CHAPTER 2:

TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

We feel it only appropriate to offer a fair warning at the very outset of this chapter: it’s about to get real. And we mean real in the sense that we are going to ask you to do some real, honest reflection. We’re going to challenge you to consider your biases, push you to think about the life experiences that influence your parenting behaviors, and nudge you toward initiating meaningful conversations with your kids. We’re going to ask you about your past, help you to reflect on your present, and implore you to consider what your future will look like. In short, we are going to encourage you to be brave; to have the courage necessary to take a cold, hard look at who you are and how you behave; and to reconcile all of this before you try to lead your child through the daunting teenage years. (And if you happen to be reading this book deeper into your high school child-rearing years, that is okay, too. Parent compass concepts can be implemented at any point in your tween and teen parenting journey to guide you in new directions and teach you new tools.)

In fleshing out what we believed the parent compass to be, we had many conversations about what we felt it meant to be a kid. Naturally, we reminisced about our own experiences. We conjured up memories of riding bikes after school and gliding to the park on roller skates. We remembered parents picking up the (landline) phone receivers to implore us to “hang up and get to bed.” Cell phones had yet to make an appearance, and personal computers were a whole lot clunkier and slower than they are today. Both of us relished in the memories of selecting fresh new school supplies every September (the education field clearly had a calling for us), and we agreed that while homework existed and was sometimes “hard and boring,” it didn’t take so long that we couldn’t have family dinner and participate in after-school sports teams or dance class. There were big projects that required time immersed in library books, digging through old-fashioned card catalogs and the Dewey decimal system. One of us recalled posting “lost dog” signs on telephone poles when a friend’s pet went missing. One remembered having time to be in the school musical and do a sport—many sports actually and not just one throughout the year—and making posters with glitter and glue for student elections. We both remembered fun summer jobs, and both of us had memories like taking trips to the local pool where there was a climb-up water slide (that was more like a ladder with a ramp attached). Weekends were, for the most part, set aside for maybe one sports game, a sleepover with a friend, and enough downtime to be ready for the week ahead. Life seemed simpler then.

Know Yourself First

Parents, the first step in navigating forward with your parent compass is, in fact, to look backward. What contributed to who you are today? To begin, take some time to think back to your own middle and high school experience. Chances are, attending school and spending free time was different for you then. You’ll probably admit that you were much less programmed with sports, extracurricular activities, and long late nights of homework than your kids are, and that you spontaneously participated in more fun after-school activities: riding bikes, reading a book for pleasure, enjoying a Slurpee, or ambling around the mall.

Consider where you attended middle and high school. Was it your neighborhood public school? Maybe a private school, parochial school, or boarding school? How were academics treated in your household when you were growing up? Did your parents push you to achieve? Maybe they were busy working and didn’t ask you much about your classes, or perhaps school wasn’t a priority in your home? Then factor in what you can recall of the kind of student you were in middle and high school. Did school come easy to you? Maybe it didn’t. Did you walk, bike, or drive to school once you were of age? What activities did you do? What classes came easier to you and harder to you? Were you the oldest or the family leader of your siblings, or were you more dependent on older siblings? Were you coddled, or were you independent? Then consider your college application process (if you went to college): there were a couple of essays that you wrote by hand or, if you were lucky, on a typewriter; you applied to only a few schools; and thick or thin college decision envelopes arrived in the mailbox to deliver the news. Many, if not all, of us agree that if we were to apply to those same colleges today, we would not have a remote chance of getting in. That is quite a sad commentary on the higher stakes now in the college admission process and how laborious and stressful it has become.

We encourage you to take some time to list your reflections. Dust off the cobwebs and take a good look at who you were back then. Peruse old yearbooks or reminisce with friends. Assess yourself—consider your background, your biases, your unique experiences, your baggage. Now think about your personality and your values. Maybe you grew up in a home in which it was difficult to garner your dad’s attention, and he only gave it to you when you achieved or won something. Naturally, you might have sought achievement after achievement just to get him to look your way, and so this impacts your approach as a parent. Maybe, if you really face it, you can best be described as a type A personality, someone with a need for order and control—sometimes at all costs (both of us are surely guilty of this).

Here is where you might want to bring in your partner (if you have one). Challenge one another to consider your competing or different parenting styles and to be honest in describing one another’s defining characteristics. Ask yourself, are you a good cop or a bad cop? Maybe you’re the patient parent—or maybe you’ve got the short fuse. Recently, my husband and I sat down to have an honest conversation about specific behaviors that we felt might negatively impact our kids, now or in the future. We each identified one behavior that we proactively wanted to work on. While it was slightly uncomfortable to admit our shortcomings as parents, it also gave each of us renewed motivation to be our best selves for our kids’ well-being—and the opportunity to hold one another accountable. (Hint: one of us is currently working on not being so much of a neat freak.)

Maybe you are the one yelling at the opposing coach (or worse yet, your kid’s own coach) from the sidelines at sports games, or maybe you are the one who can’t stand the thought of someone disapproving of you. We challenge you to take a deep dive into who you are—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If you’re a single parent, most of the time the sole responsibility falls on you to address all child-rearing issues. If you can, find a trusted aunt, uncle, grandparent, teacher, or friend who may also assist you in the stickier, more gender-nuanced issues that arise in raising your child or in areas that are outside of your scope of talents or skills. Talk about behaviors to work on with them.

So why are we asking you to partake in this extensive self-reflection exercise at the very start of this book? After all, this is a book about parenting teenagers through a competitive and uncertain academic landscape. Why is deeply knowing yourself the first crucial step to practicing good parenting? We believe that the answer lies in the ancient proverb: “Physician heal thyself.” Before you can effectively do any job that helps or influences others, you must first fix yourself. To throw in another idiom, don’t be the pot calling the kettle black. In order to correct someone else, in this case your deeply beloved child, you had better be sure that you’re also not exhibiting the same behaviors. You can parent with expertise and confidence if you and your partner (if applicable) are not only on the same page philosophically, but also if you both have participated in some deep, serious self-examination. In frank terms, you cannot heal a sickness or take good care of others without first being healed, in a healthy and clear headspace. Psychologist Madeline Levine cautions, “There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of over-parenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.”¹ Parents, fix yourselves first.

At the end of this chapter you will find a helpful questionnaire for you to complete, preferably at the start of your teen’s freshman year of high school (or, of course, whenever you get your hands on this book.) If you have a partner, we encourage you to separately answer the questions and discuss your results.

Then Know Your Child

Once you’ve considered who you are as a parent, it’s time to examine each of your tween or teen children: temperament, gender, birth order, personality, gifts, skills that don’t come naturally, and formative experiences. From the moment he or she was born, your son or daughter was a unique individual, bearing his or her own identity and genetic makeup. Some babies are quiet and wide eyed, eagerly taking in their surroundings as observers. Others are loud and verbal, making themselves known quite fiercely. And every combination of personality type exists in between. What’s more, how a child begins behaving isn’t always how he ends up, but sometimes we see some clues as to who he will become. As we all know, children are constantly changing, evolving, growing, challenging, and learning.

While most parents are not trained child psychologists, all parents can agree that each child comes out differently and with some qualities from her father and some from her mother. This, we know, is “nature.” And “nurture” accounts for everything else we put into our children. How much attention we give them from a young age and how as parents we mellow or modify our styles based on our own life experiences and personal stages, all affect how they turn out. With the influences of nature and nurture, alongside birth order or gender of child and parent, no wonder each individual is just that: a distinct individual. And no wonder parenting is a hard, exhausting, evolving, ever-changing, and growing job. But we believe that like most things in life, the more that you put in, the more you get out of it.

Here’s an author confession. I (Cynthia) have four children. The way my spouse and I parented our two younger children is different—not just based on birth order, but also based on parenting wisdom that we gained through experience, our changing energy levels, and our shifting values. My parent compass for my two younger teens is much less intense, less rigid, and frankly without sounding jaded, I care less about how things evolve because I know that at the back end of this journey everything—albeit hitting some walls of this parenting maze and redirecting along the way —will all work out. I am taking the long view. And also, I (like most of us I assume!) don’t want my kids to be overly stressed out, or worse, suicidal, since I am now more keenly aware that they enjoy the journey more, live in the moment, and just do life as it unfolds. I think parents of multiple children can universally agree that over time our standards and priorities shift, and we place less emphasis on certain things that may have seemed really important with our first children and become much less so as we move through our parenting journey. I know that I am not alone in feeling more relaxed in my parenting as time marches on and that experience and wisdom gained replaces fear.

Make no mistake: encouraging you to embrace your parent compass must not be confused with adopting a laissez-faire attitude. Rather, we are advocating that you challenge your teen to be the very best he can be—but that you do it the right way, embracing fully who he uniquely is.

Appreciating Your Child Academically

Being realistic about where your teen fits academically within his school context is central to following a parent compass. Yes, we generally describe most of our kids as kind, bright, and hard working. But the reality is that some kids are naturally more academically inclined, push themselves (note that we said themselves, not you) to be the more accelerated honors and AP students, and rise to the top of their classes. While this race to the top has been coined a “Race to Nowhere”—an unhealthy ideal that’s caused a mental health and suicide crisis—by the eponymous documentary, the reality remains that some students are just wired to enjoy school. But not all of them. In fact, most teens are just trying to stay afloat in a variety of high school-level courses, paired with all of the other academic and time pressures kids have lopped onto their over-scheduled afternoons and weekends. Following your parent compass asks you to recognize, appreciate, and mentally and verbally support your children—no matter where they most naturally fall in the academic hierarchy of their schools. Meet them at their place.

Do you feel your child could do better than where she naturally falls or has landed in her academic journey? Possibly. Maybe likely. We all want our kids to be the best version of themselves and the most academically “successful” that they are capable of being in order to meet their personal maximum potential. But we’d first implore you to examine what’s at the root of pushing them, perhaps past what they can realistically handle. Do you fear judgment and rejection in your own journey? Could you be, perhaps, more concerned with how you appear to others as a parent than genuinely concerned about your teen’s level of achievement? One head of school at a competitive college-prep high school (who wishes to remain anonymous) put it well when she reflected on her observations of today’s parents: “The college process has become a competitive sport for parents and in their minds, is reflective of their own success as parents. If your child gets into a very competitive college or university, somehow you’ve raised [him or her] better than the other parents in your community.”²

Somewhere in this complicated and competitive academic landscape, we as parents need to have the resolve to break the cycle of pushing our teens past their limit. This pushing comes at a very high cost, and no family wants their teen to be the next statistic. So, parents, check yourselves. Restrain yourselves. You had your chance to be a student; now it is theirs, for better or for worse. Rather than nagging your teen, instead spend time with him on other activities such as reading together for pleasure in the same room, going on a walk, playing a game, or having a conversation about a topic that interests him. One of my student’s intrigue of the stock market was an interest that his mother also shared. Every morning over breakfast, they watched on television as the market opened and took in the news together. They didn’t have to talk much; the shared experience was enough. Another student shared a deep enthusiasm for the same local professional sports team as his parent, making for a constant conversation topic whenever the team was in (or even off) season. Alongside eggs and toast, morning breakfasts consisted of reviewing scores and injured players and making predictions for the next games. Much more important for teens’ mental health than pushing them is “[t]he quality of [the] relationship with their parents, [which] plays a critical role in the development of internalizing (stress, depression, etc.) and externalizing (alcohol, drug use, etc.) symptoms.”³ In addition, according to a recent study by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, you as a parent can directly impact your teen’s academic experience by enriching her resilience. “Resilience results from a dynamic interaction between . . . an intrinsic resistance to adversity and strong relationships with important adults in [a teen’s] family and community. Indeed, it is the interaction between biology and environment that builds the capacities to cope with adversity.”⁴ (We have more to say on resilience in Chapter 3.) Now isn’t that the type of positive influence you’d rather practice, elevating your teen instead of adding to his already stressed-out existence?

Now Reconcile the Differences

It’s once again time to reflect back on that composite of what your life was like when you were younger. Take some time now to thoughtfully and honestly compare that to what it would be like today. What is different about your teen’s experience? Compare and contrast your experience with your impression of your teen’s.

Here’s the part where we’re going to ask you to be brave. Have your child fill out the teen questionnaire that appears at the end of this chapter. Encourage him or her to be honest. And if she says, “I don’t have time,” or, “This is weird, Mom”? Tell her you want her to do this as a favor to you so that the two of you can get along better—that it is really important to you since you are trying to be a better parent. (Who can deny you that?) When she is done, share your questionnaires with one another, discussing the differences between your upbringing and hers. Talk about your strengths and your weaknesses, and allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to share some personal anecdotes so that you appear human and fallible, rather than the all-knowing, rule-enforcing parent. Then discuss your teen’s strengths and weaknesses, your views on academics, and hers. Assure her that you will listen—just listen— while she reads her answers (and follow through with your promise, please). Parents, be courageous. Do not get defensive. (It will be a natural inclination, trust us.)

Our hope is that this exercise will not only open up lines of communication between you and your child, but also that it will give you some compassion for your teen’s experience within the current competitive and uncertain academic landscape—one that might be very different from your own experience. As you work through the rest of the book, we encourage you to recall frequently the “physician heal thyself” concept. As you work toward reconciling the way you parent with the healthy habits of the parent compass, as you continue to refine your approach and understanding of your child’s well-being, remember who you are and what got you here and contemplate how you are going to let that impact your future parenting.

During the course of the ensuing journey, you will likely have to sacrifice or put aside parental dreams in place of understanding your child as an individual in his or her journey. It’s going to be hard. In today’s future-thinking landscape, with many parents exhibiting early anxiety and forcibly paving the way for their kids’ college careers, we have lost sight of the journey and instead focused too much on the destination. We implore you, fellow parents, to tweak your thinking in this way: rather than worrying about what your teen is not, instead celebrate the student that he is and accept that he will end up on a path that suits who he uniquely is.

Knowing Yourself Parent Questionnaire

Answer each question on your own, and ask your spouse or partner or other adult influencer in your child’s life to reply to these, too. Share your replies and use them as discussion points before parenting your teen in high school academic and socioemotional-related issues. Your replies will serve as great conversation starters and will help you formulate a plan to practice better parenting behaviors.

1. What is your personal birth order? First, middle, last, or only child?

2. How were academics treated in your home when you were growing up? How is that different or similar to the way that academics are treated in your home now?

3. Reflect on your own relationship with your parents. How would you characterize it, and what are you doing to imitate (or distance yourself from) that parenting style?

4. Did you feel stereotyped or labeled by your parents (and possibly in comparison to your siblings)? How did that affect you? Was it helpful? Harmful? Something you were proud of or tried to conceal?

5. What is your personal high school and college educational background? Private versus public high school? If you went to college, what kind of college? Private? Public? Community? Close to home? Far away? Transferred schools? Trade school? Did you join the military?

6. In a few sentences or words, describe your personality in high school (i.e., socially connected or anti-social, nerdy or cool/popular, leader or follower) and your personality now.

7. In a sentence or two, describe the kind of academic student you were in high school (i.e., independent learner; highly self-motivated; on the lazier side; confident in some but not all classes; honors/AP student or regular-track student; great, average, or poor test taker; shy or a self-advocate with teachers; didn’t like, liked, or loved school; math/science or humanities/ language arts preference; well-rounded or pointy).

8. What did you think you wanted to study when you started college versus what your final major(s) was/were?

9. Was your college experience what you expected (e.g., socially, academically)? Were you satisfied with it? Were you well prepared socially and academically? Did you have any regrets?

10. Did your parents pay for college? Did you take out loans or participate in work study? Did you have financial aid? How and when were you or your family able to pay off college, if necessary?

11. What is one thing you can do better or change in order to best support your child?

12. What is one thing your spouse (if applicable) can do better or change in order to best support your child?

Knowing Yourself Teen Questionnaire

1. What are generally your favorite subjects and who are your favorite teachers? (This may change from year to year, so record your current favorites.) Have any subjects that you used to like become “ruined” by teachers you don’t connect with? Or do you have new subjects that you like due to an amazing and inspiring teacher?

2. What activities do you enjoy doing after school and on weekends? (These can be anything from academic to purely recreational.) Do you do any of these to please your parent(s), or are they self-selected?

3. What do you wish your parents knew about you and school?

4. What do you wish your parents would stop doing in relation to you or your school and/or activities?

5. Do you have any tutors? Does it feel like too much? Too little? Necessary? A waste of time? Can you wean off of tutors in any classes?

6. What is one thing your parent(s) can do to help make your homework or school experience more productive?

7. When do you have time to have chats or weekly calendar/life/ update conversations with your parents (e.g., during snack/ meals or before bed)?

8. Do you feel stressed or anxious? If so, please describe your feelings and how you have dealt with them to your parents.

9. What have you found is effective in helping to cope with or relieve your stress? Is there anything you want your parents to understand about how you cope with stress?

10. What do you like to do to decompress and relax?

11. Would you describe yourself as a generally happy person? Stressed? Outgoing? A leader, follower, or joiner? Other adjectives?

Following your parent compass is a practice and discipline that requires checking yourself often, pivoting when necessary, and improvising along the way, all backed by tools and strategies that will help your teen stay happy and healthy while you consult and cheerlead on the sidelines. The grueling work of self-examination coupled with applying and personalizing your parenting style with each of your individual children will contribute to your children feeling understood. When you are able to model to your kids humility and honesty about who you are and what makes you parent the way that you do, chances are they will start to open up to you, too—and therein lies the first step toward a more harmonious and happier relationship.