“I blame the admissions process for the overpressured situation we’re in,” says Emily Glickman, who should know. She’s president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, and her job is helping New York City parents find a good private school match for their kids. Every day, she watches how the schools’ exponential expectations are driving parents nuts. “People are always blaming so-called helicopter parents, but if you think about it, private schools and colleges are asking so much from our kids. Even to get into kindergarten, it’s good to have a resume.”
What could possibly be on a four-year-old’s resume—besides applesauce?
“That you’ve taken art classes, that you’re good at sports, that you’ve done well on the ERB,” the entrance exam for private schools, Glickman says.
Clearly, private preschools in Manhattan are the perfect petri dish for parental hysteria, but as go preppy tots in their Prada party shoes, so go the rest of us in our Payless sneakers, eventually. Plenty of public schools have gifted tracks starting in kindergarten, and the path leads right on up through high school AP classes. Woe to the child who develops a good pencil grip at age seven instead of four. She may already have missed the chance to get into the tippytop elementary school program, which leads to the best middle and high school programs, which, of course, lead to the Ivy League- level colleges. Or at least that is the perception.
Each step of the way, kids either succeed—or fail. And success is defined as being solidly Lake Woebegon “above average” in all the classes and extracurriculars that will fill those slots on the college application. How can you possibly make your kid that successful?
Jill Besnoy, a mom in New Jersey, is mulling over that right now. Her son is approaching a major turning point in his sports career: Should he join the swim team?
The coach would like her son to get serious about the sport. “But the swim team is four days a week, and that doesn’t include the swim meets on the weekend,” says Besnoy. A schedule like that would take time away from his tennis and soccer—two other areas of strength. How can she be sure he is ready to commit to a swimming career?
After all, he’s only six.
That sounds silly, of course, but it’s happening all the time. Besnoy is surrounded by other parents making just such choices for their first graders. They feel pressured to choose activities in which their tykes can wildly succeed. One of her son’s friends plays ice hockey five days a week. Most likely his parents hope that excelling in a sport will lead to other opportunities for their boy—a college scholarship, or at least admission to a “good” school.
“Parents want to send their kids to every enriching activity because the schools have set it up that way,” says Glickman. A kid applying to college saying, “I play some sports, and like writing, but I haven’t won any prizes or anything,” is like a kid showing up for the college tour naked. It’s just not done. They have to show up with accomplishments, which is why, when they fail at those, parents often despair.
But here’s one who didn’t. “I am, by Washington D.C. standards, a failure as a parent,” Welmoed Sisson, a stay-at-home mom, wrote to me. “My kids didn’t play on sports teams. We never signed them up for anything they didn’t ask for. They haven’t gone to New Orleans to rebuild houses or anything else to pad their college applications. They both went to the local public high school. They get good but not stellar grades. And not only did I neglect to send my kids to SAT prep classes, I didn’t push them to take the SATs more than once.” At the moment, Sisson’s nineteen-year-old son is in community college, “because he doesn’t know yet what he wants to do with his life.” And her daughter, a high school senior, applied to only one college. Her parents did not read her application.
This is so beyond the norm for our generation’s hands-on parents that I had to call Sisson to find out what was going on.
“People are astounded that I’m not intervening more,” she admitted. “I just believe in my kids.” She’s not a slacker mom—she read to her children almost every night, even into their teens. But she and her husband let them follow their own interests. (And drop out of piano!) As a result, her son is now studying computer game design even as he works part-time selling shoes, and her daughter wants to become a zoologist or animal behaviorist. They have the same ambitious dreams as other kids. They’re just not as worried about getting there in an Ivy League limo.
“My friends occasionally say, ‘You’re not going to get into the college you want!’ but I disagree,” says Diana, the Sisson’s seventeen-year-old. The college she wants to attend has a working farm (she does part-time farm work already), and on one of her essays she spent six paragraphs explaining that if she doesn’t get in, she will reapply for the rest of her life until she does.
That very outlook—“If I fail, so what? I will try again”—turns out to be exactly what some psychologists say is the surest path to success.
Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, has won a lot of attention, even from the folks at Apple, for her work on failure, success, and how they are linked. This interest was born out of her own experience as a child in grammar school, when one of her teachers seated her students front to back, according to their IQ scores. Lovely.
Dweck happened to be in seat 1, but this was no comfort to her. Being dubbed an official “success” by virtue of a test meant that she was only as good as her next score. Rather than feeling proud and fearless, she felt poised for a fall. As for the kids in the back row—the officially designated dummies—it couldn’t have been too great for them, either.
Eventually Dweck’s studies led her to the belief that there are two kinds of mindsets. She refers to the first as the “fixed” mindset, that of the folks who believe that they are innately intelligent or good at something. These people end up fearing challenges, because if they fail, it is a blow to their entire sense of self. After all, they defined themselves as smart, then a test showed they aren’t! The only logical conclusion is that they must actually be dumb—they think. So rather than trying to scale new heights (or take new tests), the “fixed” folks spend a lot of time trying to avoid potential failures and maintain their status quo. No leaps for them.
Then there are the folks—and it sounds like the Sissons somehow raised two—who see failure in less drastic terms. If they fail at something, it just means they have to learn or try something new so they can do better the next time. This is what Dweck calls the “expandable” or “growth” mindset.
The good news is that it may be possible to teach the growth mindset, if we remind kids, and ourselves, that the mind is a muscle. It can be challenged, it can stretch, it can get better the same way an athlete can get better, by practicing and stumbling and fumbling along the way. As Thomas Edison said when asked how it felt to fail so many times, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Call it whatever you want, Tom, failing allows for a chance to try again. But it also allows for something else, just as valuable: the chance for a child (or adult) to call it quits and go in an entirely new direction.
Celeste Brooks’s son Michael started soccer at age five, but by sixth grade, he was a benchwarmer. His mom, who happens to work at his Virginia school, told him: Practice more or you won’t make the seventh-grade team.
Well, he didn’t and he didn’t, and his mom’s friends were shocked when she didn’t pull any strings to fix that, either. She just let him fail and then watched as he dusted himself off (not a one-day affair) and switched his allegiances to track. Now he not only loves that sport but also is much better at it. I must say that exactly the same scenario played out with my own soccer-to-track nephew in suburban Chicago and with other kids I know, too: they failed and floundered, only to be reborn as something else.
And we’re not just talking about rebirth in after-school sports. There are all sorts of fields to fail in, including good ol’ life skills. Then you can be reborn as someone more responsible. Michigan mother o
f four Marybeth Hicks actively looks for opportunities for her children to fail. “Forgotten your homework? Left the trombone at home? Forgot that it’s a ‘free dress day’?” the Bringing Up Geeks author chuckles. For kids in uniforms at Catholic school, that’s a mistake of Dante-esque proportions.
Nonetheless, Hicks refuses to hop in the car to make things right—not just because she wants her kids to do better the next time (sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t), but also because she doesn’t want to have to drive anywhere before she’s showered.
Totally legit! One thing we parents forget is that in our desire to keep our kids from failing, we sometimes fail ourselves or our spouses. We’re off to deliver the left-at-home shin guards or science posters, and pretty soon there’s no time left for anything or anyone else. What’s your own social life (or marriage!)—chopped liver? Wrap it up in a brown paper bag and race it over to yourself! Eat it in bed with the one you love! Hicks says she feels bad whenever she fails to ease up on herself and let her children fail.
Not that failure is the ultimate goal. Aside from helping us learn painful lessons or change our boneheaded focus, once in a while failure can deliver a much sweeter surprise: flat-out success.
As a high school student, Adryenn Ashley lived for cheerleading. In fact, the California girl lived for it so much that during any semester she wasn’t on the cheerleading squad, she skipped her classes. The second semester of her junior year was like that, but she did show up in the fall to try out for the senior cheerleading team, the Song Leaders.
She was great. She rocked! After all, all she’d done with her hooky time was practice cheers. But she didn’t make the cut because her grades were too low.
That’s failure.
So she dropped out of high school.
That’s failure with a capital F.
Not long afterward, she enrolled in the College of Marin, a community college. And what did she do there? “I started the cheerleading program!” says Ashley. “They didn’t have one. It’s still there to this day—and I’m forty.”
She’s also, by the way, a published author and owner of her own business, WOW! Is Me. (Yes, it does sound a little like a cheer.) And, for the record, she helped chair her high school’s reunion.
Ever year, Stephen Haberman, the bumper-sticker-peeling shrink, is called in to give a chat to Ashley’s exact opposites: the high achievers at one of the Dallas high schools near him. It always ends up emotional. “They complain that they’re not able to sleep; they talk about irregular heartbeats. You start doing a little simple relaxation stress management thing, and they begin to cry. It’s so sad! We’ve got a school system where a perfect grade-point average is 4.0, but if you take advanced classes you get 4.6 or 4.7—how crazy is that?”
So why not tell them the truth: “It’s OK to fail, at least a little bit?”
“They’d never have me back!” says Haberman. “You can’t tell a child it’s OK to fail if it’s not OK with the parents to fail. So you’ve got to stop thinking in terms of failure. Making a choice about doing less of this stuff is not ‘failure.’ It’s being successful in making a choice about how you’re going to live your life. ‘Failure’ is scary. It’s the boogey man.”
He’s got a point. So maybe let’s think of Commandment 12 as really, “Believe in your kids and that they’ll be fine even if they don’t join the swim team at age six.”
And maybe even if they quit their music lessons.
REAL (ISH) WORLD
Lessons from “Little Miss Sunshine”
Garrett Peck of Arlington, Virginia, got to thinking about this movie. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read this. If you have, do:Little Miss Sunshine has this wonderful theme stitched throughout it of what it means to fail. Every one of the characters fails at what they want to accomplish: Olive fails to become the Little Miss Sunshine. Her dad fails to get his book published. Her mom is living in a dysfunctional marriage. Her brother realizes he’s color-blind and can’t fly Navy jets. Her gay uncle loses his partner, gets demoted to the #2 Proust scholar in the country, is fired from his teaching position, and fails to commit suicide! And the grandfather, well, he dies of a heroin overdose.
And yet at the end, there is an incredible feeling of resiliency in this family, that despite all of their failures, you knew they were going to make it. The grandfather, played by Alan Arkin, told Olive on the night he died that a loser is someone who is too scared to even try. That, in a nutshell, is the key point of the movie. We all fail, but that doesn’t make us losers. Resiliency is about picking ourselves up and getting back in the game after a failure.
Going Free Range
Free-Range Baby Step: Peel any bragging bumper stickers off your car. Explain to your child, “It’s not because I don’t love you. It’s because I do.”
Free-Range Brave Step: Watch that failure video: http://wimp.com/bigfailures. Think about some of the things you failed at and how, if you had succeeded, you wouldn’t have something you love today. (Personal confession: I didn’t get into Harvard. First choice. Yes, maybe that’s why I keep trying to make fun of it. Sue me. Point is, if I’d gone there, I never would have met my husband or had my darling kids, who’ll never get into Harvard because they don’t play an instrument, etc., etc. So hooray for failure . . . pretty much.)
Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Find one thing you’ve pushed your kids to do that they don’t really like and aren’t good at, and let them drop it. Be prepared for cheers.
Commandment 13
Lock Them Out
Make Them Play—or Else!
You want your children to be smart, sweet, social, successful, creative, curious, kind, and unfat. Do you:a. Sign them up for karate?
b. Have them try out for Hairspray?
c. Hire that highly recommended tutor who will arm wrestle them until they recite their times tables, then take them outside for triathlon training in ankle weights?
d. Just let them play?
Well, if you know anything about the latest, greatest findings about childhood—or even how rhetorical questions are generally posed in quiz form—you know it’s D. Play.
Play turns out to be so stunningly essential to childhood, it’s like love, sunshine, and broccoli all juiced together. It is the key to all the things we dearly hope our schools are teaching our kids (but secretly fear they’re not), including basic math, communication skills, negotiation skills, leadership, a scientific outlook, fairness, flexibility, and physics. Yes, physics. You throw a baseball and learn about speed, force, and the physical properties of windows. Also sometimes the price of windows, too, so let’s throw in economics. The run-around kind of play is good exercise. The sit-around kind of play is good for creativity.
Unfortunately—almost bizarrely—something this fun and formative and free is disappearing faster than polar bears in an Al Gore PowerPoint. In fact, that’s the only reason I’m pleading for play right here. Go back a few generations and this would have been ridiculous. Play was the default setting of most kids. You didn’t have to encourage them to do it, or convince their parents, “Please let your children cavort; it is oh-so developmentally worthwhile!” It was just a given: kids played. They had playtime in preschool, playtime after school, playtime during school.
Now? Not so much. In fact, in just the five years from 1997 to 2002, the amount of time the average six- to eight-year-old spends on creative play has declined by about a third, according to Susan Linn, whose book The Case for Make Believe is the bible on all of this. If you want to see what’s going on play-wise with your own eyes (and it’s not pitch dark outside), put down this book and walk around your neighborhood. Helloooooo? Where are all the kids?
Not playing. At least, not playing outside with each other in that 3-D thing we call “reality.” A recent survey of moms found that 70 percent of them played outside pretty much every day when they were growing up. But only 31 percent of their own children do. That’s right: fewer than a third of our kids are playi
ng outside anymore. Childhood has changed in less time that it takes to say, “Red rover, red rover . . . let’s go inside and play Halo 3.”
Who or what is to blame? Oh, pretty much every aspect of pop culture except Tina Fey. In no particular order, the play-killers are:
Standardized tests. In our quest to leave no child with a no. 2 pencil behind, our schools have been sacrificing recess and gym time, even in preschool, to allot more time for reading, writing, and math. Nothing wrong with those subjects, of course, but they go down a lot easier when kids have had a chance to play. And I know some kids (one of them in my living room right now) who would look a lot less as if they were heading off to lethal injection each morning if they knew there was going to be double recess at school.
Abduction fear. This one is really off base. As I’ve said before, if you look at the statistics gathered by the government, you will find that crimes against children are actually plummeting. From 1993 to 2004 the rate of aggravated assaults against kids went down 74 percent. Sexual assaults went down even more. I don’t think you could ask for more wonderful news about crime. Yet we are more worried about it than ever, so we don’t let our kids go outside and play. Instead they stay inside, either doing heaps of homework (see test prep, above), or enjoying their . . .
Electronics. What can I say? Electronics are incredibly seductive. We had to install a program that automatically turns off the PC after a certain amount of time, or our kids might never eat or sleep or—anything. I was worried they’d end up like that astronaut with the diapers. Why waste time away from the computer? Kids are spending so much time in front of one screen or another that one study found that 40 percent of children age three months or younger are already regular TV watchers. (This, despite the American Academy of Pediatrics’s recommendation of no screen time at all before age two.) It’s really hard to get up and go out, especially to a neighborhood devoid of kids, when there’s already an entire electronic world ready to entertain and play with you. And speaking of entertaining electronics, the most ironic antiplay force turns out to be . . .
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) Page 14