Some background: I never would have predicted that I’d end up in a classroom, teaching teens about history, economics, political science, or psychology. Nor would I have imagined that any of this would have taken place first, at my former middle school and, second, at my former high school. All of this after I’d spent years away in other parts of the world, earning a living as an actor, bartender, and then as a stand-up comic. Serendipity. Challenging work, but a blessing. Lots of smiles and genuine laughter amid the challenges.
After fifteen years in the classroom, I moved into the administrative ranks, first as a vice principal, then as a principal in another East Bay school. Now, after a few years in the private sector, I find myself back leading another high school and loving the mission-driven work of secondary education. The great thing about this work, among other things, was that the kids, and their energy, kept me young. At least that’s how many of us who’ve made careers around teens often feel. I loved being around them, conversing, laughing and engaging them at a point when they were the most interesting beasts in our forrest, animals always splitting emotional time between fear and arrogance. Add to this the fact that, now, I’m a parent of teens and find their situations amazing. Frustrating at times, but on base, amazing. There is a vulnerability in their psycho-social space, however, that makes me smile with a high degree of empathy. Teens are so often ready to light the world on fire, and yet unable to find matches. Although few of these wannabe fire starters would admit it, their fundamental reality often made them ready to pick up what we, as their guides, were dropping.
This kind of symbiosis didn’t always apply, however, to their parents. In fact, I usually felt like I had it easier around the kids, than I did with many of the moms and dads who’d so often assumed that having been involved with their kids’ educational lives had given them a twelve-year internship on how to best run schools, and the right to tell me how I should go about making this happen. I found myself nodding, keeping my eyes open, and biting my tongue when unsolicited advice was thrown my way. This is one of those situations that just comes with the job; manageable since I knew they meant well. But still, having spent five years of credentialing, another getting a masters’ degree, and nearly three more to earn a doctorate, many of them still felt they knew better. Not that nine years of graduate work means that I, or anyone else, is ready to run a school, but it does offer some relevance.
What began to unfold, as my time in the principal’s chair continued, was an abiding sense that many of the parents weren’t keeping their end of the bargain in terms of getting their kids ready to leave their respective nests. All too often, we prepare high schoolers for college, but we don’t necessarily prepare them for living in a world that is far less hospitable than the schools with which they’d become so familiar. Home and school, around which they’d centered their young lives, and participation within those institutions have a cadence that varies with each household, but the kids worked with a rhythm that offered a kind of familiar background noise as they met the world.
The problem, as I began to notice, was that the students may be able to constructively engage computational demands in their math classes, or literary analysis in English, but they lacked coping skills when it came to meeting up with healthy, and appropriate, criticism. The kids, I noticed, were fragile, narcissistic, and stressed, living lives where the number of “Likes” a social media posting garnered could make, or break, a student’s week. Which led to more postings, and more hope leveraged against feedback on the “Greatest Hits” they put on display for peer review, and the much desired affirmation that served as the desired operating system of a needy student population. Because of this, I have come to agree with those who argue that we now deal with “Nature” versus “Nurture” with an added oppositional force: it’s now Nature versus Nurture versus “Algorithm”, which complicates the emergence of maturity in ways parents just don’t seem to grasp.
This all fits into the trap well-meaning educationalists and child-psychologists set in the 1970s where Self-Esteem and its integration into the hearts and minds of school administrators, teachers, students, and parents which worked to undermine the potential for resilience and, ahem, the “grit” that kids need in order to integrate adulthood into their experience. The Self-Esteem Movement taught kids, and their advocates, that all they need to do is believe in themselves and know that anything is possible. Doing this would generate success AND maturity AND successful adults.
This approach works, until it doesn’t. Self celebration leads to a narcissism that naturally finds frustration once challenging situations arise. For example, instead of students learning that life never gets easier, but they get better, or that dreams do not work unless they do, a sense of entitlement was baked into the educational experience that has made kids fragile, fearful, and desperate for safety once life’s inevitable challenges arise.
The authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukionoff and Jonathan Haidt, deal with these and other issues in ways that are valuable for anyone raising, or otherwise working with kids. Among Lukionoff and Haidt’s most significant contributions involve how our tendency to keep our kids “safe” at the expense of having appropriate experiences to support their growth. This safetyism has kept an entire generation of kids developmentally stunted and fragile in the face of challenges. Put another way, skinned knees can be useful markers in our maturation. Being afraid of skinned knees, or avoiding them altogether, limits a kids growth. This situation is especially significant, as my own research suggested among affluent communities, where overemphasis on a high-stakes, college-or-bust ethos is hurting the wellbeing of teens who don’t have the internal capacity to build a foundational psychological infrastructure that comes from repeated exposure to their own, learned, grit. Hard to mine internally for grit when these kids aren’t taught how, or shown the resources they have within themselves. This situation is made worse when we clear the way for them so they can’t learn to appropriately face life challenges without adult interference; something especially critical to teens whose effective development hinges on the integration of competence and agency. Here, again, prepare the kid for the world, don’t prepare the world for the kid.
My time in schools gave me a front-row seat in this arena, where I got to see the Helicopter Parents who watched every move of their kids, turn into the Bulldozer Parent, who cleared challenges for their kids, thus weakening them when they needed to learn how to be strong, how to be clear with their boundaries, how to be steady in the face of discomfort, and how to be calm during difficult conversations. Without these skills, I saw students look, repeatedly, to adults to do things for them rather than stand tall and do things for themselves. When parents inevitably either fell short or pushed too hard, kids saw their parents as poor substitutes for the guides they began to need, and acted in ways that dismissed their parents as irrelivant, by pushing against parental weakness in ways that further limited the scope of parental influence. So the kids began to rule even though they weren’t equipped to do so. This isn’t a surprising result. Kids weren’t taught the necessary coping skills to meet the world within their homes and were seemingly surprised when the real world didn’t operate under that same set of rules. Kids had been trained over the years to let someone else manage and ameliorate their natural discomfort leaving them without the requisite “muscles” to do the kind of lifting that the world was requiring of them.
Making matters worse, the kids knew it. They knew they’d been hermetically sealed and too often protected from situations that might make them uncomfortable. Moreover, all the boosts to their self-esteem were often showing themselves to be hollow. And their parents sought to generate friendships with their kids and their kids’ friends rather than cultivate hierarchies that offered the kind of modeling the kids needed to integrate into their life experiences in order to fashion, at least, some kind of adulthood. Teens were too often left with little other than their increasingly fragile senses of self worth to rely on when things got tough. And their seasoned and well-regulated esteem wasn’t enough to save them.
They saw that what they’d learned in 3rd grade: “just believe in yourself” was failing them. Just believing you’re powerful, competent, and worthy doesn’t make any one powerful, competent, and worthy. Dedication, hard work, and commitment is involved, especially when things get tough and situations require deep internal sources of dedication, hard work, and commitment. True self-esteem comes from a simple calculus involving the recognition that discipline and hard work yields results. These results may not always be the outcomes one might expect, but this simple equation undermines the misguided ethos for child-rearing where “your failure is not an option”. Such a misguided approach merely insulates the kid, and the parents from learning the lessons that failure and loss on, say, the court, or field, or track, or classroom can teach. Parent and kid BOTH fail in this paradigm.
Consider how the pressure to get into schools whose diplomas should guarantee success but don’t, is creating confusion. Getting into a “great school” offers less “success” than parents would hope for is eroding the hope that makes our youth so great. It’s turning out that a Harvard degree, for example, may not be such a great value. It was no wonder that depression and its conjoined twin of stress became central to our experience as school administrators. Our kids just didn’t have the skills required to keep up with life’s demands, and the demands appeared to change less than their inability to deal with them.
Lukianoff and Haidt’s recommendations for how we might best steer clear of parental obsession with safety and thus give students opportunities to develop appropriately clearly take aim at families of privilege. Some of their recommendations, along with some of my added commentary beneath:
Encourage children to walk or ride a bike to school
Sometimes, this isn’t practical, but given the chance, and assuming the weather permits, let the kids take ownership of necessary transportation. Each journey is a chance for discovery. Intelligent, and responsibly managed risk is good.
Allow children unsupervised play with other neighborhood kids
As with encouraging walking and biking to school, unsupervised play teaches our kids how to negotiate, engage, communicate, win, lose, and, among other great life lessons, play requires management and rules that often arise out of necessity during an activity.
Go to summer/overnight camp
This encourages personal extension beyond the comfort of routine and helps kids develop an appreciation for experience as well as the positive attributes experienced at home. Besides, they might even miss you.
Learn to swim, or at least get learn to get into otherwise scary situations
Experience the chaotic power of the ocean or something like it. This proves to swimmers that there is always something more powerful than they are. They learn quickly that they may not be able to stop waves, but they can learn to surf. This lesson is powerful, expansive, and, as many of us know, valuable through their adult years in any number of situations.
Teach children the “basics” of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and “mindfulness”
A person that avoids discomfort regularly will find it difficult to get “in shape”. Learning isn’t always comfortable, but it always pays off, often in ways we might never expect. Both CBT and mindfulness, support a stability in the hearts and minds of people. This stability allows for those trained in these forms of self-awareness to become “responsive” rather than “reactive” when faced with life’s challenges.
Limit homework
This doesn’t mean that there should be no homework, but limiting its amount appropriately not only supports the desired dual outcomes of responsibility and accountability, but it also leaves room for agency.
More recess
Play, as mentioned, builds and helps support skill development that should remain useful throughout life. Lessons learned on the playground may not always have been comfortable, but insulating our kids from the difficulties and successes they might experience if they subjected themselves to the chaotic nature of play adds value to the life experience.
A “no devices” policy in school
I have mixed feelings on this since “no devices” can be an overcorrection when “appropriate use” of devices, as I’ve seen, has enhanced the classroom experience in creative and useful ways.
Teach debate
This is among the most important learning outcomes a student can take with them from any school experience. Debate, done well, sharpens both the mind and its arguments. It encourages persuasion and listening. Most of all, it shows students how important nuance can be. The world is not binary, yet kids assume, based on our behavior, that it is. Encouraging polite debate and its subtlety builds communication skills and can pull participants away from the need to be right and lead them into powerful intellectual ecosystems where questioning occupies a central place in one’s educational experience.
Get kids to compete in some endeavor so they can learn how to win and lose with grace.
Don’t insulate them from failure; let them learn from it.
Don’t let their fear keep them from getting in the arena. Battles are always instructive.
A specific college’s acceptance won’t determine the rest of a kid’s life. Period. Let them hear this from you. There are lots of great choices and options for every student, including those not going to college.
The rules of the 80s don’t apply any longer. You/We are old. Get over it.
Help kids see the big picture and what’s beyond themselves. Repeat as necessary.
Again, kids need to see what’s beyond their personal boundaries in order to see Big Pictures. This shift is key to assuming the mantle of adulthood. For a kid to see the world, and hold its glories and pain, from 60 thousand feet as well as 10 feet will help them evolve into amazing souls that can change the world because, as Ghandi might say, because they are “changed by it.”
Model what you want to see from your kids. They take their behavioral cues from you. Are you stressed? They’ll show signs of stress, often at pathological levels since they haven’t the agency to recognize what’s yours and what’s theirs. Are you happy? They’ll most likely show signs of happiness. Hopeful? Distracted? Anesthetized? You get the idea. They’re watching you. Own this as a parent.
Don’t slap your kid and tell them not “to hit” anyone. They see through this lie.
Don’t live as a fear-driven slave to circumstance and expect anything more from what you’re modeling for your kids. Be what you want them to be. This is hard work.
Protect children’s sleep
Also, protect your own. Model good sleep hygiene. For their sake. On a side, I noticed that when we started school later, kids just stayed up later and endured the same, limited number of hours asleep. What made a difference? Take the damn phones away before bed.
Still, check out this research:
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/northeast/AskAREL/Response/14]
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/12/676118782/sleepless-no-more-in-seattle-later-school-start-time-pays-off-for-teens
Have secondary schools adopt the University of Chicago statement on campus speech.
Let kids know that their self-esteem is important, but not at the expense of self-awareness. Self-esteem is fragile and it fluctuates. Self-awareness pretty much expands outwardly (and inwardly) without stopping, moving in the same direction, always broadening. I’ve already touched on this but it bears repeating: kids living lives predicated on their state of self-esteem are trying to build on a continually fluctuating foundation of value and worth. Kids who develop an appreciation of an inner familiarity, even when it’s not pretty, can meet challenges with greater clarity, greater sensitivity, and an extensive set of resources that they have built over years of healthy, and repeated, exposure to challenges they have faced in the classroom, and on the playground, and at home. They learn, to borrow a phrase, how not to be “weenies”. This, is so important. Weenies, whether they are adults or kids who turn into them in their later years, lose. Every time. Period. Strong kids learn strength and adaptability, grace and ease, wisdom and compassion. They learn how to use fire and ice, depending on what’s required of them. Kids learn quickly that they can adjust their dreams to align with their lived experience, and vice versa. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t follow their bliss, as Joseph Campbell might suggest. They should. But including a simple corollary can be truly helpful: teens should be taught that they are not fragile and that their sense of self won’t be managed or rescued by ANYONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Handle it. Find out what you’re good at, then explore why this is so and pursue it! Risk in responsible ways, own your mistakes and your successes, enjoy the Cosmic Giggle as often as possible since we’re only here a short while.
Many may disagree with these points. That’s fine. I can understand the resistance since these admonitions were hard for many of us, myself included, to hear initially. Having said this, raising kids without a keen sense of where they are, internally, when things get tough, or for us to assume that being “tougher on them” or not “coddling them” is the answer will fail us and our kids, especially if we’re not clear about what these guardrails actually imply. What we should understand is how our over-rotation into either “gentle”, or “authoritarian” models of parenting alll-too-often only sets our kids up for immediate failure and will guarantee an inability to meet challenges later in life when the stakes might be higher. Integrating Haidt and Lukianoff’s research into our child-rearing from the beginning, however, may shine light on the long shadows we’ve cast; shadows that our kids simply don’t need to chase.
The fact remains that the generation in front of us, raised on a technology that nearly puts the sum-total of human knowledge in their pockets, is hurting us. This doesn’t mean we should go back to rotary phones and slide rules. We couldn’t if we wanted to anyway. On the other hand, as grown-ups this new operating system should inspire us to, at least, consider how we might best move forward so that our progeny can become the kinds of adults who can raise the next generation as the kinds of people we have always dreamed of becoming.