Stay the Course

 

Most of what Asher is supposed to do in a given day, which is good for him to do, he does not want to do. Waking up when he'd rather sleep in. Going back to bed if he's woken up too early. Going to school when he'd rather stay home. Doing homework when he'd rather watch TV. Eating sugary cereal instead of fruits and vegetables.

All well and good. We don't know better until we do. None of this makes Asher anything but normal. But, layered about this normality is a temper that is more volcanic than most, and a resolve to see the expression of that temper through that is often longer than his parents can bear.

In my head, and increasingly in practice, I know that the appropriate response is to stay the course. I know what's best, so he needs to listen. And I know that giving in just makes the next battle harder to win. 

Ah, but when the protestations increase in length and volume, and my head is pounding from a particularly long day, it is easy to cave and hard to persevere. It's in these moments I must summon some of my own resolve, to play the long game and follow through on what is best for him. 

Indeed, Jada is still a teenager and yet has increasingly expressed such sentiments as "Dad, I wish you had forced me to take piano when I was little." If she knows at 19 that some of the best things in life are the things we don't want to do, then surely I must at age 52 live that out in my parenting with our youngest.

Happy 18th Birthday to Aaron

 

Aaron is 18 today! We celebrate you today! Welcome to adulthood, young man!

Helping By Not Helping

 

The teen years are a time of transition from childhood to adulthood. Amy and I have two under our roof, both on the older side of those teen years. So while they are still kids and we retain significant responsibility over them, it’s also a time for us as parents to step back and make room for them to make their own decisions, own their own actions, and deal with the good and bad consequences. You know, like a grown-up. 

I’ll keep things generic as to the things Jada and Aaron are working through in their lives, and the approaches Amy and I have chosen to take to support them. But what I did want to say today is that there is a form of helping that comes from not helping. Meaning that there are ways we could help our teens. But is it really helping? Or does it help them more for us to not help, so that they have to handle things on their own? 

I can give an example from my own teen years. I remember being home from college one year. I had an interview for a coveted internship at a prestigious financial services business in town. It was an early morning interview, and I overslept the time. When I finally woke up and realized what had happened, I looked at my mom with incredulity that she had not made sure I was up. In her loving and wise way, she betrayed no panic or annoyance in responding that she was not aware that I needed her assistance since I had not asked for it. 

Missing the plum interview was a hit I took due to my lack of planning. Which, would it have been helpful for my mom to anticipate that I might need her to make sure I was up in time? Or, was she playing the long game, realizing that in life I’d need to take responsibility for my own sleep schedule, or at the very least to actively ask for help rather than assume others around me would bail me out? 

So…to help? Or to help by not helping? That is the question.

Touch Grass

 

In barely 2 generations, we’ve gone from bowling leagues to bowling alone to not going out at all. The first two steps are the premise of the famous Robert Putnam book, "Bowling Alone," in which he notes that 1980's folks bowled just as much as 1950's folks but far more often solo versus in formal leagues, which he ominously warned was a fraying of the good that social interactions gives each of us and society as a whole.

Now our digital ubiquity threatens to further isolate and depress us. Kids especially interact with their phones so much that most of their interactions with their friends is through their phones. And while it's great to be so easily connected to people and information, it must impose a huge cost on our wellness and relationships.

It is easy for me to think back to my childhood, one in which screens were far less dominant and one in which my parents were very intentional about doing physical things together, like go to the swimming pool or drive to a national park. I can still hear my dad going on and on about things like views and fresh air and nature facts. 

I have taken up those batons, so my kids have the pleasure of rolling their eyes when I do the same thing with them. But I will not apologize. Kids, nay all humans, need to touch grass and go for walks and be together. It's for our good, and we are fighting a mighty tide against this healthy thing.

Pressure

 

Teens now experience record levels of anxiety, relative to when my or my parents’ generation were that age. Lots of ink has been spilled trying to figure out what that is and what to do about it. I can’t say I can add much to this discourse. One thing I can relate to is how difficult it is to unplug nowadays, both from incoming information and from external scrutiny. 

For better or worse, we have the world at our fingertips, or more to the point a few finger strokes away via our smartphones. Which is great when it comes to accessing information, but difficult to resist when it comes to just, well, not needing to know something right this second. That’s a lot of pressure, for to be able to call up anything you want within seconds is hard to disentangle from the requirement to call it up immediately. As someone who is inherently curious and doesn’t like to leave things hanging, I could see if being incredibly stressful to throttle down when it’s so easy to rev up. 

Similarly, as an introvert, the notion of being “always on” is exhausting. I recall when I served on the school board in Philadelphia and was being oriented on what it meant to be a public official. Whereas us private citizens can opt into being “on the record” (e.g. giving testimony at a public meeting, speaking on behalf of a cause at a rally), for public officials it is the opposite, as you are considered to always be “on the record” whenever you’re out and about, and the only escape is to the privacy of your own home. Teens these days are similarly devoid of a respite from the possibility of being captured on video and having a careless statement used against you, so you can imagine that the kind of vigilance and exposure that foments is a lot of pressure for an adolescent to bear. 

My teen years were not without danger or hardship. But, I can truly look back with happy nostalgia at the innocence of it all. No screens, no social media, no devices…just endless days with friends at the park or at school, being in person and in the moment. There’s something healthy about that that I hope that this generation of teens is able to reclaim, for the sake of their mental health.

I am a Student

 

As we gear up for the holiday break, I'm happy to report that 4th grade Asher has made a lot of progress as a student. His special needs, development delays, and behavioral issues were already causing problems before he lost his kindergarten year to COVID, preventing him from the socialization and instruction of that critical on-ramp to school (and, for that matter, 1st grade was in person but interrupted many times by quarantines, illnesses, and such).

Since then, he's had the support of his two parents and a bevy of educators at school, particularly to get caught up in literacy. He is still reading at a rudimentary level, well below grade level. But he is making progress every week. 

Even better, which has been an overall point of emphasis for his 4th grade teacher for all of her students, he is owning his role as a student, meaning that his education is his responsibility and that it is a major one to take seriously. In parallel, his behavioral disruptions have become rarer and rarer, both as he gains more coping mechanisms and as his attention is diverted to the proper tasks at hand.

We have a long way to go but have come a long way already. So I am marking and celebrating that!

All Walks of Life

 

 

We’ve been blessed to send our kids to two great public schools, Penn Alexander and Central High. Both are, for Philly schools, very well resourced, which is come in handy as we’ve often needed to lean on the extra supports for various special needs and intervention moments. Both are academically rigorous, as evidenced by high test scores as well as the resolve and professionals of the educators there. 

Importantly and not coincidentally, both are diverse communities. There has been some justifiable concern that racial and ethnic diversity is declining, particularly if it continues to do so. At the moment, both schools remain very racial and ethnically mixed, which we are glad for given the fact that we are ourselves a racially mixed family and value our kids being among diverse company. 

Another critical yet sadly rare type of diversity is income diversity. Indeed, it is intentionally rare, because in this country we tend to set up our local laws to discourage wide ranges of household income levels to co-exist in the same school catchment zone. So, as elusive as it is to send your kid to a school where there is true racial and ethnic diversity, perhaps rarer still is a school where socio-economic diversity exists. 

Things change, especially in cities, but at this moment in time, we experience that at our kids’ schools. They have friends whose parents are blue collar and professional, who have no cars and fancy cars, who have never gotten on an airplane and who have second homes.

Of course what you learn in the classroom is important for preparing you for career and life. But I would argue that who you learn with is just as important. And part of what is important about that is being alongside and empathizing with people who come from different walks of life, who are differently resourced and whose world view is shaped by that scarcity or abundance. We are grateful for what we have as a family, including community with people who have far more and far less than us.