Dr. Madeline Levine’s visit to campus on Tuesday and Wednesday gave the CA community much to think about.  The psychologist and author of the recent Teach Your Children Well certainly provided me with much fodder for future blog posts – so many I could probably use her work as a starting point between now and the end of the year! I will refrain from that temptation but will reflect here on some of the many points she raised that resonated with me.

 

As she elaborated on what she believes makes a parent-child relationship most effective, Dr. Levine noted that boundaries are extremely important, urging parents to establish strong parameters and not seek to be friends with their kids. Adolescents need structure (even as they often push against it) and parents regularly have to make unpopular decisions that pain their children in the short term but aid them in the long run.

 

Studies have shown that the healthiest parent-child relationships set clear delineations between the world of an adult and the world of an adolescent.  Dr. Levine has written that “A loving parent is warm, willing to set limits and unwilling to breach a child’s psychological boundaries by invoking shame or guilt. Parents must acknowledge their own anxiety. Your job is to know your child well enough to make a good call about whether he can manage a particular situation. Will you stay up worrying? Probably, but the child’s job is to grow, yours is to control your anxiety so it doesn’t get in the way of his reasonable moves toward autonomy.”

 

In that light, Dr. Levine also believes that too many of the children she sees in her practice suffer from lack of resiliency because their parents rescue them from too many situations, both large and small.  Many parents don’t want to see their children unhappy--an understandable impulse--but in keeping them from the “blessings of a skinned knee” (to borrow a phrase from the psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel), they also unwittingly impede their emotional development.

 

Dr. Levine freely admitted she has not been perfect in this regard when it comes to raising her own three sons, all of whom had their own unique trajectories into adulthood.  I too recognized some cringe-worthy moments in my own parenting when listening to her.  That level of self-examination is essential, not to make us feel guilty but to support a growth mindset in the way we parent.  Of course it is always easy to see the shortcomings in other people’s parenting--those frailties seem so obvious--but it’s much harder to own up to our faults and issues.  Yet in the end we should all celebrate the fact that we are not perfect, that adults have their own vulnerabilities, both as parents and as adults in our own right.  Our children can learn a lot by seeing us process our own failures and frailties rather than see us as having it “all figured out” 100% of the time.  Parenting is a process.

 

Easier said than done, I know, especially in a relatively volatile and uncertain time. But again, we are all in this together as a school community, so let’s keep talking and working at it.  Our kids are worth the time and energy spent.