The ugly part that I will mostly spare you, the part where I started chewing out my 11-year-old son for being so heedlessly rude and sarcastic on our short walk to school today. I hope he found some uplift at school itself, though considering that this was the first of three math-test-days, I doubt it. Luckily, I got to unburden myself to a mom friend on the way to work. She reminded me of two ideas about raising kids that I strongly believe in, but don’t always live by. So I share.
One idea is that normal child behavior, much like normal adult behavior, often reflects a person’s age and experience—so, whatever your policy on punishments, it’s almost always worth keeping in mind that children behave like children and that fact alone is worth some forbearance. This is obvious with toddlers, right? What’s up with their full-on resistance and despair? They’re toddlers; they’re not inherently “bad” people. As children get older, our expectations and hopes rise with them, but again it’s right and helpful to remember that, more often than not, their “bad” behavior is in keeping with the emotional and psychological maturity of their age. In other words, even when they need to be punished, and need to be told the error of their ways, we shouldn’t be treating them as incorrigible and hopeless little devils, not even for a moment. Today, however, I almost called my son an ass-hole. It was more like: “Why are you behaving like such an ass-hole?” Not anymore.
The other idea came from a friend of my friend, who once told her son this (I’m paraphrasing a paraphrase): “When you’re a kid, you don’t get to choose everything you do, and you’re expected to do well in things that you may not be particularly interested in or good at. But as an adult, with a little luck, you do get choose, and you actually can spend a lot of time doing something you like and are good at. But the other side of it is, right now, as a kid, you still need to try to do your best at everything (even the stuff you don’t like) because that will allow you to be in a position when you’re older to pick what you think you’d really like to do.”
There are lots of good messages packed into that statement that I think Adam needs to hear: Don’t think you’re a failure if you’re not super strong at every subject; but there is good reason to strive on all fronts; you are working towards a future where you can focus on what you like and are strong at.
Oh, my. I got a call from Adam this afternoon, in the middle of writing this note; he was deeply upset about his math test today. My sense is that kids think that tests are worth more than they are because of all the focus on test prep. He was distraught over having spent a half-hour on a question that he couldn’t solve: The last question.
“How many questions were there?” I gently asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“So the last one was hard? You didn’t answer it?”
“Yes.”
“How were the other 23 questions?”
“Good,” he said, sounding weepy but reasonably confidant.
I explained that, in all likelihood, he had a very good day in math.
And I considered how his peevishness this morning might also have been partly connected to pre-test anxiety.
I’m not sure.
Eric Messinger is the editor of New York Family. He can be reached at [email protected].
