Lessons From Our Children

As an empty nester, it is now easy for me to reflect upon the joys of parenting. The greatest joy, of course, is watching that beautiful little baby grow and develop into the complexity of an adult human, replete with gifts we celebrate and quirks that, undoubtably, come from the lineage of the other parent. But the second greatest joy may well be the way that our F2′s challenge us to rethink our past assumptions, to see the world in a different way, to learn something that we never before found interesting, and to rethink our priorities and sense of world order. With that, I want to share a lesson I learned from one of my own sons, in part because this lesson might be helpful to others, and in part because I hope it causes you to take a moment to think of your own child’s wisest moments. 

Like many of my fellow higher-ed brethren, who devote our lives to ensuring that other people’s children have the best possible educational outcomes and experiences, I became panick-stricken when my own son entered those ever-critical high school years … the years that make or break college admissions prospects. ‘Tis the season of early decision, of course with the requisite anxiety and assuredness that a “thin” letter will destine our little loved ones to a lifetime of Cinderella living.

My son was in the 9th grade when he came home and announced that he was leaving the school orchestra to play in several “pickup” groups organized by various groups of his friends. As soon as he mentioned his plan, I experienced that ever-so-familiar feeling of the “mother knot” that was forming in the pit of my stomach. I calmly asked him why he had come to this decision, and he told me that whereas his participation in the orchestra was limited to one instrument (the violin), the pick up groups allowed him to play all of his instruments (vioin, guitar, mandolin and ukele) as well as to experiment with others. And, whereas the school orchestra focused on perfecting three or four pieces a year, which were performed only once or twice, the pickup groups worked on numerous pieces from a wide range of mucsical genres, and they performed regularly at venues as wide-ranging as the community pool to various school functions and community events. And whereas the orchestra director didn’t even play my son’s instrument, and therefore could not help him improve his technique, the kids in the pickup groups each took private music lessons, and therefore brought to the group the collective wisdom and advice of no less than five different music teachers — so my son felt like he learned a lot more from his friends in the pickup groups than he did from the orchestra.

These, of course, were all good and insightful reasons, but I had college admissions on my mind. In what became our household equivalent of Jenny Slate’s dropping the F bomb on SNL last weekend, I uttered the words that I will regret for the rest of my life, which went something to the effect of, “well, it’s great that you like the pickup groups so much, but you know, they just don’t count!” “Don’t count?” My son then launched, using language that I will not repeat here, into a tirade about the fact that clearly I cared more about the college-admissions process than the really important thing, which was his interest in improving as a musician and that any college that wouldn’t value the hard work of forming and maintaining a pickup group over some organized school orchestra would not be a college he would want to attend anyway, and if a college was interested only in selecting from kids who were resume builders, rather than kids who had a real interest in ANYTHING, then he didn’t want any parts of that.  He would NEVER lower himself to that standard!  

I couldn’t believe that I had actually told my son that his friends and their music groups didn’t count. How did I become this person? I was the mother-of-a-high-school-student equivalent of a bridezilla.

Perhaps some of you similarly worry about balancing your children’s interests in independent, kid-organized activities, with the seemingly endless thirst of admissions officers for students who not only have perfect grades, perfect SAT scores, and perfect teeth, but who also can recite a long list of leadership roles in organized activities, of course for which annual awards are issued. After all, some of us don’t have kids who took a bullet for a dog while delivering organically-grown fish to stranded dolphins on poverty-stricken islands.  And some of our kids don’t have parents with the right legacy status … or a fat enough check book.    

In the end, my son was right — his interest in learning music and improving his technique was the priority, and he found a college that recognized the value of his intellectual interests over his short-list of organized extracurricular activities. Note that this kid also refused to prepare in any way for the SAT, and he never had much of an interest in his GPA, yet he read incessantly, taught literature classes at the local public library, and spent a lot of time thinking about all sorts of things — including art, music, poetry, the value of family, and our place in the continuum of the universe. He was not intellectually lazy, though he could never be accussed of being a teacher pleaser, including in the ensuing years when we decided to home-school him and I became his teacher. He was intellectually intense, though still very much a comedian, but, more important, he was true to the process and joy of learning, which doesn’t always manifest through being the class president or having a 4.5 GPA. There are lots of kids out there who are just like him.

For those of you mired in stacks of college applications, I want to assure you that it all turned out just fine. My son found the perfect college — one that met his high standard for providing an intellectually demanding and authentic learning environment, and one that focused on academic substance over physical window dressing. I held my breath when he submitted only one college
application, something I would not advise to others, but I have since recovered from my heart attack, and my sleepless nights, and am here to tell you that he graduated from that college last year, and is now a 19 year old doctoral student at a similarly wonderful and unique university (though not one that bears a blue-blooded name that gets A-list movie placements). And he is thriving.

As a very dear friend of mine used to always remind me, there is a lid for every pot! Indeed, my son found his lid, almost in spite of me. This is a long way of saying that it might be more benefial for our children to figure out who they are and what they values, and then find a college that honors those attributes and values, than it is to find the college that has the right name, or the most beautiful buildings, or the highest US News ranking, or the most exclusive eating clubs, and then figure out how to become the person that will most appeal to the admissions officers at that school. When we honor our children for who they are, which might not always be exactly who we want them to be (which is often times an expression of who we wished we would have been), they will find the right way and they will succeed. If you are fighting with them to finish those college application essays, there might be a reason that needs deeper exploration.

And while it may be true that most of our world leaders went to Ivy League schools (and for many, it was their family lineage that facilitated both circumstances), not all Ivy League graduates have become world leaders. Some of them even took down the global economy.

(Brainstorm illustration derived from a photo by Flickr user eyeliam)