Positive Side Effects

I went to an event last night featuring Madeline Levine, whose latest book is The Price of Privilege.  I found the evening quite thought-provoking, so much that it threw me into one of my bouts of middle-of-the-night insomnia, which I have always had from time to time but are really annoying now that I have kids and need all the sleep I can get, but I digress...


Dr. Levine is a psychologist who specializes in working with adolescents and spoke about the trend she and others are seeing, of increasing mental health problems experienced by teenagers - related largely to extreme academic pressures in overly-busy and under-connected affluent families.  She spent some time discussing that not only is the pressure to achieve detrimental, it is also not well-founded.  "Success" in life, has a lot less to do with the grades our children get or the schools they attend and a lot more to do with their ability to take care of themselves, emotionally, financially, and practically, as well as form meaninful relationships with others.

That was the big picture I took away from the lecture.  Among the smaller and more concrete issues Dr. Levine discussed was the role of parenting in a child's academic work: to what extent should we help and to what extent should we allow children to develop their own skills and a sense of self-sufficiency, even if that sometimes means making mistakes?  That part of the discussion reminded me of some things I had heard from parents whose children are in language immersion programs like the one K.C. will be attending.  While many parents considering these programs express concerns about how they will be able to help their children with homework, the parents with children in the program commented that, first of all the teachers design the homework to be done without parental assistance, and that it was actually very freeing for them and their children.  The parents also talked about how they observed their children developing their own resources, including collaborating with peers, to complete their assignments.

Amid the rather daunting subject matter of the evening -- it's so overwhelming to hold these little lives in your hands and in your heart -- there was some small comforting hope that our family has made some reasonable choices so far.