Helpful or Hovering? Draw Your Own Line
Now that school has started, I'm faced with similar decisions every day: Do I lobby to get Josh the teacher he wants for AP Environmental or step back? Do I rummage through Ryan's backpack for papers I need to sign or let him get a zero if he doesn't follow through? And the big one this week: Do I follow up with the mother who threatened to go to the dean if Ryan calls her kid a mean name again (which he denies) and try to keep her calm, or do I let the school's anti-bullying system take its course?
Deciding when to step in and when to keep away is a daily dilemma for today's conscientious parents. This is newish stuff. Our mothers didn't follow our progress in their wombs through books like What to Expect When You're Expecting. ("Now he has a pinky!") They didn't suffer over decisions like when it's okay to slap us or when to turn off the TV (never was fine) or whether to feed us fruit juice-sweetened cereal instead of Cheerios or if we should be driven to school because the middle school bus is too scary. They cooked, they cleaned, they asked,"Did you do your homework?" and they went about their lives -- and left us to ours.
I've been thinking even harder about these decisions since receiving comments about my last blog entry. My friend Jeri jumped on parents for living their kids' lives for them, while my cousin Rona (yes, same name) staunchly defended mothers being very involved in her kids' business. A key topic was"helicopter" parenting, a term that refers to mothers and fathers hovering even when their young adult offspring leave for college. These parents might go so far as to call the school if the child is having roommate issues. A recent New York Times article article used the term "Velcro parents." The point: Colleges have separate orientation events for parents for the sole purpose of ripping them away from their inbound freshmen. But talking every day? Texting every hour? We called home once a week during my college years, when phone rates were high, so I assume it's best to forgo communication for a few days at a time when my boys are away. Is that true? Just because that's how I grew up, when there was no alternative?
I've always pondered, too seriously for it to be healthy, when to step in and when not to. But to have such strong reactions to the H word! Jeri's reasoning is 100 percent sound. Let 'em flop and learn, baby. But Rona's kids seem amazing -- well-adjusted and close with their parents yet fully independent. So who's wrong?
Wimpy as it sounds, I think the answer's in the middle. Will kids become more independent if we leave them the heck alone? Surely. Will they feel loved and gain self esteem if we butt in when they need support? Yup. All the area in between is gray, and individual. Every mother I know gets involved to a different degree, and every mother I know pooh-pooh's other mothers' decisions. "I would never let my child jump in the mud." "I would never stop my child from jumping in the mud." "If Johnny is failing English, let him fail. He has to make his own way." "I heard the 10th grade English teacher is bad so I'm pulling Johnny out every afternoon so he can take the class at the community college."
I make my own decisions every day, never too extreme, as far as I can tell. It's tough: If I don't nag Ryan to study for his tests he might not, and then he might get into crappy high school classes and become friends with kids who aren't college bound and ... . Then again, no one said a word when I let my middle school work go. Oh, there were Fs! Big fat red ones! Then in ninth grade I started caring on my own and worked hard forever after. Shouldn't Ryan have the chance to do his own caring? But considering he's in Florida public schools, is backing off worth the risk?
I'll bet you folks have opinions and lots of them -- not about my sweet Ryan, I'll handle that one thank you, but about helping versus hovering in general. Bring it on!
Love it Rona, I think that if you're confused, you are on the right track! I've done both the hovering and the backing off. I'm not sure which one is better, and yet, the kids survive and grow up sometimes in spite of our parenting! My oldest reminded me just yesterday that he didn't come with an instruction manual. To which I replied, no son, you ARE the instruction manual. Have to say, he loved that!
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I have always found that the kids found there own way to handle the problems, and the parents who were too involved had their kids shunned. The kids also find a way to deal with the difficult teachers in their own way, and just because child A does not like the teacher or had a bad experience, does not mean child B will feel the same way. Relax, sit back, and unless your child specifically asks you to help handle a situation, STAY OUT OF IT!
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WIth 2 in college, 1 in high school and 1 in first year of middle school we've been through this issue repeatedly over the past 15 years or so. There's definitely a fine line between controlling and guiding a child. With online student tracking available to parents on everything from tardies to missed assignments, it's easy to be way too involved. The flip side is our experiment in letting one of our high school sons handle it himself for a year with the idea of "natural consequences." Those consequences ended up being that he did lousy in school and just barely squeaked by in a couple of the tougher classes, tanking his GPA. So it's a balance in my experience. For kids to be able to function in today's world, and later college, they've got to learn to be responsible for their own actions and decisions. It's also critical that both parents are on the same page or else the kid will gravitate to the path of least resistance.
Perhaps the most important factor is organization, beginning with their approach in the grade school years. My two kids who had great teachers with high standards and demands for the kids be organized have both excelled. The two who have had lesser teachers and developed sloppy study habits have not. And having been in a wide range of schools from public to private to parochial, it really comes down to each teacher, not how much tuition you pay. The most important thing of all is developing those organizational skills and study habits at an early age (before they reach their teens and stop listening to us because they think we're dumb dinosaurs). And if you get an unlucky draw on a teacher in a particular year, make up for it by being more involved than you might otherwise be.
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I think the key here is easy to say and hard to do because we generally want to spare our children the problems we see coming. If you want your child to become a healthy, realistic, responsible adult, then you must do two things well and forget your own anxiety or worry about what other people might think.
What is the thing? Love your kids, tell them daily and stay out of their business unless they ask for help. When they ask they are ready to listen. If they don't ask, you are just butting-in. Good judgement comes from making mistakes and mistakes come from bad judgments. That is how we learn.
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To truly love your child, is to truly know your child. With that you'll know what they need.
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More brilliance from my muse.
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