When my sincere efforts to help those I love go sideways, have an effect other than what I hoped, are misinterpreted or worse, I often murmur to myself that old adage, "That the road to perdition is paved with good intentions." For those of us who work in service of the public good: teachers, social workers, medical professionals, etc., we invariably discover this truth in stark terms. We cannot, it turns out, save others except in the most literal sense. We must each learn to save ourselves. This is fundamentally the story of childhood, its most important purpose.
It is no secret that parenting has changed significantly in the last few decades. I've written about this before. Fear guides our parenting now in ways it never did in the past. Virtual bogeymen live alongside those real and imagined ones. Peer pressure, to give our kids the best of everything, to live up to some imagined code of pure and perfect parenting, to protect our children from every emotional wound, promotes a number of well-intended but problematic parental behaviors that can ultimately undermine our children. These behaviors have us fighting with other children on behalf of our own. They have us clinging to our child's every tale of woe. They have us storming on to campus, even college campuses, demanding different outcomes. These behaviors have us enabling the very worst in our children, have us afraid to say no, have us abdicating our responsibilities as adults. The road to perdition...
We cannot protect our children from the trials and tribulations of growing up, from falling down, from occasional failure, from emotional duress, from ugly social encounters, from tears or want. We must not wish them to be something they are not, nor allow our emotional state to take its cues from theirs. We must not live vicariously through them. We cannot fight our children's battles or solve their problems for them. At the end of the day, they must be "...the captain of their fate...the master of their soul."
Educators, psychologists, and others whom work with children have spent decades trying to figure out why some kids just seem to be more resilient in the face of adversity, more capable of adapting to change, more successful in overcoming failure. Some constellation of innate and external factors: biological, psychological, behavioral and cultural, make up this thing called resiliency. In the past, it was assumed that some people are just born more resilient. Researchers today generally view resiliency not as some innate quality, a genetic luck of the draw, but as a dynamic developmental process. While each person is born with a "self-righting" capacity, positive environmental factors have significant influence on how a child responds in the face of adversity.
One seminal study, Werner and Smith (1982), emphasized among a number of environmental factors that influence resiliency the positive effects of attention in infancy, family cohesion, formal and informal intergenerational networks, and...wait for it...consistent structure and rules. Other studies, especially those focused on school-aged children, note that higher expectations lead to greater success, as does a sense of personal responsibility for and to one's own success, and the sustained promotion of self-efficacy and self-advocacy. Loosely translated, if you want successful, well-adapted, and resilient kids, they need strong families, lots of love, high expectations, and consistent structures of accountability. Most importantly, children must be encouraged and allowed to solve their own problems, must learn to save themselves.
It's hard to get a seven or eight on those pesky assessments. Your children won't get along with everybody, won't be invited to every birthday party, won't always be selected for some honor. Their first love won't be their last, nor their first job. Ninety-five percent of the top one percent of students fail to get accepted to their preferred university. Your children have to follow rules. They're expected to honor their commitments, show up ready to go, give it their all. And sometimes life won't be fair and there will be tears. None of these things are insurmountable; all of them are fully survivable.
If our kids still need us to solve their problems when they leave home, we've in some way failed them. This never need happen. In spite of all the crocodile tears, they'll be okay. Truly. Remember, we all made it, and most of us grew up with considerably tougher parents and their considerably higher expectations for personal responsibility. Let's help foster in our children the greatest of all gifts, the gift of resiliency. Let's cure our children of any sense of entitlement. Like those innumerable generations of children before, they'll be just fine.
See you around campus.
It is no secret that parenting has changed significantly in the last few decades. I've written about this before. Fear guides our parenting now in ways it never did in the past. Virtual bogeymen live alongside those real and imagined ones. Peer pressure, to give our kids the best of everything, to live up to some imagined code of pure and perfect parenting, to protect our children from every emotional wound, promotes a number of well-intended but problematic parental behaviors that can ultimately undermine our children. These behaviors have us fighting with other children on behalf of our own. They have us clinging to our child's every tale of woe. They have us storming on to campus, even college campuses, demanding different outcomes. These behaviors have us enabling the very worst in our children, have us afraid to say no, have us abdicating our responsibilities as adults. The road to perdition...
We cannot protect our children from the trials and tribulations of growing up, from falling down, from occasional failure, from emotional duress, from ugly social encounters, from tears or want. We must not wish them to be something they are not, nor allow our emotional state to take its cues from theirs. We must not live vicariously through them. We cannot fight our children's battles or solve their problems for them. At the end of the day, they must be "...the captain of their fate...the master of their soul."
Educators, psychologists, and others whom work with children have spent decades trying to figure out why some kids just seem to be more resilient in the face of adversity, more capable of adapting to change, more successful in overcoming failure. Some constellation of innate and external factors: biological, psychological, behavioral and cultural, make up this thing called resiliency. In the past, it was assumed that some people are just born more resilient. Researchers today generally view resiliency not as some innate quality, a genetic luck of the draw, but as a dynamic developmental process. While each person is born with a "self-righting" capacity, positive environmental factors have significant influence on how a child responds in the face of adversity.
One seminal study, Werner and Smith (1982), emphasized among a number of environmental factors that influence resiliency the positive effects of attention in infancy, family cohesion, formal and informal intergenerational networks, and...wait for it...consistent structure and rules. Other studies, especially those focused on school-aged children, note that higher expectations lead to greater success, as does a sense of personal responsibility for and to one's own success, and the sustained promotion of self-efficacy and self-advocacy. Loosely translated, if you want successful, well-adapted, and resilient kids, they need strong families, lots of love, high expectations, and consistent structures of accountability. Most importantly, children must be encouraged and allowed to solve their own problems, must learn to save themselves.
It's hard to get a seven or eight on those pesky assessments. Your children won't get along with everybody, won't be invited to every birthday party, won't always be selected for some honor. Their first love won't be their last, nor their first job. Ninety-five percent of the top one percent of students fail to get accepted to their preferred university. Your children have to follow rules. They're expected to honor their commitments, show up ready to go, give it their all. And sometimes life won't be fair and there will be tears. None of these things are insurmountable; all of them are fully survivable.
If our kids still need us to solve their problems when they leave home, we've in some way failed them. This never need happen. In spite of all the crocodile tears, they'll be okay. Truly. Remember, we all made it, and most of us grew up with considerably tougher parents and their considerably higher expectations for personal responsibility. Let's help foster in our children the greatest of all gifts, the gift of resiliency. Let's cure our children of any sense of entitlement. Like those innumerable generations of children before, they'll be just fine.
See you around campus.