The Parent Compass

In a recent consultation with a student and her mother, I attempted to gather information from the seventeen-year-old young woman sitting in front of me. Nearly ten minutes into the meeting, though, I noted that the student had yet to speak; her eyes were downcast while her mother blathered on, often comparing the student to her older sister. Attempting to loop the young woman into the conversation, I asked her what sorts of things interested her. She stared at me blankly, clearly at a loss for words. Her face scrunched up in pain as she squirmed on the couch, frantically glancing back and forth from me to her mother. Eventually, she turned to her mom in exasperation, pleading only, “Mom!” while she further contorted her face—still unable to answer my question. I was floored.

We’ve all witnessed the out of control parent screeching from the sports sidelines, carelessly embarrassing himself and his horrified child. We’ve all looked on while a parent dismissively answers a question intended for her capable teenage child or takes the helm on a final project so that her child doesn’t perform poorly on it. We’ve all known the parent who wants to make himself heard by teachers and administrators but who somehow can’t recognize when he has simply gone too far. And we’ve all noticed the parent who posts bragging comments on social media detailing her teen’s every accomplishment, whether big or small. And then we’ve all experienced the nuances: the parent who completes her son’s homework assignment over breakfast (but of course her son was “dictating the answers”) and the one who completes some sections on college applications (but of course his daughter was “sitting nearby”). Maybe that parent is actually you. Or maybe you are trying not to be that parent but are nevertheless beginning to feel the strain in your relationship with your child as the pressure of academics builds.

The role of a parent is complicated and tricky. Navigating that role with confidence, trust, and patience is no easy task, and it is full of twists and turns—an intricate parenting maze that fundamentally necessitates constant self-evaluation. But at its very core, following your parent compass demands that you take the time to truly know yourself and your child. The concept of a parent compass was gleaned from years of closely studying parents who fostered their kids’ success, and simultaneously watching from the sidelines those parents who hindered it. The Parent Compass is a collection of stories, suggestions, and ideas that deal with how to behave as a parent in a world full of intense academic and social competition. This book also infuses current research and statistics, news articles, and insight from scores of interviews with experts in the psychology and education fields as well as wisdom gleaned from teachers, headmasters, counselors, and other professionals who work with today’s tweens and teens day in and day out. We discuss appropriate behaviors within the context of your relationship with your growing children—those behaviors that promote a respectful relationship with a well-adjusted, healthy, productive student rather than a strained relationship with an unhappy, insecure, exasperated one. Following your parent compass involves being aware of your child’s behaviors and interactions with other adults, including teachers, coaches, and administrators.

It is hard for parents to practice what they know is right when everyone around them seems to be frantically tutoring, managing, and helicoptering. While well intentioned, many parents don’t know how best to support their children during this sensitive and stressful time. Indeed, it is common for us to encounter overbearing parents who mean well but who ultimately render their kids helpless, unfulfilled, and without a voice—and push their kids away in the process. In his work, author Mike Riera aptly discusses the transition in a parent’s role from manager to colleague and consultant. As students transition from middle to high school, at some point, they “fire” their parents as managers; this is a sign of independence. As painful as this may feel to parents, it is better not to fight back but instead to grieve a little and then hope to be hired back as “consultants.”¹ We agree with this analysis, and most importantly, we think that parents need to remember to be cheerleaders for their kids and to help them find and pursue their interests—both in the classroom and out of it—whatever they may be.

The parent compass is a movement. It is a call to action—to check yourself, to check your fellow parents, to take an honest look at why you behave the way you do when it comes to your child’s academics, and to make changes so that today’s tween and teen generation can learn grit and resilience and can contribute meaningfully in their gifted or even not-so-gifted areas. The goal of checking your compass is to help you modify your behavior and, in turn, your mindset. It is an antidote to over-parenting. It is to help you parent with intention. It is to hold you accountable so that you do not fall prey to parenting peer pressure, college rankings, and media hype about colleges. We believe that kids respond best to parents who inherently trust them—in their day-to-day activities and also in their decision-making skills—and we extend that principle to what feels right for the college process.

One high school headmaster eloquently summarized so much of what The Parent Compass is trying to teach parents.

Families, too, play a role in empowering students. We need you to show your belief in them. It’s tempting in this day and age to step in: to take control when you see your child struggling, to solve the problem for them. But this sends the message, “I don’t believe you can do this. I don’t believe that you’re capable of handling this yourself.” That’s not what you mean, but that’s what a sixteen year old will hear. Here, too, we can take the long view—we want them to learn to advocate for themselves. Your calming influence is what will empower them to get there.²

Parents, as you begin to embrace the intentional parenting strategies suggested in the following pages, also ask yourself, what is the end result that you want with your relationship with your teen? Picture yourself ten, twenty, even thirty years from now. Is what you are doing now paving the way for the relationship you want then?

Hovering, micromanaging, and making a lot of unnecessary noise in your child’s upbringing only adds stress and worry to an already overly busy time. If this describes you, we’re sorry to break the news: you are a helicopter parent. If you are constantly meddling and stepping in to clear the way of every obstacle for your child—to groom the path, so to speak—then, well, we’re sorry to break the news: you are also a snowplow parent. If you are strict, demanding, inflexible, and maybe even militaristic with hard rules for your kids, you are also a tiger parent. And, if you can answer yes to any of the following questions, you are not effectively navigating with the parent compass:

• Do you contact your child’s high school teachers or administrators instead of allowing your child to self-advocate?

• Do you hover over your child when he is doing homework or studying for a test, or do you get overly involved in helping with or overseeing his schoolwork? (Flashback: were you the parent at the playground who habitually hovered over your child to protect him from falling?)

• Have you ever woken up your child during the night to study more? (Yes, we have heard of this shocking parent behavior, too!)

• Do you deliver a book or homework assignment to school every time that your teen forgets hers? Or maybe it’s her lunch, coat, or a forgotten item for her extracurricular activity?

• Do you try to ensure that your child has a certain teacher for his classes or coach for his teams?

• Do you try to pave the way for your child to be academically successful? Or do you intervene so that he has more opportunity in his extracurricular activities?

• Do you make hard, or perhaps extreme, rules such as very early curfews and impossible homework expectations—and unreasonable punishments for not adhering to these rules? Would you describe you or your spouse’s style as military style?

• Do you hire extra tutors in multiple subjects to help your teen with homework?

Unfortunately helicopter, snowplow, and tiger parents do not practice parenting etiquette and are creating a generation known as snow-flakes (or teacups): college students who are fragile because they have no experience with adversity or failure and are ill-equipped to deal with even the most mundane of tasks, like waking themselves up for class or self-advocating with a professor or teaching assistant. But there is hope for even the biggest helicopter parent! We intend to help struggling parents understand more about how their behaviors could be negatively impacting the relationship with their teen and, what’s more, could be rendering their teen helpless and hopeless. And we intend to offer strategies to help fix and improve these relationships.

On the other hand, if you answer yes to these, you are likely following your parent compass:

• Do you urge your teen to seek teachers’ feedback whenever he is struggling with a class or when he doesn’t understand a concept?

• Do you have your teen contribute financially (e.g., pay for her own gas) or do household chores and tasks (e.g., make her bed, set or clear the table, or do dishes)?

• Do you encourage your teen to self-advocate (speak first to a teacher or coach if he has a problem or issue)?

• Do you encourage your child to respectfully speak up when she has an opposing opinion?

While this second list of questions may be hard to discipline yourself to practice, fostering autonomy in your home will afford your teen a large payoff later: he will be better equipped for life outside your home in school, college, and the real world beyond. Taking a long-view approach in parenting—imagining your child as an adult and over a twenty-year timespan—instead of obsessing over every small infraction, decision, or mistake he makes, will yield better long-term results in your child’s social and emotional development. If you invest your time in embracing and practicing parent compass strategies, you will raise a well-adjusted and happy adult. Consider this parent’s summation: “This is a great accountability question for parents. When you find yourself intruding in your teen’s life, ask yourself if helping them the way you feel is most natural is really going to help them down the road? Is helping them actually hurting them? Does your help disable them from learning hard lessons they’ll thank you for later? . . . I often use this phrase: the further out I can see into the future, the better the decision I make today for my child.”³

“Learning to cope with manageable threats (like failing a test or forgetting one’s lines in a play) to our physical and social well-being is critical for the development of resilience.”⁴

Let’s take a minute to look at what your child is experiencing developmentally between the ages of twelve and eighteen and how that impacts your parenting behavior. For those precious six years, she is testing, exploring, trying on, embracing, and rejecting in order to determine what her role in society looks like. Who is she? What career will she pursue? What are her values? These are questions that she is naturally and developmentally asking herself. Furthermore, let’s consider your child’s brain. Scientists tell us that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of twenty-five. Yes, twenty-five! Guess what? Your child will have already graduated from college and entered the workforce at that point. So these critical years are defined by intense self-discovery, making mistakes, and learning from them. At its very core, this stage necessitates trying on individuation from mom and dad.

It follows, then, that an overreaching parent will impair a child’s ability to successfully navigate this crucial developmental stage. Overscheduling, rigidity, speaking for a child, pressure to hold certain opinions, and inflexibility on the part of a parent will impede his ability to authentically explore the world around him. Parents who pigeonhole their child into a certain vision that they have for him, or who don’t allow him the freedom to try things on, are significantly impairing their child’s ability to navigate this stage successfully. And what happens when a child cannot successfully navigate this stage? Well, naturally, he will have no clue how to determine how he fits into the world. (Remember our main character in the opening paragraph?)

How do you know if your teen is actually happy? While this age is often hormonal, volatile, and difficult to decipher, it is also a time of joy and immense growth and exploration. Electronic devices might get in the way of your ability to best evaluate your teen in terms of her happiness quotient, but in general you might find a happy kid to be someone who generally seems to be balancing the rigor of school with the emotions of friendships and romantic relationships, and who seems to be eating well and getting enough sleep. Happy teens have interests or hobbies that they enjoy pursuing. Of course they won’t always have a smile on their faces—which may hint at the thoughts swirling inside, so parents, don’t be afraid to ask them. We offer many questions to get conversations moving later in this chapter.

In a recent Pew Research Survey of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds across the country, 70 percent of those surveyed cited anxiety and depression as a major concern. In fact, that measure placed the highest, above any other concern, including bullying, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy.⁵ You know your child best, and if your instinct tells you that things seem to be off, then listen to it. Common signs to watch for could be a drop in grades, apathy, weight gain or weight loss, a withdrawn nature when they are typically not withdrawn, tearfulness, or severe mood swings, among other behaviors.

Do you sometimes find your teen answering you in one-word answers— “fine,” “good,” “sure,”—or, worse, in grunts, eye rolls, or shoulder shrugs when you ask a question? Are conversations becoming shorter, less enthusiastic, or few and far between? Are there even tears sometimes when you ask non-threatening questions? Asking the right questions elicits productive dialogue and also empowers your high school teen. How many of you ask the question, “How was school today?” or, “How did you do on your test today?” when your child slides into the car or shuffles through the door after school? Why not ask better questions that draw out more meaningful content and require more thoughtful responses?

Here are some questions to ask your kids at the end of the school day that necessitate thoughtful responses:⁶

Additionally, author and “question expert” Warren Berger has written several books on the power and art of asking good questions. Below are a few of his suggested questions to encourage more meaningful conversations with teens. You can try to answer these questions yourself, too, so that you and your teen can share your thoughts with each other:⁷

• What was the most difficult problem you had today? How could you have handled this differently?

• What is your sentence? (Meaning, if you had to summarize your life in one sentence, what would that sentence be?)

• What is your tennis ball? (What is the thing that you chase as intently as a dog chases a tennis ball?)

In Kelly Corrigan’s New York Times–bestselling book Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say, the author explores the statements that we need to share in order to have more meaningful relationships. The most important that she explores for the context of this book is the phrase “Tell me more,” which is simply a head nod and an “uh huh,” encouraging your teen to share more and letting him know that you hear him, you see him, and you are intently listening and want more. (This is not the same “uh huh” you might offer as your eyes are fixated on your phone while you scroll through the day’s text messages. More on that in Chapter 6.)

Finally, the parent compass movement wholly resonates with this quote from Nobel laureate scientist Isidor Isaac “Izzy” Rabi, as he reflects on his mother’s line of questioning when he was a child: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist.”⁸

Hearing is one thing, but listening is quite another. Hearing allows words and sounds to be perceived by one’s ears; it’s a passive action. But listening—listening requires work, practice, and concentration, which require active participation in an exchange. Practice presence. Be present. Focus on your child. Hear every. single. word. Look her in the eye and absorb what she is saying. It may help to picture it this way: if you have a career outside of the home, you are familiar with those situations when you attend a board meeting or sit down with a boss, colleague, or superior. You must be on your best behavior and offer all of your attention. Parents, extend the same courtesy to your own kid. There are hundreds of articles written on the topic of listening, and a simple Internet search will yield them. We encourage you to read a few. Whether you have an open, communicative teen or a reserved, less conversant teen, when your teen does open up to you, be prepared for floodgates to open. Often, you are the safest audience for your teen to vent to, unload on, and share private stories and situations. Understand that these confessions are not necessarily for you to solve or fix; mostly your child needs someone to listen and receive this information that may have been bottled up for a day, a week, or even a month (more on refraining from fixing in Chapter 3).

When Sarah’s daughter, Beth, started attending boarding school across the country, Sarah received a weekly phone call from her daughter. These calls were often full of dramatic and heavy news, whether social, academic, or athletic. Because of this, they were difficult for Sarah to receive, as she was not geographically nearby to offer a hug or direct eye contact or observe her daughter’s body language. After sometimes thirty minutes of unloading, Beth hung up the phone and Sarah (and often her husband) was left with the fallout of this conversation—and they panicked. Should they get on a plane and fly there to help? Should they alert Beth’s dorm advisor or a teacher to check on Beth’s mental state? Sarah and her husband lost nights of sleep, tossing and turning as they considered how to intervene. When they did choose to call an adult who could have eyes on their daughter, they were usually told, “I just saw her at lunch today laughing and smiling with her friends. I will keep an eye out, but everything here looks normal.”So, what were Sarah and her husband to do? Accept that they were the receptacle of a flurry of stress their daughter had been holding onto as she waited for someone she trusted to tell? But as Sarah and her husband settled into their new role, they realized that they were her people; now that Beth was away, she needed them to be her safety valve. Sometimes just listening and not acting or trying to solve all problems is enough. (This story applies to college-age teens as well. A similar pattern often occurs when kids are living on their own for the first time. Approach it the same way.)

• Stop what you are doing and offer eye contact—even touch your teen’s arm or hand while she speaks to you.

• Practice good posture, leaning in while spoken to. Don’t cross your arms, check your phone, or be distracted by the eighteen things on your to-do list—they are patiently awaiting your attention.

• Use confirmation expressions, like “Mmm hmmm,” while nodding your head in agreement to demonstrate that you are connecting. “Tell me more,” a phrase recently re-coined by author Kelly Corrigan, can be used to encourage your teen to keep his words flowing and your ears listening.

• Parrot back or paraphrase some of the things she is telling you. This will help your teen feel authentically heard.

• Silence is okay. Sometimes a pause allows your teen to better formulate his thoughts and words. Don’t feel the urge to finish his sentences or choose his words for him.

• Resist the urge to fix and problem-solve. Sometimes all your teen needs is the space to talk to someone she trusts and de-escalate the situation. Often just speaking the words to someone with whom she feels safe is enough to diffuse and lighten her load. Just listen.

• Pick a good time and location. Don’t be afraid to have chats while lying on your teen’s bed, enjoying a snack or meal with him in the kitchen, or hanging out on the family couch. Sometimes a casual, comfortable setting yields the best exchanges. Both of our families have puzzle tables where in-progress puzzles are always on display. Those locations can facilitate some great conversations between you and your teen.

There exists mounting evidence that our children suffer when we do not follow the parent compass. In The Price of Privilege, psychologist Madeline Levine warns of a new at-risk group of young people: “Researchers . . . have found that America has a new group of ‘at-risk’ kids,” she writes, “or, more accurately, a previously unrecognized and unstudied group of at-risk kids. They defy the stereotypes commonly associated with the term ‘at-risk.’ They are not inner-city kids growing up in harsh and unforgiving circumstances. They do not have empty refrigerators in their kitchens, roaches in their homes, metal detectors in their schools, or killings in their neighborhoods. America’s newly identified at-risk group is preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families.”⁹

At best, your child might look like the child we met at the beginning of this chapter: unable to carry on a conversation with other adults, unable to identify her own likes and dislikes, unable to articulate who she is. And we’d ask you, where is the spice of life in that? But at worst, your child could develop some serious symptoms and diagnoses, most notably severe anxiety and depression, and your relationship with her could greatly suffer. Says Kirk Carapezza, for WGBH News, “The early intensity in upscale suburban families about their children’s future achievement is said to be one factor behind the mental health crisis that colleges are facing. Over the past ten years, the rate of anxiety and depression among college-age students has doubled, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. Psychologists say the pressures driving these problems start long before kids set foot on campus.”¹⁰

Parents, we implore you to take seriously what you are reading. Try the tips we offer in the ensuing pages. Some will work for you, and some will not. Perfect parents don’t exist and neither do perfect teens. Spoiler alert: you will fail. And then you’ll try again until you get it right—just as you’re teaching your kids to do. And then you may even fail again. And again. And then get it right again. After all, the simple fact that you are reading this book demonstrates that you want to do better. And what is wrong with attempting self-improvement? Nothing.

• Do expose, identify, facilitate, and fuel your kids’ passions (and be supportive and enthusiastic if they are different from your own!).

• Do avoid advice from other parents who make you feel guilt and peer pressured in comparison to what their kids are doing.

• Do be flexible to new ideas in education, alternative routes students can take after high school, rule bending, and reinterpreting what you can do as a parent today.

• Don’t compare your kids to other people’s or friends’ kids. Your kids may share classes, teams, or interests, but no two kids are the same. Allow each teen to be an individual.

• Don’t be a helicopter parent who hinders your kids’ expressions of their natural talents. The majority of kids do not know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, and the thought of determining it at the developmentally inappropriate age of fourteen can be paralyzing to them.

• Don’t push to have it all figured out for your kids. Let them learn things in their own time and try on many passions; some preferred ones will eventually emerge.

• Don’t blame yourself if your budget cannot afford extra summer programs or fancy camps or if you don’t have personal connections for your teen to obtain coveted internships. Most of those supplemental activities and connections can be found for a fraction of the cost through local recreation centers, church or religious groups, community college, or college campuses.

• Don’t compare your own kids to one another. Birth order, gender, your parenting experience, and plain old DNA make no two kids alike.