Dear MMS Families,

The instinct to survive. It propels powerfully our feelings and behaviors: “You can take the person out of the Stone Age, evolutionary psychologists contend, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person.” (Nigel Nicholson). This school year, I’ve noted three cautionary stories for parents. If we are not self-aware, far-sighted, and self-regulating, the emotions the ancient survival instinct can provoke in us toward our children–no matter our pedigrees or level of education—can subsume us in fear and greed. The instinct can provoke us to act shortsightedly, self-defeat, and cause great harm. The good news: there’s a hack for this.

Cautionary Tales:

The first caution is the scandal from last November connected to T.M. Landry, a private school serving predominantly low-income students of color in the high-poverty town of Breaux Bridge in Louisiana. The school had become famous for its viral videos showing their students happily receive acceptance notices from selective colleges. The education here focuses almost solely–starting even in 7th grade–on preparing students for the test used for college admissions, the ACT. Sadly, investigative reporting revealed that the school’s owners doctored students’ transcripts in order to wildly inflate their academic credentials. The owners also sent completely fabricated stories to colleges about their students’ life struggles (e.g., fictional stories about childhoods of abandonment and abuse, of alcoholic parents, of noble community service projects and boot-straps self-improvements). The owners cynically played on the heart strings and civic-minded ideals of college admissions officers; they also submitted their students to corporal punishment and screaming. The survival instinct, it seems, motivated the owners–and to some extent the students and parents–toward an irrational belief that rich, deep learning and healthfully developing the mind and character are not as important for survival. Rather, getting admitted to a name-brand, competitive college is it–whatever the ethical costs.

The second caution: the behaviors recounted in the recent college admissions scandal. Why so many affluent and well-connected parents thought it smart to break laws and basic morality to ensure for their children spots in name-brand colleges is a bit of a mystery. In terms of the survival instinct, certainly the children of these families will be fine and well taken care of in their lives, regardless of the names of the colleges from which they graduate. If not fear for their children’s physical survival, perhaps it was “identity survival,” the parents’ own fear of feeling “less than” if they could not proclaim that their children attended coveted colleges. Or even perhaps it was a misplaced idea of emotional survival. Something like, “My child needs to get into her dream school, otherwise, she’ll be crushed, and I can’t let her feel crushed.” Finally, it could just be old-fashioned greed: “I have the resources to take what I want and get around the system. I will take it.” (This may be the most obvious explanation: a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, whose results have been replicated, suggests that as we become wealthier we face a real risk of becoming less ethical, as well as less compassionate.) Regardless of what we discern as armchair psychologists, the damage created by the parents’ fear- and/or greed-based behavior is profound—on their children’s lives, in our society’s faith in the integrity of institutions of higher learning, in the motivation of our own children to continue to believe that hard work and honesty are rewarded.

A third, final caution: the recent New York Times piece, “High School Doesn’t Have to be Boring” noting that in the U.S. from 5th grade to 11th grade, there is a forty-three percent decrease in levels of student engagement in their classes. And, that it is usually only in the extracurricular, in which students have more choice, agency, collaboration, and presentation opportunity, when high school students are truly engaged in their learning. (…sounds like Montessori to you, too?)

The authors summarized what they learned after visiting a wide variety of thirty high schools from around the nation: “In lower-level courses, students were often largely disengaged; in honors courses, students scrambled for grades at the expense of intellectual curiosity. Across the different class types, when we asked students to explain the purpose of what they were doing, their most common responses were ‘I dunno‘ and ‘I guess it’ll help me in college.'” Sadly, we know that this thinking is off: The skills most important for our children’s future in the globalized, rapidly changing world are intellectual curiosity and the capacity to problem solve complex challenges through critical and creative thinking. Just “getting in” to college is not enough preparation for an independent, successful, and meaningful adult life.

The Hack:

Don’t want to be driven by panic and terror as you parent? Here’s the parenting hack that will lessen the likelihood that irrational survival fears compel you to create a mechanistic, transactional, anxious, and fraught childhood for those you love most:

Step 1: Make a list. When you launch your child/children from your home as young adult(s), what are the important habits of mind and heart (e.g., cognitive, moral, spiritual, social, emotional, ethical) you want them to have most powerfully developed? List everything you can think of.

Step 2: Now, you can only have three: cross off everything you’ve listed until the three characteristics are left that are truly most important to you to see your child/children develop.

Step 3 and beyond: Now, whatever it takes, bring this list of three to every moment of parenting:

• Is raising an “honest” child a top three? Great. So don’t let them cut corners, don’t freak out when they tell you the truth even when it’s not at all what you want to hear, and be sure to affirm and celebrate moments of integrity—theirs and others.
• Is having “passion” for their lives in your top three? O.K., so start really noticing what gets them excited (e.g., ceramics, origami, biology of flightless birds, the oboe, complex number games, snorkeling, street hockey….), and help them find more and more opportunities to explore just that–even if that means schlepping to oboe lessons and letting them learn origami techniques on YouTube.
• Have “highly intellectually developed” on your list of three? To museums and book clubs and summer science experiences you go! Discuss vigorously ideas over dinner. Pose moral dilemmas and push critical thinking during car rides.
• “Socially skillful” and connected with deep friendships? Encourage and support budding friendships. Don’t begrudge driving all over for play dates or cleaning up after raucous slumber parties.

Does this sound simple? Does it sound easy? Because we humans are socially comparative animals, it’s not always so, especially as our children get older. When we hear about our neighbor’s child who took seventeen AP classes, has a 4.6 GPA (that’s actually a thing now), and was waitlisted at that college in Palo Alto, we may think, “Forget your fascination with flightless birds, child! No more books on penguins…we’re going to that tutoring center in the mall to give you an edge!” When we learn that our boss’s daughter got into that insanely competitive college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with just a 3.2 GPA but as a famous volleyball player, we may drop the oboe lessons and push our children to become coxswains on a crew team, because we hear colleges want more good coxswains. Trust me, this all can happen.

Where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water:

As my wife and I continue to raise our 16- and 14-year-old sons, I think often of our list of three (it’s a fun couple’s exercise, by the way). We are not immune to moments and days of parenting panic, but they are farther and fewer between. And when it gets really bad, I have a Wendell Berry poem I turn to to bring me back to reality (below).

Our lives don’t go on forever. On this beautiful spring day, let’s remember to savor our lives as parents, recognizing that our children will have pleasures and pains in their lives and futures we can’t even begin to guess. Let’s equip them with what we have learned matters most in leading good lives, and let’s not forget to find much joy in their sometimes messy processes of growing up–not just their destinations as adults after they move from us. Let’s not forget what really matters.

Happy Spring, MMS!

Sam