Self Less

Thank you again for your wonderful responses to my blog about our shared delight, our guilty passion. Favorite books to read to your kids is still a thing. In our community anyway. Glowing rectangles have not taken over every family. A math professor in the Midwest is reading Pride and Prejudice to his adolescent daughter. Awesome! Parents all over the country are reading and discussing books with their kids. Many of you were (rightfully) dismayed that I (inadvertently, I assure you) left Charlotte’s Web off the short list. Gregor the Overlander was also repeatedly mentioned. As was Babar, the elephant. Shame on me! My apologies, Queen Celeste!

When I was teaching high school English, I recommended James Thurber’s Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated.  The Bear Who Could Take it or Leave it Alone remains one of my favorites. It won’t take you three minutes to absorb the gentle good humor. Go ahead and give it a quick read and then come back for an insight into our beloved children’s sense of themselves based on a paragraph about two different students.

An 11th grade history teacher is discussing Trotsky’s murder in Mexico. Stalin has previously failed to kill his exiled political rival. But this attempt is successful. Mercader, an agent, pulls a small ice axe from his coat, burying the makeshift weapon two inches deep in the political theorist’s skull. Trotsky wrestles with Mercader, breaking his hand. Trotsky’s bodyguards rush into the room almost beating Mercader to death, but they are too late. Trotsky succumbs to the brutal attack, dying the next day. Three hundred thousand people walk past his casket.

A student listens to the lecture about Trotsky, Mercader, and the ice axe. The student shakes his head, scoffs, raises his hand. When called upon he states unequivocally that the scenario could not have happened as described. “Everybody knows there is no ice in Mexico.”

Another student is graduated first in their class, attends a liberal arts college before matriculating at a technological institute for graduate studies and earning a PhD. When asked about their accomplishments, they suggest that they were lucky, that the other students were smarter. This student is either definigh false modesty or suffering from an advanced case of imposter syndrome.

There are always problems you can solve. There are always problems that you can’t. Einstein struggled relating the four fundamental forces of nature. Protons and neutron stick together; gravity affects objects at a distance. How did Einstein feel about his “failure” to come up with a unified field theory? How did “there is no ice in Mexico” feel about his blindingly inaccurate insight? How does the valedictorian feel about their accomplishments? And most importantly, how can parents help our beloved children feel good about themselves whether they are extraordinarily brilliant or not so much?

I will suggest that should your child throw three touchdown passes on his way to winning the Super Bowl, someone else may make note of the event, mention it on social media perhaps. You, their parent, need not exclaim, “good job!” There will be other indicators of the success, a fifty-million-dollar salary for example. Or a stipend for appearing in a deodorant commercial.

Many parents seem to think that it is their responsibility to bolster their child’s sense of self by incessantly incanting “well done!” Isn’t it a little insulting to suggest that your kid doesn’t know that touchdowns are preferable to interceptions? And shouldn’t the kids be allowed to develop an internal locus of control? “Mom? Dad? I just saved a child from drowning. Did I do good?” said no person ever.

Which is not to suggest that the ill-informed student who suggested that Trotsky could not have been attacked with an ice axe should be castigated. Only that somewhere along the path, they might have learned to think before they speak. And that the valedictorian might have felt better about their gifts.

Allowing our kids to find their own way, ascribe their own meaning, internalize success would be my suggestion. A little silence can go a long way. Screaming at kids when they make an error, doing back handsprings when they don’t, steals from them the opportunity to feel good about figuring it out on their own. Because as any Brown Bear in the Far West will tell attest, “you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”