The Smart Parenting Revolution: A Powerful New Approach to Unleashing Your Child's Potential Hardcover - 2005

Excerpt

Chapter One

Blaming the Victim: Disconnecting Children from Their Own Future “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

—Socrates

When we hold an infant in our arms, we all feel it—that gaping awe and amazement as we look at the prints at the ends of those tiny fingers. At that moment, it is as if a door inside our hearts opens—we feel a wave of wonder at the miracle of this child’s uniqueness and potential. My grandmother would have said that we are recognizing their spot of grace.

Before you read further, I’d like to invite you to pause and bring that moment alive again—the sensations, smells, sounds. Where were you? Who else was there? What time of year was it? What was your deepest wish in that moment? If you could have given that child a blessing, what would it have been? What did you dream for that infant? What was your commitment as a parent? And those who stand behind you—grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents—what do you imagine were their dreams and prayers for this tiny bundle of possibility?

In that first moment and a thousand times since, you’ve probably asked yourself how you could best cultivate this being so that he or she could blossom as fully as possible. You are not alone. Parents and guardians throughout history have felt what you felt. They have whispered fiercely, tenderly, lovingly, “I want my child to succeed, to be who he or she is meant to be in this world, to be happy, to know he or she makes a difference. I want to give my child the best I possibly can.”

How does the door close? How do we all forget? Rather than cherishing all that potential, we come to see Martin as “hyperactive” instead of energetic. We think of Sally as “inattentive” instead of imaginative. We label George “oppositional” rather than independent. How do we develop a handicap of trust that limits our perception of the unique island of brilliance on which each child stands? How does our attention shift from what might be natural resources that need to be developed to what could be deficits that need to be fixed? How do we learn to limit what could be possible for our children instead of learning to champion their innate gifts?

This happens gradually, but as they go through school, we shift our focus to what’s wrong with them and how it can be fixed. This is not unique to parents. As a culture, we are experiencing a crisis of understanding that results from the way we have learned to think about our children and the challenges they face. When I was in graduate school studying clinical psychology, I was meticulously trained in the history of pathology. I could sit down with anyone and within thirty minutes, while carrying on a polite conversation, diagnose their particular neurosis down to the numerical classification code. (No wonder, at cocktail parties, when I told people I was a psychologist, they quickly moved away!)

After several years, although proficient in categorizing what was wrong with every person I met, I found myself skilled in knowing how to help someone become sick or crazy. I also found myself feeling removed, remote, and isolated from the very children I wanted to help. My supervisors commended my “professional objectivity.”

I was not atypical. Since 1947, more than $30 billion has been invested in research that follows this deficit model. “The neurochemistry of depression is much better known than that of happiness, mostly because the former has been studied more intensively and for much longer.” As author Dacher Keltner said in the January 17, 2005, issue of Time magazine, “Until a decade ago, 90 percent of emotion research focused on the negative, so there are still all these questions about positive states.”

A recent search of psychological literature revealed 50,000 articles on depression, but only 400 on joy. When my daughter-in-law, Angie, searched the Internet, she found three times as many sites dedicated to learning disabilities as to learning abilities; 746 that track failures, 127 that track successes; 42,020 sites were focused on “What’s Wrong with Me?” and 90 sites were dedicated to “What’s Right About Me?”

We have made significant progress in many areas of individual treatment, especially those using psychotropic drugs. We have gained great proficiency in focusing on individual pathology and dysfunction. However, since this deficit model locates the problem “inside” the individual person and considers meeting the needs of at-risk youth largely a task for professionals, it fosters what could be called a “them” strategy: Since the deficit is inside us (or our children or both), the solution must be outside in “them”—the experts, the schools, the government, the drugs. If they don’t fix the problem, we have someone else to blame: them. This model results in continually dedicating more resources to design more medications, treatment programs, and fixes for the “special needs” children who we categorize according to their pathologies. In October 2003, Time magazine reported that fifteen million prescriptions were written for antidepressants for children and teens. A conservative estimate states that 5 percent of American children today are being medicated for ADD/ADHD, while in England the figure is about 0.3 percent. Are we raising Generation Rx?

What effect has this deficit focus had? In the past two decades, “in the midst of unprecedented material affluence, large and growing numbers of U.S. children and adolescents are failing to flourish. In particular, more and more young people are suffering from mental illness, emotional distress, and behavioral problems,” says the Commission on Children at Risk, a group of thirty-three high-profile children’s doctors, research scientists, and mental health and youth service professionals, in their report “Hardwired to Connect.”

The report continues, “Scholars at the National Research Council in 2002 estimated that at least one of every four adolescents in the U.S. is currently at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.”

In the time it takes me to stare out the window and sip my iced tea, four teenagers tumble through my mind: Curtis, twelve, who doesn’t like to talk a whole lot but is completely at ease break-dancing in front of an audience of two hundred adults; Max, who has to be forced to sit and do homework but can’t wait to volunteer for the Special Olympics; Tiffany, who is considered a troublemaker because she tells it like it is even when it’s not “appropriate”; Latisha, who pushes wheelchairs in an airport after school while dreaming of being a clothes designer. Which one out of these four?

Reluctantly, I return to reading the report: “Despite increased ability to treat depression, the current generation of young people is more likely to be depressed and anxious than was its parent’s generation. . . . About 20% of students report having seriously considered suicide in the past year. . . . Death rates overall since the 1950’s have dropped by 50%, but homicide rates among U.S. youth rose by more than 130%. . . . Suicide rates rose by nearly 140%. . . .”

More children come to mind: Clayton, ten, whose teacher says he’s below grade level, while he secretly draws pictures any artist would envy; Seth, eight, who hypertexts from one imaginary world to another while his parents consider which medication to put him on because he can’t pay attention in creative writing class; Pedro, sixteen, who dreams of playing in a heavy metal band while the other kids mock his crooked teeth and skinny arms; Marc, fourteen, who just got kicked out of school for smoking pot and is being sent to boarding school in the fall. Which one of these four?

There is a tightness in the center of my chest, but I go on reading: “We are increasing our capacity to rescue children who are drowning in the river, but steadily losing ground when it comes to keeping children out of the river in the first place. . . . Treating pathology is not the same as positive youth development. The former focuses on illness and emphasizes the need to direct help to a few of us, the latter focuses on health and emphasizes the need to shift probabilities for most of us.”

What would another way of thinking about children’s challenges be? If a student drops out of school, the deficit model would have us ask: What’s wrong with this child? What’s wrong with his parents? What’s his problem? A different way of thinking would begin with a very different kind of question: What are this youth’s strengths, gifts, and talents? Are they being utilized in school? At home? When has he been successful in the past? How can he use what he’s good at to deal with the challenges he’s facing? What are the energizing and engaging forces available to him? Who does this youth have mentoring and supporting him? What conditions would make it possible for this youth to make a positive difference to his community? It would ask you, the parent or guardian, what do you cherish and appreciate about your child? How can we all nurture that? How could you do more of that?

This kind of inquiry expands our thinking, broadens our attention, connects us to possibilities, widens our options of response, and shifts responsibility for this youth’s health and development where it belongs—to all of us. The strategies that result are “us” focused: They require something from all of us. Together, we have the capacity it takes to support our children in this revolution.

What is required to accomplish this is a shift in perception. We must help ourselves and one another change the way we see our children, ourselves, and our responsibilities. To do this we must change the stories we tell ourselves. We have done this before. In my lifetime, we have unwoven the stories that define how we see women. My mother believed that the only way she could fulfill her role as a woman successfully was to get married (once), have children (two), bake chocolate chip cookies in the oven of her own house in the suburbs (with three bedrooms). Similarly, we have unwoven the stories of what it means to be a family, a man, what it means to work.

What remains to be seen is how we reweave those stories. If our children are to have the kind of future we dream for them, it is clear we must change the way we think about them.

Giving Your Child the Best in a Crazy, Beautiful, Complex World

“Young people are resources to be developed, not problems to be solved.”

—Michael Resnick, Ph.D, Professor of Pediatrics,

University of Minnesota

I have written this book because I believe in “us strategies.” I believe that passionate parents can help their children live up to their potential rather than down to their deficits. I believe all of us can give children the best by bringing out the best in them.

I could not have written this book when I was a parent. I had to wait until I was a grandparent, until I had seen enough and done enough and struggled enough to realize that my granddaughter cannot flourish unless all grandchildren do. Now I can say to you, dear reader, what my grandmother said to my parents, “What you must do is help your children love to learn and find their spot of grace. In this way they will be able to develop their gifts and share them with the rest of us. You must help them recognize and honor the different gifts of others who are also unique. We need them all.” This is what each of us can do so our children will feel as if they matter and as if they belong to this crazy, beautiful, complex world.

When I was twenty years old, I rode the New York City subway every day from Columbia University, where I was a graduate student in psychology, to Harlem, where I was a brand-new first-grade teacher. It was my first year in charge of a classroom. I was assigned thirty-five youngsters, many of whom came to school with rat bites on their faces. Though I had made lesson plans in advance for the first six months, I was completely unprepared for the task ahead of me. My education classes at college had taught me how to color and cut out fall leaves and hang them on the windows of the classroom. I had been carefully instructed in the making of Easter bunnies by drawing two yellow circles on a green sheet of construction paper and attaching a cotton ball with white glue. I had no idea how to make sense of the lives of these six- and seven-year-olds or how to “teach” them anything that was relevant to them. My lesson plans were all about phonically decoding Sally, Dick, and Jane. I didn’t have the vaguest idea how to decipher the squiggling, giggling, squirming, craving little minds that surrounded me.

What saved me (and them) was that I was young, energetic, and then, as now, a “learning junkie.” On my endless subway rides, I became totally captivated by a book called A Man’s Search for Meaning, written by Dr. Victor Frankl, a man who had survived years in Nazi concentration camps by believing in what he called “personal freedom.” He clearly couldn’t change the events that were happening to him, but he realized that no one could take away his right to determine the meaning he placed on those events. In Frankl’s case, he chose to believe that he was experiencing the camps so that after the war he would be able to teach the world about the human need for meaning. It was choosing that belief that saved his soul and gave his life the meaning he needed in order to survive.

Meanwhile, the students in my classroom had more labels in their cumulative folders than the cans in the local supermarket: educably retarded, severely learning disabled, seriously unmotivated, troublemaker, and of course the ever-present “slow learner.” Each of these labels carried an implied story that could imprison them for the rest of their lives. The more experienced teachers in the crumbling school gave me another limiting story, warning me that I had better start by “holding a tight rein,” because once I let it get slack, “they’ll have you up against the wall and take over the classroom.”

What the other teachers didn’t know is that I was, then and still am now, incurably defiant. I chose to believe that those kids were born to learn, and that it was my task to support every one to succeed in doing just that. Mr. Stewart, the principal, warned me at the end of every day that I was a “naïve white girl.” And I was. But I was burning with the fierce belief that each child in that classroom had a spot of grace buried in them somewhere, and I was determined to find it.

I rode the subway the first morning of the school year imagining Victor Frankl as one guardian angel and my grandmother as the other. Under my arm I carried the thick red manual of state and federal education regulations. If only I had been given an operator’s manual to each child along with the classroom register and standardized test scores! Lulled into a wide-minded state by the rocking of the train and my own desperation, an idea began to form in my mind.