TICKLING THE IVORIES
And other things that are good for your children. Judith Timson explains,
It’s August, and by rights many parents of school-age children should be reclining with their gin and tonics, grateful for another week or so of relaxation before the September rat race begins.
Alas, many of them are already deep in the worry zone, obsessing about a child starting a more difficult grade, or a teen they just know is going to screw up in math, or their own unyielding stress-causing attitudes toward their children’s academic success.
As author Julie Lythcott-Haims writes in How to Raise An Adult, a book whose subtitle seductively urges parents to “break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success,” parents over-involve themselves in their children’s school lives out of the best intentions: a profound wish for them “to start where we left off, to stand on our shoulders.”
But the result, as is well-docu- mented, is that parents have gone from helicoptering to bulldozing to actively harming their kids with their intense desire to “help” them succeed.
In her former position as dean of freshmen at Stanford University, the author observed an abundance of “under-constructed, existentially impotent” college-age students, always looking to their parents for guidance. (Although most kids of any era who go off to university were unformed: that was what going away was meant to change.)
I do think parents of my generation were simply afraid to let their kids fail. Now the pressure to succeed seems even more searingly intense, and the results are troubling: self-harming and sleeplessness among post-secondary students, and if you believe mentalhealth experts, anxiety rampant among all ages of children.
Parents seem damned if they do push their kids (why can’t we just let them discover their own way to succeed?) or damned if they don’t (this kid is an ambition-free zone; help!).
It’s easy for me to be sanguine now that parent-teacher conferences are just a fraught memory.
I now see a pattern that wasn’t always possible to see during their growing up: the time when they started to become truly interested in the things that would define them as adults, and conversely, the times when they unloaded perfectly wonderful pursuits that were not theirs to carry into adulthood. Today, I believe retroactively in their innate wisdom to find what they needed.
Looking back, I can identify three things that perennially enriched my children’s academic lives and helped them succeed on their own terms:
French immersion: Alternately fashionable and unfashionable, and somehow always political, the choice to educate your children in a second language has far-reaching ramifications. (My daughter now makes her life in France; can I sue?) Studying in French sharpened them considerably. It gave them the equivalent of an otherwise unaffordable boutique education in a public school system. They came away with a wider world linguisti- cally, and to a greater or lesser extent the ability to switch easily between our two official languages.
Music lessons: When we married we got a piano as a wedding gift from my in-laws; my mother-in-law has played all her life. Through sheer luck — I accidentally drove my car into his fence — I found a brilliant and strict, but ultimately kind, piano teacher. He taught both our children for eight or so years, and his standards were such that declarations of “I’m never going back in there again” were not unheard of as they bolted from his house after a lesson in which he told them, simply, they hadn’t played well enough for his tastes.
As standards got loosey-goosey in the public school system, Chris kept them on track, and their musical education gave them a true sense of accomplishment. And self-esteem; you can either play Bach or a Broadway show tune or you can’t.
Extended family: You can’t rustle up a tribe of relatives, but they’re great to be close to if you have them.
When all the adults in a family love and pay attention to all the children within that tribe, letting them know their accomplishments — and setbacks — matter and that they have adults to turn to other than their pesky parents, kids can feel an added sense of ambition. A formidable great aunt once took my children to task for not having properly acknowledged her at a social function. But they got so much more than a manners lesson in return: not only the imperative to account for themselves to a widening number of adults, but role models galore.
It will be fascinating to see what the millennials — now having their own children — do differently than we did. Every generation rebels a bit against the parenting tactics of the previous one.
But I’m pretty sure our adult children would never disavow the positive effects of the above three items. They couldn’t be less trendy or more enriching. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson