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TwitThisThe Trouble With Perfect
You see them everywhere: well-intentioned but overbearing parents, making tsunami-size waves in classrooms and on ball fields. In some school districts, it's become embarrassingly commonplace for assertive parents to pressure teachers to change grades. ("She's eight! Harvard's only ten years away!") Coaches and directors of other extracurricular activities get more of the same. Says Sharon Czelusniak of Queens, New York, a girls' soccer coach for eight years, "We had lots of parents who preferred that their children only play as forwards, even though our philosophy was for the younger kids to learn all the positions."Pushy, grade-grubbing moms and dads take a toll on everyone in the system, not just the children. Surveys show, for example, that "parent management" issues are a major reason many new teachers leave the classroom for other professions, presumably less crazy-making ones.
The Millennials -- kids born after 1981 -- are America's most protected, overwatched generation ever, say Neil Howe and William Strauss in their book Millennials Rising. For a variety of reasons, their baby-boomer parents and other adults have been monitoring them like none other (I sheepishly recall over-monitoring my own Millennial). While no one is recommending we return to the days of wearing dunce caps and sitting in corners, the care of little egos can go too far. As Elisabeth Guthrie, MD, co-author of The Trouble With Perfect, writes, "Is it really to a child's advantage to have a teacher say to a student who's given an incorrect answer, 'That's the right answer to another question'?"
If the multiplication tables or the capital of Virginia are open to interpretation, what can youngsters actually believe? When there are no wrong answers, when grades, talent and diligence all seem relative, why should children bother with accomplishment? (By the way, the Virginia statehouse is in Richmond.)
So how can parents help their kids without "hovering" like helicopters?
For starters, say the experts, parents need to get real about the abilities of their offspring, and then be more honest with them. Children need to be able to "assess strengths and weaknesses, monitor and refine their own performance," writes Mel Levine, MD, in his new book Ready or Not: Here Life Comes. That ability is enhanced when they have clear cues and realistic encouragement from adults they look up to. Director of the University of North Carolina's Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning, Levine notes that self-assessment becomes essential, especially in the years between 11 and 20.
New research in neuro-development shows that this is the stage when the brain's frontal region matures and neural connections become stronger. As this part of the brain begins to specialize -- important wiring for life -- preteens and teens begin to explore and focus on their interests and passions, finding the personal niche that leads to lifelong accomplishment and true self-esteem. What they don't need right now is false data.
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