I was standing outside at the West Traffic Circle with three mothers I know well while they were waiting to pick up their children. One mother, who everyone would recognize as having a balanced parenting perspective and a wholesome, engaged child, told us that her daughter admonished her the other day by saying, "Mom, you left my trumpet outside."
We all laughed, including the daughter, because it was such an absurd thing for a child to accuse a parent of — neglecting to bring in the child's possessions to protect them from the weather.
The parents discussed a useful book from 2002 that helped one of the mothers understand how to raise teenagers. The title of the book, which just about tells you all you need to know, is Mom, Get Out Of My Life. But First Can You Drive Me And Cheryl To The Mall?
We laughed again.
I remarked to these three involved, appropriate parents that I have observed in the six independent schools I have served that there is a particular challenge for parents of any stripe but especially parents of relative high income to know the line between providing for their children and conveying the inaccurate message to their children that they're entitled to riches and wealth and possessions. I've talked often about how we don't always protect our children by protecting our children.
As your child grows from the age where he does need to be protected to the age — it is different for every child and in every family — where he no longer needs to be protected, how does a parent know where that line is, what the age is, and what the the right moment is to let their child stumble, fall and learn that he can pick himself up again without any help from his parents or other adults?
As a parent now of two post-college children who are supporting themselves and of whom their mother and father are proud, I know that is not an easy parenting decision, made dozens of times every day by all of us.
This challenging question of when not to hover as parents led me to say to these three Country School mothers that I think there are two kinds of parents in this world: those who carry their children's backpacks to the car at the end of the day and those who do not.
That sounds accusatory because many of us as parents, quite rightly, help out when a child is struggling with an unwieldy science project or has a heavy gym bag and a heavy book bag. But there are other times that a parent picks up the backpack to speed things along and to make sure the child does not leave it behind on the playground or on the courtyard bench.
But what if the child did forget the backpack and had to walk all the way from his car back to the bench to get it? How many times after that would he forget it, dreading that avoidable walk back-and-forth?
Or what if she really forgot it because she was distracted by her friends and left it at school and could not do her homework at night without, like an old fashioned 10-year-old, calling one of her friends — or emailing, face-timing, etc. – to ask what the homework is and ask that friend to snap a photo of the page out of a textbook with the assignment? Would that help the student become more independent, accelerating her natural growth in independence and responsibility?
These are not easy questions and I don't mean to be flip about the fact of there being two kinds of parents, those of us who carry our children's backpacks and those of us who don't.
We tend to carry our children's backpacks home because we know they are heavy. But what if our children sensed themselves how heavy the backpacks are and spent another 90 seconds in front of their lockers at the end of the day, not chatting with their friends but thinking really hard about which books, folders and assignments they needed to take home that night — adding weight to their backpacks — and which assignments, folders and textbooks they did not need to lug home that night?
Eventually we do that as adults, right? We don't bring materials home from the office unless we have an intention to work on it. We want that same discretion and decision-making in our children and we want them to feel the weight of a book in their backpack that they don't need in their backpack, don't we?
How about this, then? There are two kinds of parents in this world: those who think about the right moment to stop carrying their children's backpack and those who are still on the threshold of growing their child toward independence.
This parenting stuff is not easy and the ambiguity of no definite right answer is fatiguing. But having your child someday fully independent makes it all worth it.
