We raise our children to live in a world whose landscape we can not predict. Like Generals who always fight the last war, we look back on our own childhoods, mine lessons of what worked and what scarred us, and then vow to make our kids the beneficiaries of this wisdom.
But the world has this pesky habit of transforming itself between here and there.
In a lecture on the changing workplace years ago, I learned a factoid that sums up the dilemma: 2/3 of professionals today are working in jobs, and certainly in ways, that did not exist when they were in school. That sounds like a stretch, but then I did a quick mental scan of just my immediate family. My husband finds genes for a living. My mother teaches law classes online. My sister does something that has to do with science research grants that I don't understand. One brother-in-law has a slew of patents for wireless devices. The other brother-in-law helped found a charter school. My sister-in-law studies managed care. I blog every day.
What to tell my children to study in to prepare them for whatever might come next?
Skills can be learned, of course, so far trickier is how to give them the emotional and intellectual foundation that will serve them best. The children of the 70s and 80s grew up in households with two working parents -- who left them more or less on their own. It will make them independent, those parents thought, but the kids felt it as a lack of attention, and now that they are parents themselves, they have vowed to do better.
Which is why no one can accuse today's parents of not paying attention to their children. We measure their every emotion, put video of it on Facebook, analyze it online with friends, applauding and reinforcing along the way. The finish line in this race is getting into college, with the car window sticker serving as proof that attention was paid, children were given all the tools to succeed, and happiness will logically follow.
Which is turning out to be exactly the wrong message to be sending this generation as they head out into the least welcoming and embracing adulthood in decades. The first wave is now looking for work (or camped out in Zuccotti Park, or being tear-gassed in Oakland) and adjusting to the new reality that the world as a whole is not going to tell them how special and unique they are.
Timothy Egan makes this point compellingly on The New York Times website today.
...For all the efforts to raise hyper-achievers, we didn't teach enough of a basic survival skill -- to find joy in simple things not connected to a grade, a trophy or a job.

What was missing in the life message of child-raising was some of the counter-cultural swagger in that 2005 commencement speech by Steve Jobs, the one that made the viral video rounds after his death. If you listen to the whole speech, it is what he says at the end that seems so apt for these years of diminished expectations. "Stay hungry," Jobs said, borrowing an admonition from the creators of The Whole Earth Catalogue, an early bible for him, and equally important, "Stay foolish."...There were those soccer games with no losers or winners, with everybody getting a trophy at season's end. (Even if most parents knew the score.) And all those small bodies trudging home with ridiculously heavy backpacks, loaded down in many cases with SAT prep material for children yet to lose their front teeth. The summertime menu included homework camp. How fun!
...Maybe if I knew that our children would be coming of age in an economy that would crush even the best and brightest among them, I would have cared a little less about their score on an advanced placement history test, and a little more about helping them find happiness in moments at the margin. I hope many of them are doing just that -- without our help.
Have you changed the message you send your children lately? Do you regret any messages you've sent them over the years?
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Of late, because we were all told by the Headmaster of his school that the Westminster exam would almost certainly contain a Dickens passage, all the kids have been reading Dickens this autumn at home. My son reads a ton, but as the exam approached, I began to get nervous that he wasn't reading any Dickens and one day found myself just casually "picking up" David Copperfield at the local library and dropping it on the sofa where he reads at home.
As an erstwhile Catholic, I felt I needed to confess. They tell me that the acknowledging the problem is the first step to recovery...
Delia Lloyd
www.realdelia.com
As for the world she will be launched into: here too there is a fine line that has to be walked between optimism and pessimism. We live abroad, where values are somewhat different: in pure material terms we live modestly by American standards, but enjoy a great public school system and comprehensive, affordable health insurance. In terms of her professional prospects, I'm optimistic and hope this optimism is rubbing off on her. If her choice of career no longer brings the big paycheck it used to, well, she already knows from experience that you can live without the McMansion and every modern gadget and still be happy. (But she'd still like to be rich, anyway.)
I think what motivates parents to hyper-praise is not necessarily a reaction to a lack of praise they experienced, but a deeper awareness and acceptance of the emotional life of children, and use this openness in a very misguided away, thinking that painful feelings are to be avoided altogether instead of acknowledged and empathized with.
Children feel pride when they do something well. Its a natural by product of being human and something parents don't need to feel for them. I hope that parents who are genuinely proud of their kids realize the wisdom in actually stepping out of the way and letting the child find their own sense of accomplishment, their own sense of achievement. That's often how I found mine.
This is perhaps the most insightful statement into what is wrong with parenting these days. How is it that we expect our children to be empathetic or caring when they are not allowed to experience the disappointements of life. The neutering of painful feelings is like not feeling at all.
Born in 1961, I came home to an empty house sometimes, played outside all day during the summer just coming home for dinner, and had an Italian Tiger Mother who insisted that anything less than an A was unacceptable.
I hope I have taught my girls that taking risks (having just closed a business which was the joy of my life for almost 4 years) is worth everything and happiness cannot be measured with dollar signs.