Uncommon Sense: Parenting Pointers from Thirty Years Teaching: Part 1

How do we become good parents? Is it enough to just imitate our own parents? If we had perfect parents and our partner had perfect parents, won’t we be perfect parents, too? Parenting is difficult. No one parents in the same world as their parents. How do we help each other to grow as parents?

Think of the other important roles in your life. As a professional, I have colleagues and coaches and plenty of opportunities for development and learning. In my non-professional activities, I take lessons, go to events, and read to improve my skills.

But parenting is supposed to be somehow automatic. Don’t tell me how to parent because I have always known how. In fact, I was a fantastic parent before I even had kids!

I vividly remember a visit to my Aunt Paula’s house when my daughter was around eighteen months old. She watched me interact with my child and pulled me aside and suggested another way to handle the situation. She gently taught me, in the moment, how to improve my parenting.

We must be as aware of our parenting as we are of our other roles. We must work to be reflective and sensitively help our partners and friends. This doesn’t make us parent critics or shamers. This means that we must be conscious parents who are self-critical and recognize that we will make mistakes that need to be addressed. We understand that we have a web of support that includes our partners, parents, friends and even our own children.

It also means that we must have the humility to admit that we don’t know it all, we will make mistakes, and we are never done developing.

With that in mind, here are a few of the lessons I have been taught as a parent and teacher over the past thirty-some years working in the classroom. I brainstormed some of these with my wife, family, and friends. I asked the question: what are some of the most important things you wish the families with whom you worked knew? This is the beginning of this list:

Don’t prevent consequences – even for mistakes. If your child forgets an assignment, they must deal with that. If the lunch didn’t make it to school, let them problem solve. If they got a bad score on a test, coach but don’t direct them to assistance. When the stakes are higher (and the consequences more severe), think long and hard before stepping between your children and the effect of their actions. These tougher moments may be the most important to allow kids to feel the impact of their power.

This leads us directly to the idea that your children must be the primary actors in their own plays. Don’t write the script for them. Don’t call the teacher; instead coach your child to talk to the teacher. Don’t jump in; help your child to learn the skills to be their own advocate!

Don’t make excuses: But he has baseball, she is so busy, this is not something they do well, the teacher is scary, the coach will retaliate, that boy is just difficult, and on and on and on. There are a ton of rationalizations why our children shouldn’t be problem solvers. And while there are exceptions to most rules, be honest about when you are making an exception and when it is easier or more in our interest to take action rather than let the child do the job.

Be honest with yourself: is this for you or is this for the child. It is almost always easier to do something ourselves. It is almost always more effective to play talent agent, stage parent, or social director. We are more skilled than our children and will probably do better taking care of their needs. However, they must learn how to do what we do. Coach them, yes – do it for them, no! Knowing the difference is not difficult, but being honest about it can be.

It is okay to struggle. It is okay to be frustrated. Dealing with obstacles, difficult people, and challenging problems makes us more capable people. From competence comes confidence. Rob the child of the problem-solving pain and you handicap their true adult capability.

“We” are not filling out college applications. “We” don’t have a test tomorrow. “We” are not moving into the dorm. Our language reveals us. When I hear a parent use a collective that should be reserved for royalty (We are not amused), wait staff (What are we having?) or doctors (how do we feel?), it means only one thing: a child’s boundaries are being crossed and then, truly, we have a problem.

Model the behavior you want them to learn. Be on time. Use organizational strategies. Make them an audience to your mature problem solving behavior and show them how adults function. And let them see how your process when you struggle and how you seek help when you need it.

Help your children to see that planning matters. Children live in the here and now (even when they are on their devices) and have trouble understanding how what they do today affects tomorrow. Teach them to think ahead and plan for tomorrow. Show them how what we do now can open or close doors later on.

As parents, we need to coach each other. It is extremely difficult to take feedback on one’s parenting. We don’t have benchmarks or classes or objective ways to measure our effectiveness. This makes it all the more important that we cultivate reflectiveness, work collaboratively with our partners and the important people in our children’s lives (like their teachers), and actively work on improving our prowess as parents.

Reading for Treasure: October

Reading for Treasure is my list of articles that are worth your attention. Click here for an introduction!

Here are a few more articles that are worth your attention. This group of articles has no theme other than I think you might benefit from and enjoy reading them! Read on!

If you haven’t had a flu shot yet, now is the time. And getting a flu shot is as important for others as it is for you: “Hey, Asshole, the Flu Shot Isn’t About You!”

Can you tell a fake news story from a real one? This study suggests that the older you are, the less you are able to distinguish fact from opinion. Of course, this is critically important as we make big decisions like for whom to vote: “Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact From Opinion.”

As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, Mr. Rogers is one of my heroes. While we have heard a great deal about him thanks to recent movies and documentaries, this article goes beyond “look for the helpers,” washing feet, or any of the other frequently shared Mr. Rogers clips: “What Mr. Rogers Taught Us About Story Telling.”

Finally, here is a list of practical strategies to preserve the health of your cell phone battery: “How to Get the Most Out of Your Smartphone Battery.”  

I am currently reading Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman.

Admissions of Grandeur

What does it mean to “cheat?” What does it mean to “have an unfair advantage?”

Wealthy people cheat to get their children into prestigious colleges? They manipulate the law so their children can receive financial assistance designed for people with far greater needs? Really? They do? How unfair! How immoral! How shocking!

Not really. The recent college admissions scandal shouldn’t surprise anyone. Affluent people, especially affluent White people have been gaming this system since the beginning. The even more recent scheme where parents changed their children’s guardianship in order to secure them financial aid is a variation on the same theme.

There are many issues here: affluent (and other) parents’ desire to place their children at prestigious universities, their ruthless and selfish disregard for laws, ethics, and other people, the role of private consultants, private and public schools, and others who facilitate these machinations, and the effects that such efforts have on all students and the institutions they attend. There are other issues, but let’s start there.

Parents with resources have been gaming the college admissions process forever. If you believe that competitive universities select their students based on an honest and forthright evaluation of the candidate’s qualifications, then I would like to charge you several thousand dollars to increase your child’s chances of getting into one.

This is not to say that Snidely Whiplash or Boris and Natasha Badenoff are running college admissions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. I am sure admissions counselors are trying to be fair and evenhanded. However, they must know that is impossible.

The idea is that students who are most able and worthy of admission to the most elite institutions are the ones that are chosen is as much a fantasy as the idea that anyone can be president. There is no meritocracy. There is no “standardized” anything. A “holistic” evaluation of a student’s application to college is a euphemism for a subjective judgment based on factors that often have nothing to do with academic credentials.

In his book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, Frank Bruni, writer for the New York Times, discusses the issues of college admittance into highly selective institutions. He notes that children of alumni or celebrities, big donors, students from select private high schools, and elite athletes have an instant advantage. The Operation Varsity Blues scandal certainly focused on how athletics could be manipulated to alter admissions results.

Bruni also discusses a question that should be on the mind of anyone working with students preparing to go to college: why choose one school over another? There is no doubt that putting an Ivy League sticker on your car or sweatshirt on your chest is a status symbol. There is also no denying that a degree from a prestigious university does open doors and create connections that are different than those from the other 90% of post-secondary institutions.

But does every student from Notre Dame, Dartmouth, or Duke become a super-star? Do all of them reap all of those benefits? Obviously not.

Certainly, for some very wealthy families, these universities are nothing more than finishing school. Children from these families have their roads laid out before them by their parent’s power and wealth. They will succeed regardless (or sometimes in spite) of their upper-class status. Bonus points if you can think of any examples of these people.

Do the parents in the tiers below the Bushes, Waltons, Kochs, Rockefellers, and others believe that getting their child into these schools will elevate them into the elites? Perhaps. Do they have admissions of grandeur? Of course! Will going to one of these universities transform junior into a tycoon? Not likely. 

If your children’s worth is built on achievement of almost impossible goals, if you have been stitching together resumes for your children since before they could walk, and if success is dependent on a hair-thin chance of getting into the “right” school, wouldn’t every parent cheat or at least help increase the odds? This is your darling child we are talking about right?

Most parents would not cheat to get our children into college. Most of us know right from wrong. Most of us wouldn’t have the desire or resources. And most of us would have the common sense to know that, to paraphrase the title of Mr. Brunni’s book, that our children will not become the universities they attend.

Yet, there are parents for whom such a nearly impossible target is the goal. Mr. Barnum knew about them. He said one of them was born every minute. Thus an industry has sprung up to cater to their obsession. They promise to take their progeny and make them better than they are, better, stronger, faster, and smarter – and they will charge six million dollars.

How sad to be one of those children. How horrible to have your worth measured by such impossible, impersonal, and shallow goals? How dreadful to not be good enough unless properly labeled. But no price is too high to reach these heights.

The admission mania of parents faking their children’s test scores and financial background, photo-shopping kids into fake sports stars, and paying fortunes to those who stoke their obsessions is an extension of a society of privilege and selfishness. The parents benefit. The colleges benefit. The consultants benefit.

What about the students? What about the applicants they displace or who don’t get financial aid because it was given to more affluent fakers?

Ask that White field hockey player from the suburbs, or better yet, ask her parents.