It may take a village to raise a child but heaven help the villager who tries to give parenting advice.
I learned this lesson the hard way, before I even had kids, when I innocently responded to a friend’s complaints about having a back seat full of cracker crumbs left by her toddler by asking “why don’t you just feed her before you get in the car?”
Once the laughing had died down (it took a while) my generous friend simply responded, “Well, just wait and see what you decide.” And, she was right. Parenting is not a spectator sport. Once I was in the thick of it, my back seat was a disgrace of cracker crumbs and hoagie wrappers.
Parenting is a tricky business. On one side of the balancing act is the long term goal of raising a happy, educated, well adjusted person who is prepared to go boldly into the world. On the other side are hundreds, even thousands of daily decisions about where to push, where to ease up and where the line is between letting a kid be a kid and abdicating your responsibility as a parent all together. It isn’t easy.
Here in Singapore, parenting has been front page news with the recent release of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and it’s description of her “Chinese” style of parenting. Keep in mind, this is the land of “Singapore Math,” a country where the top students get their names and test scores published in the newspaper. Singapore parents are not pushovers, and even these parents thought the Tiger Mom was a little harsh.
At the same time that I was reading the book, I had the opportunity to see a compelling documentary called “The Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture,” which challenges the way children are educated in the United States, especially the focus on test scores and crippling amounts of homework. This film showed kids who were exhausted, frustrated, miserable, and had no idea why they should even get out of bed in the morning.
It is here that I have to give grudging respect to Amy Chua. While many of her methods were by my measure extreme (and by her own admission, not wholly successful) her daughters are smart, talented, accomplished young women. They know how to work hard and achieve their goals, especially the goals they ultimately set for themselves. Whether I agree with her methods or not, her daughters have learned the important lesson that they can do hard things and that success often means trying again, and again, and again.
What seemed to be lacking in many of the kids interviewed in “The Race to Nowhere” is what I think of as resiliency, the ability to bounce back and re-group. These are also smart, talented kids, but many of them seemed wrung out and emotionally fragile.
Too little sleep (this is a huge problem), too much pressure, and a system that is skewed toward “posting good numbers” left some of these poor kids completely adrift when they reached a point when the numbers weren’t there. I was shocked at the statistic given in the movie that the University of California system, which enrolls students with an average weighted GPA of more than 4.0, has to provide remedial math and English courses to nearly half of the freshman class. Ok, so these kids had the grades, but should they really feel good about it?
Trying hard things, failing at first, and eventually being successful; I believe that is what makes a person feel strong, competent and brave enough to reach for goals that are way beyond their grasp. I would even argue that protecting children from failure does them more harm than letting them fall and teaching them how to get back up. How do we teach our kids that “failing” at something extraordinary can be judged more of a success in life than playing it safe?
I don’t know the answer. I do believe it is our job as parents to give our kids the tools that they need to be successful and happy adults, including discipline, empathy, resilience, self confidence, and a curious mind. How we decide to go about it is up for debate, but I am not going to criticize the Amy Chuas of the world for trying what worked for her. And I hope she won’t judge me for telling my son that if he wants to take on the challenge of the more advanced Chinese class, I will be thrilled with “Bs.”
It seems to me that the best we can do is try to understand what motivates our kids, push them when they need to get out of their comfort zone, cut them some slack when they are up against it, hug them a lot and, in good faith, make the tough parenting choices. With any luck, our wonderful and resilient children will forgive us for our inevitable and all to human lapses in judgment.
