Parenting School-Agers

Seth had forgotten his homework assignment at school again. Darn it! Time for another episode in the ongoing drama, "Same old, Same old," playing nightly in our living room, starring me and his Dad as the angry parents and Seth as the child who "didn't live up to his potential."

On cue, when asked where his homework was, he gave us his kid-from-Mars look, the one that said without words, "What.... me? You earthlings make me so very angry...."

Our timing was exquisite, the script so familiar we were pros. Instantaneously my cheeks would burn and my tongue loosen, pouring out the very words from my childhood that I'd sworn I'd never never say to my children. His dad would chime in and Seth would yell back, tapping into the personal ocean of anger that seemed much bigger than homework. "Don't always talk about me!" he'd yell. "I'm a reject. What do you expect?" Time-out meant he got to sulk off to his room, not to be seen until morning. His homework still wouldn't get done, because he didn't know what homework to do.

Act Two always took place in the principal's office.

If we are these perfect parents, why is he so mad? What did we do to deserve all this anger? Why does he feel so bad about himself?

We had to remind ourselves that our kids always have a reason to be angry. Nobody ever asked Seth if he wanted to be adopted. This original, pre-verbal injustice seemed to fuel a lot of issues in our house, certainly not just the saga of undone homework. The first words each of our kids spoke were "It isn't fair!" It's no fun to be the targets of anger, but as their parents, we were always the safe targets, the safest firing range because they trusted that if we hadn't yet rejected or ejected them from the family, we likely never would.

Finally, one night, I was just too bored to play my role. The homework show was depressing. I couldn't bear to hear my eloquent lecture on the virtues of responsibility one more time, let alone listen to my son's and husband's parts. "What's good about this?" I asked myself. Actually, I couldn't think of anything good. So then I reached as far as I could and tried to come up with, "What's funny about it?"

That's because I had once heard some wise man say, "If you're going to tell your children the truth, you'd better make them laugh; otherwise, they'll kill you."

When the curtain went up that time, I said, "You're fabulous, baby! I'm just so amazed by your thoughtfulness, I hardly know what to say. How creative! It took me a long time but I finally figured it out! How could we have been so dense? It's to help us that you're not doing your homework! You're trying to stay in fifth grade next year so we won't have to drive you to middle school. You know how we'd hate waking up an hour earlier to drive the car pool and you're such a good kid, you're trying to let us sleep. You're amazing! Now come over here and test some of this popcorn, just to make sure it's okay to eat."

Seth was so surprised he laughed. Laughter was the spell-breaker. It took the sting out. The good news is the homework show was over. We never spoke of his homework again. The bad news was that his Dad and I had to start waking up an hour earlier to drive him to middle school. It was a lesson for me in reframing: putting a new frame around a behavior or event and looking at it in a context that was directed toward a goal. Our goal had always been to help Seth see himself as someone who could take care of himself, but our prodding had given him the opposite message in a particularly loud voice: "You need us. If we don't push you, you will act irresponsibly and fail. You don't know how to take care of yourself." We knew better; we just had to work on it. We're still doing it. It's the work of a lifetime.

What got in the way was our own stuff. One of the biggest pitfalls was our secret hope to be perfect. Parents can't be perfect. No single interaction, not even the choice of one parenting style over another, will make for perfection. Our kids bring their own temperaments to the process of growing up. We must observe and accept each child's distinctive nature and do what we can to provide the intimate, responsive and loving interactions he/she can respond to. Being good-enough parents is a good-enough goal.

Plain old enabling was another issue on our side of the street. We promoted weakness every time we picked up his shoes, returned his library books, pushed him to do his homework, delivered his newspapers (Oh no, we didn't deliver his newspapers, did we? Well, poor baby, he had a sore toe.... Oh, okay.), removed rocks from his path and stripped him of the joy of saying "I did it myself." We wanted to protect him. We didn't want him to get hurt. Feeling responsible for his feelings, feeling as if we had to make up for the losses he experienced, was really a way of buying his love. It wasn't for him; it to make us feel good about being good parents. The vast majority of things that happen to our children are beyond our control. All we can do as parents is sweep our side of the street and let our kids sweep up after themselves.

Our denial of Seth's struggle with feelings of rejection also needed sweeping away. We loved our children so much; how could Seth feel "like a reject"? How were we failing to give him the love and security he needed to develop high self-esteem?

If we rate rejection on a scale from one to ten, then the experience of being separated from one's birth family has to rate a ten. In an attempt to avoid our own discomfort with associations of abandonment and rejection, we'd always tried to minimize the impact of this experience for our children. "Your mother was too young," or "They didn't have the means to take care of you at that time in their lives," were our attempts to soften our children's feelings about their placements. In fact, it doesn't matter what the circumstances were. The fact is that Seth was placed with our family. No matter how good the reason, he feels rejected in a way that's hard for us to talk about. We stayed so busy trying to make him feel okay about being adopted that we denied the authenticity of his feelings. Our son has always held on tight to what he values - his worn blankie and his teddy from babyhood, his first football, even after the dog chewed up the laces. His experience of feeling rejected has been hard for us to validate. What he needs is acknowledgment and clarification of his feelings, not a model for masking them.

In a complex family system like ours, where the children are the ones identified by outsiders as the ones likely to have problems because they have been adopted, self-disclosure by parents to children has become a great tool to help our kids learn to deal with their own emotional challenges, the losses we can't fix. Whenever I let down my own protective shield and dare to share my real self with my children, the moments of sadness I am not so eager to disclose - like the blues I sometimes feel when I remember none of my children look like me or my irrational fear that something will happen and the whole family will disappear and I will be left alone, or actually feeling twangs of jealousy when my daughter gave birth, or that I worry they will all be infertile because they will have caught it from me by osmosis - something good happens. Sharing my embarrassing hidden stuff with them shifts something in our relationship. Part of feeling real is being trusted with others' real selves. Don't wait to do this. Don't keep yourself from your children. The results of this trust are good.

We believe that high self-esteem has the opportunity to develop through those situations when children feel empowered: the sense of having the resources, opportunities, and capabilities to control their own lives in important ways. We think role models help: human, philosophical, and operational examples that help establish meaningful goals, values, ideals, and personal standards. Valuing uniqueness is another key: the ability to respect qualities that make one special and different and acknowledge receiving respect and approval from others for these qualities. Feeling connectiveness also contributes: an ability to gain satisfaction from associations that are significant and to have these associations affirmed by others. Connectiveness comes from identifying with a group of people, feeling connected to a past or a heritage, feeling we belong to someone, feeling we're important to others, and knowing that the people or groups we're connected to have status.

The best advice is that what really matters most within the family is the capacity for sharing pleasure. Think about this: if it's not fun, change it.

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