Can Do

Teachers across the country are being bombarded with the following narrative from well-meaning but horribly misguided parents: “Don’t tell my daughter that she got a ‘B’ on the test. We don’t want to damage her self-esteem. We will help her more with her homework, we promise. It’s just that she’s so delicate and she doesn’t have a good sense of herself because she has an August birthday and her older sister is so much smarter. If our younger daughter finds out that she got a ‘B’ she’ll give up studying and I know you don’t want her to quit on herself. Please tell her she got an ‘A on the test’.”

These parents and this conversation have spread like algae blooms across grade level and into public and private schools. I’m not arguing that your children’s institutions are perfect, that their teachers are flawless, or that students shouldn’t get the support that they need. I have written extensively on how parents are the first and most important teachers for their children. I acknowledge that teachers can be insensitive, demanding, unfair, or even rude. But contrast the lawn mower parents above with the following statement culled from an adolescent’s recent experience:

“Yeah, the water was rising pretty fast and it didn’t seem like there was a viable way for the rest of the folks to get down off the rock under the overhang without slipping. You know how Uncle Nate’s knees are and it was so dark we couldn’t see the moss on the rocks. He wouldn’t have been able to see much with the rain blowing so hard and I didn’t want him to end up slipping and dropping eight feet into the river. So I made three trips to get everybody’s back pack and then I went back again to help Nate and the rest of the people down.”

“Weren’t you exhausted, hungry, and terrified after hiking all day and being lost all that way from the campsite?”

“Yeah, I guess. If I’d thought about it, maybe. But somebody had to get my family out of there and I didn’t think I could count on air support.”

If self-esteem results from overcoming–not avoiding–failure, where do you think heroism comes from?

How is your child going to have the intestinal fortitude to help his Uncle Nate off a ledge if you’ve argued every grade for him all the way through school? The alternative–allowing your son to get a B or talking to his teacher about why he should have a different grade–is vastly preferable. And if I may ask a frank question: WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT TO YOU THAT YOUR CHILD GET ALL A GRADES?

Because your child’s life IS going to involve some tricky bits. If he’s not stuck on a rock above a river in the dark, he’ll be faced with some intractable problem somewhere along the way. Don’t you want your kids to have the skills to overcome adversity? Where do you think these skills are going to come from?

Your child may be picked last for softball, fail her driver’s test, or be rejected by a favored suitor. You can’t protect her but you can prepare her. You can’t give her the answer but you can give her the skill. The best preparation to deal with big disappointments as an adult is to practice overcoming smaller disappointments as a child.

Psychically, one of the worst things you can do as a parent is to feel your child’s feelings for her, soften every blow, rescue her from every uncomfortable situation, enable her to build a castle on shifting sand. Support, listen, and help her problem solve, yes. Deny her the chance to overcome problems in her own way, no. And whatever you do, under no circumstances should you be talking to your child’s fourth grade teacher about a ‘B’ on a test.

Chances are, your children aren’t all that fragile. Unless you make them that way. Unless you want them to be.