anxiety? Depression? A difficult marriage? Trouble with closeness? Being easily overwhelmed? Trouble reading emotions? By writing it down, you’ve overcome denial, challenged projection, and become poised to think about the kinds of change you need to make.
You’ve already written down what you think is most likely to get in your way when you’re tackling tough issues. Now jot down the particular parenting issues, big or little, that you find most difficult: letting your young child make her own decisions (“You can’t wear stripes and polka dots together”), bugging your middle schooler to be more “friendly” because you’re afraid she won’t be popular, staying out of your adolescent’s room day after day when the door is closed even though you worry about what he’s doing in there, insisting that your child study harder because you fear that his grades won’t allow him the “choices” you see as being critical to his future. Put these two lists aside, to be returned to later.
The job of understanding our own lives is the project of a lifetime. We are never really finished, because life ebbs and flows and change is inevitable. What feels tolerable one day—your three-year-old’s pouty “I hate you”—may be intolerable a decade later when your twelve-year-old looks straight into your eyes and spits out the same words. Parenting continually asks us to grow and develop. There are three things that stand out as being critical to our ability to adapt and grow along with our children. The first is self-reflection, that is, truly understanding our histories and ourselves. The next is the ability to tune in to another’s state of mind, or empathy. And finally, flexibility ensures that we have a repertoire of parenting skills so that we can bring our best game to the parenting table. While I’m writing about self-reflection, empathy, and flexibility as if they are separate categories, in fact they are more like a web than a list. Each of them depends on the others for maximal effectiveness.
Self-Reflection
If there’s a heartbeat to this book, it’s about the value of self-reflection. As a psychologist, I’m trained to help people turn inward and think about the circumstances and feelings that drive their thoughts and behavior. One piece of advice inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi was “Know thyself.” There is a reason why self-reflection is such a positive and critical part of human development. Without it we are not free to make choices. Forces that are unclear, or even unknown to us, drive us instead of our own considered decisions. What allows us free choice, as a parent, a partner, a friend, and an individual, is having “digested” our own experiences. Self-reflection or introspection is not navel-gazing. It is the challenging task of taking in our history, our life experiences, and our feelings, processing them, and integrating them into a clear and coherent story about our lives. You need to be able to make sense of your own life in order to help your children make sense of theirs.
Go back to your lists. How do you make a deeper, more meaningful story of your life, one that sheds some light on both the parenting problems that are toughest for you and the ways of coping you use that are less than successful? Start by taking some quiet time just to think about what’s on your lists. Most of us have given considerable thought to our parenting issues, sometimes talking them over with spouses and friends until we’re blue in the face. While talking with friends and partners can be extremely helpful, suspend your reliance on others for a bit, as you turn inward to collect your own memories and feelings. Many people find writing in a journal helpful. This allows you the opportunity for intimate expression as you write, as well as objective reflection as you read what you have written. For example, you might write something like “I know I’m way too anxious and pushy about my kid’s grades. But what if she falls behind and loses out on all kinds of opportunities. I couldn’t bear to see all my friends’ kids marching off to top-tier schools while my kid goes to the University of No Stature.” This is a good start. You’ve identified a difficult parenting issue—how best to manage involvement with your child’s schoolwork. And you’re aware of the parts of you that get in the way of optimal parenting (anxiety, vulnerability to peer pressure). Now your task is to see if you can discover, in your own history, what makes this issue both so vital and so draining. Were your parents’ expectations for you high or low or in line with your capacities? Were they interested in your educational progress or indifferent to it? Were they concerned with your feelings of accomplishment or defeat or more concerned with how others might judge you? Were you made to feel proud of your progress or ashamed of your mistakes? I can’t possibly list all variants, since every family is different, and the reasons behind anxiety or depression or vulnerability are different for each reader. But exercises like meditating, journal writing, reviewing family photos, or simply talking to oneself all help to bring our particular issues and challenges forward, broadening our understanding of ourselves and helping us to make clearer and better parenting choices.
We are never free of our past, but we can be free of its unwanted intrusion into our relationship with our children and the ways in which we choose to parent. Being a parent gives us the extraordinary opportunity for a “do-over.” Once again we are in a parent-child relationship, but this time we hold the cards. We can use the best of what we learned from our own parents and change the things that were out of synch or hurtful. This time around, we get to choose.
Empathy
I’ve long held this particular notion, a perhaps idiosyncratic one, that given a choice between being loved and being understood, most of us would choose to be understood. Of course, most of us want both. But while it hurts not to be loved, it can be unbearable not to be understood. We seem to have a profound need to have our deepest selves be seen, acknowledged, accurately understood, and embraced. We can be in a “love relationship,” but if we’re not understood or, worse yet, if we are misunderstood, the relationship ends up feeling profoundly lonely. Of course, you could argue that love without a clear understanding of the other person isn’t really love at all. But as we’ve looked at things like denial, projection, or family history, it’s also clear that seeing the people we love accurately and without distortion can be a tall order.
I’ve never met a parent who didn’t love his or her children in profound and well-meaning ways. Ask any group of parents what they want for their children when they grow up, and the universal answer is “to be happy.” Most of us believe we are empathic parents and believe that the empathic bond we have with our child will have a great effect on how they develop. And yet most kids I see feel anything but understood. So many of the issues we’re currently facing as parents will be resolved either successfully or unsuccessfully depending on our capacity to be accurately attuned to our children.
Because we are social animals, we have a biological need for connection. The neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls this our need to “feel felt” and traces its origins to how our brains are wired for connection.3 Much of this connection goes on nonverbally; just remember the back-and-forth of smiling at your infant’s face and her smiling back at you. This is called resonance and it’s a critically important way of communicating throughout our lives. Think lover’s eyes, mother’s hand, child’s hug.
Parents today have become great talkers with their children. They discuss, debate, argue, and explain endlessly. This certainly is a change from how much our parents talked things over with us, and it has its benefits as well as its limitations. But talking to your child does not ensure that you are being empathic or even on the same wavelength. Generally children feel talked “to,” not with. Their assessment is often accurate. You do not build your connection with your child through verbiage; it is built through an accurate understanding of your child’s emotions and point of view. This is where parents sometimes get off track. They confuse empathy with sympathy, discussion, or friendship.
An empathic connection with your children is probably the single most advantageous and protective factor in their development. It encourages everything from good mental health to academic performance. Since empathy is also a silver bullet, let’s take a moment to fully understand it. Empathy is the accurate understanding of another person’s internal experience. It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with that experience. Unlike sympathy, it makes no assumption about how the other person is feeling. When you are being empathic with your child you are joining him in his emotional experience. If it’s a positive experience for him you share his enthusiasm and amplify his good feelings. If it is an unsettling or distressing experience for him you comfort and soothe him.
Entering into another human being’s internal life is a delicate business. Clearly we have great advantages with our children. We’ve known them from birth. We’ve had lots of practice learning the meaning of their various gestures and can generally read their signals rather easily—hair twirling means “I’m tired,” a quivering lip means “I’m upset,” foot tapping means “I’m anxious.” But here’s the caveat. They change. And so do we. Going down the slide may have been terrifying to your three-year-old and tuning in to him would have meant comforting him. Six months later going down the same slide is positively exhilarating and you get to celebrate his accomplishment with him. All the while you need be attuned to his nonverbal communication so that you’re not telling a terrified child that he did a super job or gathering a competent child in your arms to reassure him.
It is easier to be empathic when we have had empathic parents ourselves. We’ve been tuned in to and generally know how to tune in to others. But just as self-reflection was a road to clarifying and, in some cases, undoing damage from our past, so is it a way to build our empathic capacity. We first need to know what pleases us and what disappoints us. These may or may not be the same things that please or disappoint our children. While we certainly hope that our children grow up to share our basic values of respect, kindness, and service to others, we simply can’t expect them to grow up with the same likes, dislikes, preferences, and talents that we have. Our job is to produce and guide our children; not to reproduce ourselves. Nor should we want to. One of the absolute miracles of life is the profound uniqueness of each person.
All three of my sons went to the same local public high school. In my community that meant a demanding curriculum with high expectations and a narrow view of what success looks like. This worked fine for my oldest boy, who was competitive, extremely hardworking, and high-achieving. If he came home with less than an A on a test he would be frustrated with himself. My job was simply to tune in to his frustration, not to talk him out of it, give him a pat on the back, and let him know that I was available if he wanted to talk more. He had no disturbing symptoms (for example, stomachaches, headaches) for me to worry about. So because I was a high achiever myself, it was easy to empathize with him over what to him was a disappointing grade.
My middle son couldn’t have cared less about his grades. Through some process of osmosis he maintained a high GPA; he never actually knew what it was until he had to fill out college applications, because he didn’t care about numbers. He was all about creativity and looking at things in different ways. Often he would crumple up a test as soon as he received it and toss it in the class wastebasket, occasionally to his teacher’s chagrin. He never understood how this could be considered “disrespectful”; he always scored well; his grades just weren’t that interesting to him. Empathizing with him about school was just a bit harder for me because his disregard for grades and scores was foreign to me. When he came home upset about a detention because he once again had tossed out his exam, I had to be empathic in an entirely different way than I had been with his older brother. Encouraging him to help me see the world through his eyes made all the difference. “There are so many more interesting things than grades. I see amazing things that other kids barely notice. Grades are just kind of boring.” That was all it took. The great thing about empathy is it helps our kids yet it helps us, too. Seeing the world through his eyes was part of what transformed my own views about the current state of affairs in education.
And finally, my youngest son was a perfectly average student (exactly in the middle of his class), which in our community, with its unrealistic zeitgeist of “excellence,” meant that feeling good at school was a real challenge. The things that interested him and that he was good at, such as using his hands, building, or landscaping, were scarcely given a nod at his high school. To his credit, he understood early on that if he solely focused on academics, he was going to have a tough few years. So he found courses that interested him at the local community college and took several of them with considerable success. This is how you turn a C student into a B or an A student. Not with tutors, but by helping your child find what he is good at and interested in. (I don’t mean to dismiss all tutoring; I just think it’s greatly overused. And while it may help some children, it makes many more feel that they can’t learn without constant oversight.) As a PhD and a type-A high achiever, could I really empathize with a child who was on a different path? Absolutely. I chose to see all that was good about him—the most genuinely kind kid I’ve ever known—and when he was frustrated with his school’s constant drumbeat about grades, I was perfectly capable of empathizing with his difficulty and supporting his strengths. After a couple of false starts (pretty miserable misreads on my part), I don’t think I ever challenged him about his grades again. He was working to capacity and he was happy. Good enough. More than good enough. Terrific.
This is what I mean by tuning in to your child to help make decisions about pressure, school, sleep, homework, and extracurricular activities. My sons are mostly grown now. The oldest predictably went to a powerhouse school. My middle son went to a school known for the arts and my youngest is at a polytechnic. They have all been happy with their schools. In order to help your children maintain optimism and enthusiasm and eventually make good choices about what college to attend you need to crawl up behind their eyes and look out at the world from their point of view. It takes an open mind and an open heart. It takes practice in listening and an awareness of the knee-jerk reactions we may have that prevent us from listening closely and seeing clearly. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have our own viewpoint or preferences. But it does mean that in addition to being able to share our perspective and maturity with our kids, we can “feel with” them as they try to sort out their lives.
Empathy is the glue that holds together our most important relationships. This is what ET meant when he pointed to Elliott’s forehead and said, “I’ll be right here.” Empathic connection is stronger than distance or separation. It is what keeps our children alive in us as long as we live, and what keeps us alive in our children even as they set off into the untraveled territory of their own lives.
Flexibility
Flexibility is a frame of mind. It is what allows us to choose the best response from a raft of different possibilities. Flexibility in parenting does not mean you should become a pushover. There is a delicate tightrope to be walked between your child’s need for structure and the importance of considering content and context when you make decisions. But without flexibility, you are unlikely to be a successful parent and will certainly not be an empathic or introspective one. A lack of flexibility makes us vulnerable to poor decisions because we’ve defaulted to an unthinking, nonempathic, automatic response. When it comes to our kids, this is not the way we want to make decisions. Actually, it’s not the way we want to make decisions at all.
Marilyn wants her youngest son, Ryan, to attend the same private elementary school her two older daughters attended. It is a well-regarded, academically focused school, and Marilyn’s two older daughters thrived there. Marilyn’s active son hated the school as soon as he walked in the door. The halls were hushed and when he peered into the classrooms, he could see kids quietly working at their desks. At his preschool there was a lot of action, kids running around, noisy chatter in the classroom. When the headmistress brought him into her office for an interview, he was told to stay in his seat and she reprimanded him for touching the objects on her desk. When Ryan and his mother got home, Ryan burst into tears. “I’m never going there. I hate it. You can’t make me.” Marilyn took offense at this last comment and responded angrily, “You’re just a kid. You don’t know what’s good for you. You’ll go wherever I decide you should go.” Harsh, huh? But Marilyn isn’t an evil mother. While she couldn’t be empathic with her son, we can afford to be empathic with her. What was going on?
First of all, the headmistress spoke with Marilyn after interviewing Ryan and suggested that while her two daughters had been terrific students at the school, perhaps Ryan wasn’t “ready” for its rigor. This made Marilyn feel humiliated and ineffective. A reserved woman herself, she had been happy with her two quiet girls; but her husband had pushed for a third, hoping to have a son. While he was thrilled with Ryan’s arrival, Marilyn felt different. What little time she had shared with her husband was now taken up by Ryan. From the beginning she felt confused by her son and his constant activity. Whether it was colic as an infant, two visits to the emergency room before he was five for tumbles that he took at the playground, or the fact the he was never quiet, always humming or singing even while he was playing alone in his room, Ryan felt alien to her. She worried that maybe he had ADHD, even though his pediatrician said he was just a normal, active boy. Marilyn wasn’t sure she believed him. He’d never seen Ryan madly whip through the house trailing a cape of towels shouting at the top of his lungs, “Beware my superpowers!”
Marilyn had seen Ryan as a problem from day one, and the headmistress’ comment at school only reinforced this feeling. Here is an example of why self-reflection, empathy, and flexibility are a web and not stand-alone characteristics. If Marilyn had been able to be self-reflective, she would have had more awareness of both her resentment toward Ryan and the shame that she defended against by being angry with him so frequently. This in turn would have made her more likely to feel connected to Ryan and empathize with his view of the school as being rigid, unwelcoming, “not me.” If she could see the school through his eyes, she might decide that flexibility was in order, and while it was a good school for her daughters, perhaps it wasn’t the right school for her son. Instead of seeing this as a deficit in Ryan, she might have felt some pride at his ability to figure out how wrong the school was for him.
Is flexibility something that you can develop? Aren’t some people just rigid in their thinking? Besides, isn’t consistency supposed to be good for children? The answer to all three questions is yes. But flexibility gives us the opportunity to exercise free choice. If you always respond in the same way, you are being driven; you are not driving.
There comes a point in parenting where we must decide whether to maintain the status quo or, armed with new information, choose a different course. There is little question that our children are living in a world that is not simply oblivious to their needs, but is actually damaging them. Given the amount of research documenting how our current narrow version of success is exhausting the resources of a small group of highly academically talented students and diminishing the potential of a far larger group of students, our failure to act, to demand change both from our institutions and from ourselves, is inexcusable.
We are at a tipping point. Either we will continue to show a lack of courage, or we will become proactive and decide that our children deserve a reasonable childhood, schools focused on the joy of learning, empathic parents, and protection from the excesses of a culture defined by materialism. I know that you’re worried about your child. Worried that he or she might get left behind, not have the stuff it takes to compete, lose out on opportunities. But we do not have to choose between our children’s well-being and their success. The very things that promote your child’s well-being and happiness are the same things that will promote his or her success in the world. Enthusiastic kids who feel loved and valued for their particular skills and interests, who are both self-aware and aware of the needs of others, who can work hard, delay gratification when necessary, and reward themselves when appropriate, who find life both fun and meaningful, are kids who are most likely to be both happy and successful. Deeply happy and authentically successful.
I know that it takes courage and discipline to fight an uphill battle, to compete with market forces that have unlimited resources, and to take unpopular stands. But here’s the reality. Every measure of child and adolescent mental health has deteriorated since we’ve decided that children are best served by being relentlessly pushed, overloaded, and tested. Our current version of success is a failure.
Yes, we are all facing an uncertain future—technologies that we can barely imagine and jobs that have not been invented yet. Uncertainty is difficult to tolerate and our anxiety about how well our children will do in this only partially imagined world is understandable. However, the needs of children were, are, and will be irreducible. They need to be unconditionally loved, allowed to have an active and curious childhood, encouraged to challenge themselves, disciplined when necessary, and valued for the unique set of skills, interests, and capacities they bring to this world. If we can return to these essentials of healthy child development, then more than any tutor, prep class, or prestige college can do, we will have prepared our children to lead satisfying, meaningful, and authentically successful lives.