Thursday, April 10, 2008

IN A PERFECT WORLD SOMETIMES GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH

For
four months the writer's strike forced people in my town to cutback and
reconsider their financial priorities. Some barely felt the pinch of a
comatose economy while others didn't survive it. Those in the middle
adapted and survived.

During this time of financial
re-evaluation I realized how easy it has become to delegate our
parenting responsibilities to others. We live in an era where
excellence is the norm, pushing ourselves to reach the same maximum
ability as our technological gadgets and passing this goal of
excellence onto our children. Their world is faster than ours was at
their age and we expect them to achieve earlier and better than we did
in order to compete. We give our hard-earned money to professionals to
train our kids for the marathon of modern life - private schools,
tutors, trainers, therapists. In some situations professional
consultation is necessary but many parents, feeling overwhelmed by
self-imposed expectations and inadequacy, seek out experts who they
believe can handle the demands better than themselves.

I
recognize this is most prevalent in big cities like mine but I think it
applies on some level to everyone. I know of parents who enroll their
kids in private school expecting the school to churn out perfect
children with perfect critical thinking skills, perfect SAT scores, and
perfect manners - their money buying them perfect visions of
themselves. I hear of countless others who place themselves on the
brink of financial ruin in order to enroll in these same schools. They
cause stress in their marriage and their family not wanting to give
their child anything less than the best. Some students thrive in these
challenging environments going on to college with an academic knowledge
deeper and better than from any public school but many students do not.
It's these children that pay the price for our super-charged,
supremacy-seeking, education-budget challenged society. The time they
spend struggling with an accelerated curriculum meant for a minority of
students is time away from self-discovery in alternative forms such as
sports, music, reading for pleasure, or just goofing off.

A
boiling teakettle lets off steam to release pressure - our children are
like little teakettles. We risk them exploding or burning out if we
don't let them play during the only time in their lives when they can
without guilt or judgment.

We make things worse by sheltering
our children from disappointment starting at a young age. We lavish
them with praise and accolades. We let them win at cards and board
games to protect them from frustration and failure. How does this
prepare them for real life? We immunize our kids to build up their
resistance to disease, why not the same for disappointment?

I
believe in therapy, it is the reason I am happy with who I am today,
and before we instituted our family cutbacks, I depended on our
therapist for my children's every emotional misdemeanor. I worried
about my daughter's shyness and withdrawal and my son's tendency to be
explosive. I wrote down every piece of advice our therapist gave us and
kept the notes in my night table drawer for frequent study. I heeded
her words more than I did my own instinct. Surely, some kids do need
professional help but I risk saying that many would do as well or
better with genuine parental nurturing and supervision. We're all
looking for the easy answer, the explanation, the quick fix, but with
time off the perfection treadmill and only my gut to guide me, my
family is no worse for wear. We err, we survive.

It takes as
much time to drive our kids to the tutor as it does to spend quality
time with them. We'd have to educate ourselves on our specific subjects
but don't we all read parenting books and research the internet anyway?
The trick is to trust ourselves. If we do, we might come to the
conclusion that we are more capable of raising our children than we
give ourselves credit for. Paraphrasing parenting expert Wendy Mogul,
author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, we don't need to be perfect, sometimes good is good enough.

I'd go so far as to say sometimes good is better.

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MERLOT MOM

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Labels:
giving up on parenting,
good is good enough,
Letting others parent our children,
Wendy Mogul