parents

Kids today still turn to their parents when they have something important to say, but increasingly, kids are looking to teachers to be role models and to provide guidance, according to this year’s   Highlights State of the Kid™survey  . Of the 2,000 kids polled, 25 percent said that they admire and respect their teachers because they are caring, loving, and kind. My own ten-year-old supports this finding because he told me about his teacher’s kindness on the first day, and subsequent days, of school.

This kind of feedback is a giant warm hug of gratitude to educators from U.S. children. It signifies that teachers realize the critical role of a caring relationship in learning. In fact, research backs up the idea that learning takes place—and brain connections are strengthened—when students feel connected to their teachers, fellow students, and the larger school community.

Kids’ perceptions of teachers as role models of kindness and caring point to a growing movement in education to focus on actively creating caring learning environments and promoting the whole child’s development—physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. Social and emotional learning in schools means actively working to create a safe, caring, and connected school community in which students feel a sense of trust and belonging and cultivate skills like self-awareness, empathy, and responsible decision-making.

And parents agree! In my own survey of parents, 95 percent said they felt social and emotional skill development was the most critical of all skills for their child’s success in school today and for their future lives. So how do we, as parents, work with our child’s educators on this critical issue? Here are a few simple ideas.

1. Ask what your school does to promote relationships and social, emotional, and academic development. Approach your child’s teacher or the school’s parent-teacher association. (Here’s a tool to begin that conversation.)
2. Learn more together as partners. Check out my site, Confident Parents, Confident Kids, to learn more about the power of social and emotional learning in schools.
3. Get involved. Now more than ever, parents realize that involvement in their children’s education is key to their success. Ask in what ways you can give of your time. It doesn’t have to be volunteering in the classroom.

Show care and gratitude. It’s easy to get caught up in hearing the negative aspects of what’s going on at school. Instead, make a point of asking your child about the positives. What’s going well? What do you like about your teacher? Then, share your gratitude with the teacher. Let her know you notice. Complimentary words at pick-up time or a note from you can make a teacher’s week!

“Adam just caught the most gigantic bass, Mom,” my son exclaims as if Adam is a neighbor, a school friend, or at the very least, someone I know. But I quickly realize my eleven-year-old son is referring to one of his favorite “YouTubers.” Adam and others like him are creeping more and more into my son’s conversation and I recognize he’s learning new terminology, visiting new places, and encountering a host of new experiences. For this reason, I am eager to get to know Adam, understand the reason for my son’s enthusiasm, and explore what he is teaching through his videos.

My son is not alone. A large number of U.S. children have told Highlights in their 2018 State of the Kid survey that celebrities are a key and growing influencer in their lives. Yes, parents remain the top influencer and second and importantly, teachers also capture children’s admiration. But increasingly our children also look to the personalities on their screens for role modeling. Whether it’s an e-gamer (playing competitive video games) or a reality television show star or a professional athlete, fifteen percent of children ages 6-12 report that they admire and respect celebrities. In addition to noting that those role models are caring and kind, they said they were generous, helped others, were smart, and knowledgeable.

It’s no surprise that celebrities are rising in their influence considering that the average child is on screens between seven and eight hours per day. As parents, we know the dangers that lurk with a simple word search and click of a “return” key, so we may feel worried, even fearful, as our child explores the world through our home screens. Yet if she or he were to join a club, organization, or extracurricular, we wouldn’t hesitate to get to know those involved. The same is true for our child’s digital community.

We have an opportunity to lean in and learn from our resident experts and enthusiasts, our children. It won’t serve our trusting relationship if we play “Gotcha!” attempting to catch our child straying into the danger zone. But if we genuinely express interest and allow our child to lead our exploration, they may just grant us entry. We’ll have the chance to become reflective with them about what they are viewing, preparing our kids with the skills and tools they need to become screen smart. In turn, we’ll grow in our own ability to trust their new and ever-expanding world.

How to Connect Over Celebs

Getting to know our child’s influencers when we can shake a hand and make eye contact seems do-able. But what about celebrity influencers? How do we get to know them? Here are a few tips for parents.

1. Ask your child about their interests and influencers with an open mind.

Though we may fear what they could run into as they surf the web, their digital community is just that, yet another group they engage with. If your child joined a school club like the Girl Scouts, you’d learn more about all of the individuals involved. So too with their digital community, get to know the players involved led by your child.

2. Select and review new content together.

Help your child learn to become proactive about reviewing appropriateness of content with you and explain why that’s important showing the benefit. If your child has ever encountered a terrifying video, ask if those images have stayed in his or her mind. That’s an easy, relatable way to explain that not all content is appropriate or desirable (for kids and for adults!). Seek out review sites like Common Sense Media. Together type in the new app, game, or movie and learn more before viewing!

3. Share regular updates on influencers.

At family dinners, the conversation may naturally turn to the events of the day. If you know that a YouTube star is influencing your child, then bring that influencer into your conversation. “What’s he up to lately?” If that star makes a poor decision that could herself or others, discuss her other choices and the real-world consequences of those choices. Keeping an open conversation can not only give you invaluable insights into who your child is looking to for social cues, but also could keep your child safe, since she’ll know she can come to you if and when there is a problem.

4. Replace fear with curiosity and empathy.

After all, fear comes from the unknown. If we, as parents, are in touch with our child’s influencers, we don’t have to fear them. We can recall our own experiences of teen idol posters taped up on our bedroom walls. Or recall when we dog-eared and carefully noted the time when a television special would air our favorite star. Our children are feeling that same glow of admiration. And we can join in their enjoyment as we cuddle up next to them and their iPad to learn more.

The community of influencers on our children has and will continue to grow. Our ability to reach out, learn, and connect with those individuals will only deepen our trust and intimacy with our children. As for me, I’m delighted that my son, his friends, and indeed U.S. children are focused on learning from adults who are caring, kind, and generous.

On special occasions, like birthdays, my parents would let my sister and me share a can of soda with our dinner. I remember how we would put two identical glasses side-by-side on the table and take turns pouring a little soda into each of them, periodically checking, like surveyors measuring a million-dollar property, to make sure that both glasses contained exactly the same amount of liquid, down to the last milliliter.

We measured our parents’ love in the same way, always vigilant to make sure we got equal amounts of it: equal amounts of attention, affection, praise, and presents. If one of us ever felt she was not getting her fair share, our home would ring with that most aggrieved accusation in the siblings’ handbook: “You love her more than you love me!”

In less emotional moments, one of us might slyly pose the only question that makes mothers and fathers more uncomfortable than the one about where babies come from: “Who do you love more, her or me?”  Every parent knows there is no answer that will satisfy the child who asks this question. If you say you love both or all of your children the same, the kid won’t buy it. He’ll either think you’re humoring him and try to wheedle another answer out of you, or suspect you’re not telling him the truth because you love his brother or sister more (or less) than you love him but don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

The problem is that “Who do you love more”” isn’t the right question. It’s not a matter of the amount of love you have for each of your children; it’s about how and why you love each of them, how you express your love to each, and what you particularly love about one or the other. Try explaining that to a six-year-old!

The fact of the matter is that if I had to divide my heart between my son and daughter, I have no doubt the two parts would come out equal. But if I had to describe my love for each of them individually, it wouldn’t sound the same, for the simple reason that they are not the same people. I love my son’s gentleness, his protectiveness toward those he cares for, his instinctively sunny disposition. I love my daughter’s engagement with the world, her curiosity, the intensity of her feelings and beliefs. As mother and daughter, she and I share more of our emotional lives with each other, while with my son, I share a sweet, easygoing camaraderie. How can I even out the lump sum of such an assortment of sentiments and attachments in a way that they will understand?

Growing up, both kids had gripes about the unequal (i.e., unfair) treatment they felt they sometimes received from me. My son complained that I spoiled his sister, that I indulged her and got her anything she wanted. My daughter grumbled that I was more lenient with her brother, that I laughed at some of his misbehaviors, the same misbehaviors for which she got scolded.

I here and now freely admit that their grievances were absolutely legit! I did buy daughter more, because she seemed to need more—more clothing, more paraphernalia, more stuff —while my son seemed to need less. (We’re talking about a boy who could wear the same shirt for a month and not notice.)  I did scold him less, because he knew how to charm the anger out of me by explaining himself in a way that made my stern face crumple with amusement. But did these inequities mean that I loved her more than him or him more than her? Not for a minute.

So, where does that leave us? Maybe there’s a mother out there somewhere who knows how to satisfy her children’s incessant desire to extract the inexplicable, but my own best guess is that we’re back where we started, with “I love you the same amount,” amount being the operative word. Although that answer might not be complete, and it might not pass muster with our kids, it is truthful—at least for me it is. My heart is filled with love for my children, and the feelings I have for each are bound together inextricably. One of them may take up more space in there one day, the other loom larger the next. But there is always plenty of room for both. 

“I want a dog,” Caroline begged. “Please.” Our daughter was seven years old and had made up her mind.

“Someone will have to take care of the dog,” we told her. “It’s a lot of responsibility.” I had a full-time job and we had two children. We already had enough responsibility.

“Then let me get some kind of pet,” Caroline pleaded. “Any kind of pet.”

So we all talked about what kind of pet Caroline might get. It would have to be easy to care for and inexpensive. A cat? Too stinky. A bird? Probably too noisy. We decided on a goldfish. You never had to walk a goldfish. They never barked or whined in the middle of the night. They could swim around without a collar or a license.

Caroline really loved her little goldfish. She named him Rainbow. She sprinkled food into his fishbowl once a day and cleaned it once a week. She wished Rainbow good-morning and good-night and asked him how he was doing. She even asked him if he had enough light to see where he was going and if he preferred a different location in her bedroom. A more dedicated owner no pet goldfish ever had. Given the chance, I’m sure Caroline would have taken Rainbow out for a walk too.

But then, just a few weeks later, Rainbow died. My wife and I discovered him dead, floating without a flutter on the surface of the water in his bowl, and had to tell Caroline. That was hard for us to do, just as we knew it would be. She broke down in tears, and we had no success comforting her. We offered to get her another goldfish, but she said no thank you.

How and why Rainbow died we have no idea. But no foul play was ever suspected. Maybe he was old or sick. Maybe he missed his pet-store friends.

Now came another tricky issue: what to do with the body. As it happened, it was summer, and we belonged to a beach club on the Atlantic Ocean. Caroline came up with the idea: we would bury Rainbow at sea. 

So off we went to our cabana, Rainbow adrift in a plastic bag filled with water. We shuffled in our sandals on the hot sand toward the shoreline. Caroline stood there with us holding the bag.

She told Rainbow she loved him and was sorry he had died and would miss him. Then she said good-bye and dropped Rainbow into the surf. The waves quickly wafted her pet goldfish out into the ocean and out of sight. Caroline slowly waved good-bye, crying.

Losing Rainbow was how Caroline first learned that nothing is guaranteed to last forever. It also showed us just the kind of daughter my wife and I were lucky enough to have. Sensitive to the suffering of others, particularly the helpless, such as babies and other small creatures. She hated to see the vulnerable hurt.

Empathy and compassion are hard to teach, if they can even be taught at all, but maybe they can be learned from experience. Caroline knew how it felt to be hurt. Sometimes kids in school made fun of her because she was small, just like Rainbow. She never told me about any of that; I had to find out from Mom. Now maybe her sympathetic nature came naturally. But more likely, it was early on that she came to understand and identify with anything small.

That’s also why Caroline grew her hair and gave it to Locks of Love for children who go through chemotherapy. It’s why she breaks into tears at scenes in certain movies about a hardship—Dumbo separated from his mother, for example—and at the sight of a dog limping along missing a leg.

Caroline is still like that today. Just ask Coco and Edgar, her two rescue dogs.

As a toddler, our son Michael came into our bedroom at night to sleep on the carpet near our bed. He never knocked on the door or asked to come in or tried to climb into our bed with us. He always conked out on the side near his mother. Obviously, just being near us—or, rather, her—gave him a sense of security.

I’m sure my wife felt flattered by his wish to be close to her, though she never said so. Who could blame Michael, really? I mean, there he was—what, two, three years old?—in his room down the hall from us, thinking, Hey, it’s dark in here and I’m all by myself. And then I can imagine his just deciding, Look, enough of this alone-in-the-dark stuff. I want my Mom.

All around, it was really cute.

Michael’s habit of silently slipping in to join us lent our nights an aura of mystery and suspense. I remember waking up and wondering, Is he here yet? He would make his entrance at different times, most likely whenever he felt the need, rather than going by any regular schedule. And then I might look down, and there he would already be, sprawled out with his eyes closed and his head on a pillow, all tucked under his blanket. And so night after night in he would come, our reliable little visitor, bundled in his baby-blue pajamas, the three of us sleeping together in the stillness and the quiet until morning.

This little ninja routine of his brought its problems, though. For example, I would get up at night to go to the bathroom and either almost step on him or trip over him. So we had something of an issue there: I wanted to avoid hurting him—and myself.

And then, Michael turned four, and I started to wonder how much longer he planned to be our nighttime roommate. I suspected he was getting a little too old to depend on our company all night. And of course, the older he got, the more he grew, creating a larger obstacle.

Now, please understand. I loved having our little guy there. Some nights I would kneel down next to him in the shadows and look at his beautiful face, just watching him breathe. But I was concerned about squashing him, and said so to his mother.

“Maybe Michael should sleep through the night in his room from now on,” I said. At a certain point he would need to learn to sleep by himself, just as everyone does, and maybe the sooner the better. I wanted only what was best for him.

“It’s fine,” his mother said. “It’s no big deal. He’ll stop coming in when he’s ready to stop coming in.”

Naturally, I worried about what the future might hold if we took this course of action with no cutoff point. Michael would be sleeping with us in our bedroom at the age of 10, and then at 20, and then at 30. He would graduate from college, start a job, get married, even have kids, but still there he would be, sleeping on the carpet next to our bed. And all along my wife would be saying “It’s fine; it’s no big deal. He’ll stop coming in when he’s ready to stop coming in.”

But one night only months later, I looked next to the bed and four-year-old Michael was nowhere to be seen. And the next night, too, and then the night after. And eventually I went to his bedroom to check on him and there he was, warm under the covers, at last secure enough alone to stay put. 

And for just a quick moment, proud as I felt of our son, I wanted to invite him to come back.

I was having breakfast recently with the appealing young woman who used to be my little girl, when she suddenly looked across the table and, out of the blue, began reminiscing about a game we used to play when she was in the first grade. "Remember how you'd put the cereal boxes in a circle on the kitchen floor,” she asked, “and then spin me around until I stopped in front of one of the boxes, and that would be the one I had for breakfast?" I smiled, flashing back to the hurried mornings when that game had been the only way I could make sure she didn't spend a precious five minutes pondering her cereal choices and wind up missing the school bus.

So many conversations with my children today start out with the words: “Do you remember...?”  The question always delights me. It feels as if they are extracting some happy detail from their childhood and presenting it to me like a gift. After all, kids are the repositories of our parental pasts, and when their memories are good ones, we can feel gratified. 

Our children often remember the little things that we, their parents, may not. So, just as I will never forget sitting on my father’s lap raptly listening to his nightly stories about a made-up, Orphan Annie-like character he called “Garbage Can Mary,’’ my grown-up daughter remembers how I pretended my fingers were “tickle bugs” and used them to tickle her awake in the morning. And just as I can still picture my mother hand-delivering trays of tea and toast to me whenever I was sick in bed, my son fondly recalls how I sat on the floor of his room and read him a book—about a mighty steam shovel, or a courageous dog, or a legendary first baseman—every night of his young life. 

Of course, our kids are bound to remember the times when they felt we were mean or unfair. I have many such misdemeanors on my rap sheet, and have found that the best way to deal with them is to either express regret, if I think they have a good a case against me, or explain myself, if I think they don’t have all the facts. 

So, when my daughter, at the age of 18, accused me of refusing to get her the American Girl doll she claims she begged me for when she was 10, I speculated that I probably hadn’t taken her request seriously since, as I remember it, she never liked dolls and wouldn’t play with the little girl next door who did. While I ultimately did say I was sorry she’d been disappointed about the doll, I immediately went on to enumerate some of the half million other things she’d asked for that (often against my better judgment) I had bought her.

Despite my daughter’s complaint, I’m convinced that it’s not the American Girl dolls and the X-boxes that count most with our kids, but the daily time and attention, comfort and fun we give them as regularly as we give them dinner. At least these are the things that seem to spring into their minds most often— treasured memories that fit into their pockets and that they carry out into the world, where they become signposts for their own behavior as parents.

I wish I’d grasped this essential truth earlier on. I might not have fretted so much about not getting them every little thing their hearts desired.  Maybe I didn’t listen hard enough to my own childhood memories. If I had, I would have realized that I knew all I needed to know about which ones matter the most. I only hope I’ve passed that lesson along, intact, to my children.

I recently had back-to-back conversations with two distressed mothers. One, the parent of a preschooler, described how a tantrum her four-year-old son had thrown at a public playground had left her feeling helpless and more than a shade embarrassed. The other, the mother of a college graduate, felt wrung out by her 24-year-old daughter’s failure to honor some much-discussed, carefully negotiated responsibilities.

Despite the varied circumstances and the 20-year difference in their children’s ages, both women were left with the same ache: an acute feeling that she had failed as a parent. I have little doubt that had either of these women been a witness to, rather than a participant in, the very same dramas, she would have regarded the under-siege mothers with empathy of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God variety.

But these incidents involved their children. So, each of these mothers felt that she could have handled the situation better—if only she had maintained a cool head and not let anger or impatience gain the upper hand.

It never goes away, this feeling that we parents must somehow get it right, each time, every time.

Here’s the thing: we don’t.

Here’s the other thing: like our kids, we’re only human.

That may sound obvious, but, in the course of our daily lives, we tend to juxtapose our grown-upness against our children’s immaturity. What reflects back is the enormity of the age, wisdom, and experience divide. Sure, our kids act out. They’re kids. We’re adults. We should know better than to … (pick your brand of self-poison: yell, snap, or turn a cold shoulder; play deaf, use harsh language, or threaten penalties we know we won’t enforce).

I don’t know about you, but I was at my peak as a parenting expert when I was still childless. Back then, I’d watch parents respond to a child’s provocative behavior with hapless attempts to reason or calm, and I’d think: If that were my kid, I wouldn’t put up with that! If that were my infant crying on an airplane, I’d make her stop! If that were my son mouthing off, I’d make him zip his lip! If that were my daughter not doing her chores, I’d show her who makes the rules around here!

Parenting is easy—when you’re not a parent.

For those of us who actually have kids, however, here’s what we learn while our tots are still in Onesies, then keep learning over and over as they progress from soiled diapers to school sports uniforms to seductive sundresses and staid business suits: they may be our kids, but each of them is very much his or her own person. 

If you have more than one child, you witness this daily as your kids grow under your roof. While this one craves your praise and approval, that one wants you to stop telling your friends that he got a part in the school play. While this one demands your undivided attention, that one wishes you’d disappear and leave her alone. This one disintegrates into tears because she’s colored outside the lines; that one finds delight in taking crayon to freshly painted wall.

The marvel isn’t only how different they are, but how differently they respond to the same parental cues. The coaxing that works like a charm on your son’s intransigence is inflammatory nagging to your daughter’s ear. The disappointed sigh that halts your toddler’s tantrum is toxic fuel for your tween’s melodrama.

This isn’t science. This is life. Your life—and theirs. It might help to remember that the next time you’re confronted by one of life’s more challenging parenting moments. When given the benefit of distance, by all means reflect, revise, and strategize. But remember, too, that in the heat of your child’s upsetting behavior, you offered the best you could.

In other words, forgive yourself. Chances are, your child already has.