Kvelling of the Yiddisha Mama

It’s amazing that a book about the extreme discipline and focus of a high-achieving Chinese-American working mother has sparked a national discussion on parenting priorities. Certainly Professor Chua’s style is highly focused on measurable achievement – top scores, top grades, perfect performances. And David Brooks argues that she’s coddling her girls by keeping them from learning to navigate the social and emotional world.

Every parent I know (an admittedly self-selected set with fairly synchronous socio-economic characteristics) has high expectations of their children and values education. And we have a surprisingly varied array of approaches to conveying that value to our children.  We also value emotional intelligence and struggle to balance letting our kids learn by experience versus coaching them through social situations.  Here are some of our core values and how we are trying to teach them.

• Responsibility - we use homework as an opportunity to develop this value. We expect them to do their homework and do it neatly. If they don’t do it properly, it’s between them and their teacher because that’s how we teach them to be responsible for their own work. But we do check in that they are doing it.
   
• Achievement - we expect them to apply themselves and work hard in school and in their activities. We let them know that we are communicating with their teachers and getting assessments on their effort. We want them to know that we will hold them accountable for making their best effort.
   
• Continuing education – last week, my son asked about his college fund and tuition.  I showed him his account and we looked up tuition at Cal Berkeley and Stanford. He appreciated how much money it would take for him to get an education – and that education is an investment.
   
• Community – we discuss that our children are representing us, our school and our people in the world and that we expect them to treat people with respect and try to make the world a better place. And if they don’t, we express disappointment on par with if they don’t do their best on a test. That said, we believe that they should work out their own disagreements and ask parents for suggestions and advice, but not to fix it. They know we are in their corner, but they have to make their way in the world.
   
• Mastery – every parent I know struggles to get their aspiring Mozart to practice their instrument and we are no different. Each piece of music is an opportunity to achieve mastery. Often, we find that having a performance focuses their practice and the fear of performing badly motivates more effort – resulting in the pride of mastery. 

At the end of the day, my husband and I think you cannot change a child’s inherent wiring but with lots of sleep (11 hours plus per night), good food (no soft drinks, juices or excess sweets), little screen time during the week and consistency in our expectations for school, behavior and music, we have a shot at creating self-directed, well adjusted but ambitious adults who are inspired to make a real contribution to the world.

What are your key values and how do you engage with your children to help them develop them?

Thanking Paraolympic Moms too

My favorite ad campaign of the Olympics, Thanks Mom by Proctor and Gamble, is expanding the community service element of the campaign.  And you can help support Team USA through them.  Originally, P&G offered to pay for the athletes' Moms to attend the games.  MediaPost reports that the company is now extending it that offer to the Moms of paraolympic athletes too and contributing to Team USA.

Their goal is to have all the Moms in the US thanked by Mother's Day.  If you pledge to say "Thanks Mom" before March 21st,P&G will donate a dollar in your honor to Team USA.

Go to Thank a Mom. And don't forget to thank your Mom.

Is Racism natural (and why reading an article before commenting is a good idea)

Obviously not.  Newsweek's cover on Sept. 5 2009 raised the question if children are born racist to be deliberately provocative. The letters to the editor mostly conveyed that the writers didn’t read the article.  My fellow bloggers who are top ranked on Google don’t seem to have read it either – because the article clearly gave anyone who cares about eliminating racism clear actions to move towards that goal.  Apparently Maureen Dowd and Rush Limbaugh also didn't read the article.  If you do nothing else with this post - read the article.  It inspired me to engage with my children on the topic of race.

Children are natural sorters.  It’s ingrained in our brains to sort everything – including people.  We sort by gender and we sort by age and we sort by color.  Of course, society and family assigns values to the sorting – but the fact is, it’s just a sort.  That’s what children are born to do and any effort to tell children not to sort is both confusing (sorting things like numbers, blocks, foods are okay, but other sorting is bad) and fruitless.

The Newsweek article draws on considerable research to educate readers about WHEN to actually talk about race.  The main takeaway for me was that we have to talk about race with our children pretty much as soon as they are aware that they are sorting – around age 3.   In fact, the research showed that society is going to educate our children for us by the time they are 7.  Small window to wire in our values.

Inspired by this research and certain that I haven’t explicitly discussed race with my boys, I brought it up on the way to school.  Of course they knew that people come in all colors and they were fast to tell me about how they are friends at school with children who have different skin tone than their own (different religions too, but that wasn’t our talk). They wanted to share their confusion about the story of Rosa Parks and why anyone ever thought it was okay to make certain people sit in the back of the bus or train because of the color of their skin.  They believed that was just unfair.

We talked about the character of a person – their values and actions – being so much more important than any difference of color, religion, gender (which I had to explain) or age.  It was actually a very easy conversation and one we’ll have again from time to time.

The pundits who seek to agitate for ratings are clearly not reading the material...so let's be careful how much merit we give their opinions - another value we teach our children is that they are entitled to their own opinion as long as it is informed and educated. Simple fear-mongering and agitating is just wrong.

Have you talked with your child about race or any other value in the sorting continuum?  If not, when?