Designer Children

JGH over at Nyack Backyard wrote a piece recently on the new documentary, Race to Nowhere, and it got me thinking about the driven moms in our little town who feel the need to design their off-spring’s future…map it out and drag them along the path to success.

When I first met Ms. Super Care Mom she told me how to DO IT. “What I have is a file…it is really very simple. Every time Princess Perfect volunteers, is mentioned in the newspaper, joins a club, gets an award or performs in a play—I put it in the file and the whole file is handed into the guidance counselor at the end of the year to become part of her school dossier.

“That is amazing.” I said to the beaming mother. But I was thinking “Amazing the guidance counselor has not gone off the deep end dealing with these parents—she probably either has the patience of Job or is just circular filing this C.V. of teenage brilliance.

Ms. Super Care Mom knows all the tricks to push and pull your kid to the top of the heap and they are all based on good child psychology and strong-arming the school system administrators and teachers. It works and you can do it too, but do you want your child on the top of that heap?

The Man and I were raised in oddly similar laissez faire homes-- packed full of kids with parents who were more artistic than focused. We were fed, clothed and loved and then set loose on the world. There was not a lot of individual attention to FORMAL achievements, but rather constant encouragement to try new things…break rules... be independent.

The Beast and her close friends are, for the most part, unfettered by the chains of an over-scheduled life. Yet, they are busy. They make their own busy—they plan, they build, they create. Our mantra to The Beast has always been— “Try it, you may like it….broaden your horizons” And she does.

God help us when it comes time to do college essays—I am sure the child will decide to film some social media driven event or create street art in response to unseen poverty or whatever passion she is into at the moment rather than write the standard college brag essay.

But that is her and this is a new world.

We are no longer in the 1950’s—what is success today, will be not be tomorrow. As parents, we don’t know where our children's successes will lie, so we cannot give them detail directions how to get there. We can only give them the skills to navigate to find their way—to invent their own future and success.

To quote my favorite educator, Jean Piaget: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists"

Nothing New Under the Sun

Have you ever read the Golden Ass?
No, no, no—it is NOT on the New York Times Best Seller List. Its copyright is circa 100 A.D. Who knew just 100 years after Christ there was SO much going on... magic, sex, scandal, bestiality. It was a REAL eye-opener for me as a 16 year old girl who thought it would be interesting, and super-intellectual, to read this Greco-Roman work that was written so, so long ago...and indeed it was. Needless to say—I could NOT put the book down and I believe that was the moment I decided to major in Classics in college.

But I digress before I even get going....the other day I looked up a quote that I had seen on my day planner from someone I was not familiar with. Dorothy Dix-- “I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. “

I love a little research--so crawling the web I discovered that Dorothy Dix was born in 1861 and died in 1951 and was “the forerunner of today's popular advice columnists, Dorothy Dix was America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death. ( I have ANOTHER hero) Her advice on love and marriage was syndicated in newspapers around the world. With an estimated audience of 60 million readers.”--thank you Wikipedia.

Intrigued by this turn of the century Dear Abby, I, of course, ran to my local library to get more information about her. I LOVE self-help books! How to Increase Your Income by Raising Gerbils, 101 Ways to Heat-Up Your Relationship via e-mail etc.. And I adore what I call popcorn research—Why Women Don’t Negotiate Well, Why Girls Become Insecure at 10, Why Men use Language that Make Women want to Punch Them in the Head...I am a complete addict....so obviously I HAD to find out more about this self-help pioneer via some popcorn research book.

Now what is odd is that because I am completely in love with the IDEA of improving myself...I ALSO have a free subscription to a magazine called: Successful Living...which, of course, I LOVE even though their fact-checkers leave something to be desired. Because, really, who doesn’t want to hear the story of the woman who made millions of dollars developing Bert’s Bees Products after living in a shack with her infant twins once she was abandoned by her husband....Just click here—you KNOW you want to read the story.

As fate would have it in the most recent issue of Successful Living they had a story on Robert Holden, the author of Be Happy. And I found during my “research” --“Miss Dix’s Dictates for a Happy Life.” I will not go through all the similarities between contemporary Robert and old Dorothy since there are SO MANY, and frankly Robert Holden pales in comparison, but here is just the first one:

Dorothy Dix
First. Make up your mind to be happy. Happiness is largely a matter of self-hypnotism. You can think yourself happy or you can think yourself miserable. It is up to you...learn to find pleasure in simple things. If you can’t go to the opera, you can turn on the radio. Nail on your face the smile that won’t come off, and after a bit you will find that it comes naturally.

Robert Holden
For happiness, according to Holden, is simply a matter of choice.



Happiness, Sex, Scandal, Bestiality....some things never change.

Anyone interested in buying a gerbil?