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Chapter 3

Great Expectations

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Henry David Thoreau

In a magazine piece I read about a Kenyan school that holds its classes in a shady grove outdoors, the headmaster, who had helped plant the trees as a child, recalled an African saying: “When you plant a tree, never plant only one. Plant three – one for shade, one for fruit, and one for beauty.” On a continent where heat and drought make every tree valuable, that’s wise advice.

It’s also an intriguing educational insight for a time like ours, when vast numbers of children are endangered by a one-sided parental approach that sees them solely in terms of their ability to be fruitful – that is, to “achieve” and “succeed.” This pressure is destroying childhood as never before. Child therapist Katie Hurley writes:

Academic pressure is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to fast-tracking childhood. Yes, learning is accelerated across the board, but so is childhood in general. We’ve experienced a gradual cultural shift in this country, and it’s becoming more and more prevalent with each passing year.

It’s true that young children are more likely to face intense academic pressure right now, but they are also overloaded with extracurricular activities. They play competitive sports (sometimes two sports during each “season”), they take the best music and art classes available, they join community-based programs and they fill their weekends with play dates and parties.

Children are losing childhood because they aren’t given the gift of time to play. That cultural shift – the intense need to raise competent, successful people – don’t we all bear some responsibility for it? As a country, we need to wake up to the increased stress levels among children and learn how to dial it back. If we want to raise happy kids, we need to start by taking back childhood.1

Naturally, parents have always wanted their children to do well, both academically and socially. No one wants their child to be the slowest in the class, the last to be picked for a game on the field. But what is it about the culture we live in that has made that natural worry into such an obsessive fear, and what is it doing to our children? For many, the trend toward fast-track academics makes school a place that they dread, a source of misery they cannot escape for months at a time.

Even though my grades were rarely exceptional, my parents cared far more about whether I got along with my peers than whether I achieved an A or a B. They assured me, especially when I didn’t do well, that there was a lot more in my head than I or my teachers realized; it just hadn’t come to the surface yet. Such encouragement is only a dream for many children, especially in homes where academic failure is seen as unacceptable.

My mother used to say that education begins in the cradle, and few parents today would disagree. But the differences in their approach are instructive. Whereas women of her generation sang their babies to sleep just as their mothers had done – because babies love the sound of their mother’s voice – today’s parents tend to cite studies on the positive effects of Mozart on the development of the infant brain. Fifty years ago, women taught their toddlers finger games as a matter of course, purely for the sake of a good time spent together. How often do we set aside time for nursery rhymes now, despite endless discussion about the importance of bonding and nurture?

Mothers can and should be the best defenders of the sacredness of childhood. As the Spanish proverb goes, “An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.” But parents today hear a louder message, telling them they must constantly crack the whip in order to keep their children ahead of the curve. Something is wrong with a culture when it informs a mother that her children’s success rests on her ability to push them, or when it tells a father that good grades are the only measurement that matters.

To me, it’s frightening that so many families have fallen into this trap. Now the results are beginning to trickle in, from teenagers and young adults who barely survived the strain and pressure, who missed the formative years of just being a child, and who never found that beautiful child-to-parent relationship of trust, acceptance, and encouragement. In an interview, novelist Kim Wong Keltner talks about her childhood:

All this chasing of straight As, this pushing, pushing, pushing for academic excellence, makes kids start to think their parents only care about who they are on paper. And ultimately, they may just decide: “If nothing is ever going to please you, why should I even try?”. . .

I got good grades just to get my parents off my back. I got top test scores, but I was never encouraged to make connections with other people. And I never felt like I could separate myself from my parents; they would always say, “You’re a part of me, what you do reflects on me.”2

True, some survivors of this approach admit that without this parental drive, they wouldn’t have such a successful career or make as much money as they do now. But what is the true meaning of success? What experiences in humanity and interaction were missed? We have to consider the next generation of children, and what they will learn from parents who never had a childhood.

Still, there are many parents who think deeply about what they want for their children, and who are inspired to change their emphasis. In an interview, author Paul Tough talks about what he wants his son to learn:

When Ellington was born, I was very much caught up in the idea of childhood as a race – the faster a child develops skills, the better he does on tests, the better he’ll do in life. . . . [Now] I’m less concerned about my son’s reading and counting ability. Don’t get me wrong, I still want him to know that stuff. But I think he’ll get there in time.

What I’m more concerned about is his character. . . . I want him to be able to get over disappointments, to calm himself down, to keep working at a puzzle even when it’s frustrating, to be good at sharing, to feel loved and confident and full of a sense of belonging. Most important, I want him to be able to deal with failure.

That’s a difficult thing for parents to give their children, since we have deep in our DNA the urge to shield our kids from every kind of trouble. But what we’re finding out now is that in trying to protect our children, we may actually be harming them. By not giving them the chance to learn to manage adversity, to cope with failure, we produce kids who have real problems when they grow up. Overcoming adversity is what produces character.3

Children need a chance to learn that failure often teaches us more than success. Everyone goes through hard times, and these can be crucial for the development of a child’s moral character. How else will they learn that the greatest triumph is the one that follows a defeat?

In his classic Basics of Education, German educator Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster argues that the comforts of contemporary civilization have cushioned life so completely that many people grow up without the capability to deal with anything that makes demands on them. Faced with the simple unpredictability of life – not to mention pain, suffering, hard work, or sacrifice – they helplessly succumb, Foerster writes, “as if to hard blows. . . . They do not know what to make of frustration – how to make something constructive of it – and see it only as something that oppresses and irritates. And though these very things provided earlier generations with the experiences through which they gained mastery over life’s challenges, they are often enough to send the rootless modern person into a mental institution.”4

The tendency of parents to hover over their children, trying to eliminate all danger, risk, and frustration from life, can be damaging. In an article titled “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail,” teacher Jessica Lahey writes:

I have worked with quite a number of parents who are so overprotective of their children that the children do not learn to take responsibility (and the natural consequences) of their actions. The children may develop a sense of entitlement and the parents then find it difficult to work with the school in a trusting, cooperative, and solution-focused manner, which would benefit both child and school.

These are the parents who worry me the most – parents who won’t let their child learn. You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.5

There are wonderful things to be learned from trying, failing, and trying again. If a project is not up to standard, a good teacher can help a child think about improvement and inspire him to do better. But that lesson is lost if the parent has completed the project for the child. And what message does that communicate? At some point, the child will need to face a challenge without a parent at his side. Will he look around for someone to take over, or will he step up? If his parents praise his half-hearted efforts so as not to threaten his “self-esteem,” will he ever know the satisfaction of a difficult job well done?

This is where active and involved fathers can help. I still maintain that no one has as much influence for good in a child’s life as a mother. But a father’s role is different and just as important, as Naomi Schaefer Riley, columnist and mother of three, writes:

Dads are more likely to let their children take risks. It’s not just that they’ll actually let go when teaching kids how to ride a two-wheeler (something that I instinctively did not want to do when my kids were learning). . . .

As psychologist Daniel Paquette has observed, “Fathers tend to stand behind their children so the children face their social environment, whereas mothers tend to position themselves in front of their children, seeking to establish visual contact.”