Changes

Welcome (back) to my (new) blog and my (new) website.

New design, new essays.

Same commitment to empowering students and inspiring parents.

Are you in the best relationship of your life? I certainly hope so. I hope you and your partner are snuggly and cuddly whether you’ve been together for one month or 50 years. I hope you have lazy Sunday mornings where you take a walk, have a leisurely healthy breakfast, and enjoy one another’s passions the rest of the day: books, movies, crossword puzzles, your favorite sports teams, shared interests. I hope you appreciate how lucky you are to have found and have one another. 

But maybe things are terrible. Maybe there are power and control issues. Deciding whether to get Chinese or Italian for dinner makes the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty look pleasant and agreeable by comparison. Every conversation feels like a brittle negotiation segueing into a familiar unpleasant argument. Maybe you spend your time with mediators, forensic accountants, and divorce attorneys quarreling over who is going to get the saucepan that what’s-her-name gave you as a wedding present all those years ago. Maybe your separation makes Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas (the new one with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch is also worth watching) in War of the Roses seem like an instructional video.

I certainly wish for you the former situation—joy, fulfillment, contentment—rather than the latter—resentment, regret, feeling like you’re trapped, trying to remember what you ever saw in each other. 

I don’t have any advice for you if you find yourself deciding whether to leave a bad situation. Ann Landers used to ask “are you better with them or without them?” They are always a few minor reasons to stay—economics, fear of the unknown, the devil you know is better than speed dating.

Wait until the kids go off to college is a theory that has its adherents although I frequently wonder if staying in a bad marriage models a poor decision for the kids, whether ultimately the kids would be happier watching independent people start their lives over as best they can.

Again, no particular insight. I study child development, adolescence, education, and college admissions. I tour boarding schools and colleges and I talk to families about where their children survive and thrive. I would not pretend to be an authority on marriage. But I do frequently recommend that students, if at all feasible, get divorced from their current schools.

Sometimes there are no options—geography, economics, or logistics make change impractical. But there is frequently a way to make a bad situation tolerable. “You made a commitment to a math class” and “colleges want to see an A in AP Calculus” are poor arguments. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” suggests Hamlet in Act II, scene ii, but he is an unreliable narrator who, to my knowledge no matter how many times I reread the play, never even had to take pre-calculus at the University of 16th Century Denmark.

Hamlet is stuck in a bad situation, and, as you remember, the stage is littered with corpses by the end of Act V. Your kids don’t necessarily have to stay in the wrong school or the wrong class. “You have to follow through with multivariable calculus, that’s what you signed up for” makes as much sense as devoting your one and only life to an untennable marriage. If by studying three hours a day, seeing the teacher for extra insight before and after school, working with a study buddy and a tutor, allows you to be successful, by all means make it happen, suck it up, do the work. But if you’re sitting in class day after day absorbing nothing (imagine spending an hour after hour in a Swedish literature class—if you don’t speak Swedish) it’s time to transfer.

The analogy for staying or leaving a bad marriage is hardly a perfect analogy for keeping your children in the wrong high school math class or college choice. There might be reasons to stay in a bad marriage. But the reasons to stay in an imperfect match for high school are meager. It may be the case that there are no choices, that economics or geography, restrict movement. But if it clear that your child should be elsewhere, now would be a could time to make the switch.