“Are we attempting to prepare the road ahead for our children or our children for the road?” This is one of the many provocative gems I picked up last week at my annual meeting of heads from similar sized PreK-8 independent schools around the country. There are 25 of us from coast to coast who founded a research collaborative about 5 years ago based in a belief that our particular kind of schools has both unique needs and unique opportunities that could be more fully realized if we worked together as a group.
For example, our collaboration has led us to a groundbreaking project with Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization (http://www.ets.org/about/who/). ETS developed and administered many well known national and international standardized tests such as the GRE, the AP program, and NAEP. They are excited to be working with us on a first-of-its-kind standardized assessment for middle school aged children in critically important areas not traditionally assessed by schools, such as time management, resilience, creative problem solving, teamwork, ethics and intrinsic motivation.
As the project develops you will hear more from me about it, but for now I want to focus on this idea of resilience. We had a rich and long discussion about the growing importance of this characteristic in an ever changing, ever more conflict ridden world. The irony noted by many of my colleagues is that while resilience seems to be growing in importance, our culture seems to be doing more and more to rob our children of opportunities to develop resilience and self-reliance. Much has been written recently about the new parent culture, using terms such as “helicopter parents” and “bubble wrap parents” to describe the phenomenon of increasingly involved and protective parents. Headmasters from every region note that parents more frequently challenge school discipline decisions (spawning the term “defense attorney parents”) –even for minor infractions with small penalties -- and often in front of or with the knowledge of the student. Although I’m not sure it was entirely good, that simply did not happen a generation ago. Add to this skyrocketing pressure for good grades, leading to rampant grade inflation and higher rates of cheating in schools, and for athletic success, leading to countless stories about rule violations and violence in interscholastic athletics.
However, I don’t think it’s as simple as blaming parents for being over-protective. The issue is much larger and lies in matters of human nature and American culture. First of all, many in American schools, media, public service, and private industry do their very best to scare parents about dangers their children might face. Secondly, most schools and child service organizations have been better at driving home the importance of success than we have about the best ways to acquire the skills that lead to success.
So schools – and parents -- need to be counter-cultural in this area, but to do so means getting comfortable with seeming self-contradictions. If it is true that we learn more from our failures than our successes, schools and parents should orchestrate safe, productive failure. If we learn more from challenge than comfort, we must create appropriate discomfort. How can we do this? Consider some of these possibilities:
1) What if we didn’t always and immediately rescue children from frustration or conflict? What if we simply let them wrestle with it, sit in it, wallow in it, even?
2) What if we don’t try to wrap every conflict or disappointment up in a nice, neat explainable package? Some things in life don’t have apparent explanation. Some things in life are never resolved. What if we let our children learn and experience that sooner rather than later, and on some relatively small issues before the big ones hit?
3) What if we let young people take up their own challenges. If there is a conflict with a teacher, suppose we suggest that they go to the teacher to resolve it. And what if we let it be should they choose not to? When they have a conflict with a peer, what if we occasionally said, “How would you like to handle it?” And when the response is, “I don’t know,” what if we simply said, “Well, let me know when you have an idea.”
4) What if we stopped fawning over students about their grades and started commenting on the effort we see? What if our first question after an athletic event weren’t, “Who won?” but instead “Who played well?” or “How did you play? Give me some examples.”
5) What if you didn't rescue that last minute paper, project, or assignment for them? Is it really more important that they get a good grade on an elementary school project than experience the consequences of waiting too late to start or ask for help? I can assure you it won't keep them out of UGA or Harvard. In fact, learning the lesson early might well help them get in.
You get the idea. Make your own list. Yes, part of our job is to guide, protect, and teach our children – to show them the way. But I was reminded last week that part of our job is to “prepare them for the road, not to prepare the road for them.” As Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, writes, “Success in the 21st century depends more on knowing what to do when things go wrong than in getting everything right.” When they are young is exactly the time to give them the experience and practice with that, before the stakes are much higher.
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