I'm in the midst of deciding about what to do about the two years remaining in my daughter's high school education. My husband and I do not want her to graduate from the school she attends right now. As we look at options, from private schools to online and correspondence schools to home schooling, we then start wondering about our choices for our son. He home schools as an eighth grader, and he does not consider public high school an option for his continuing education. As we consider what colleges want what where our daughter is concerned, we can't help but also consider our son's path.
Panic mode sets in and I wonder, "Does he need a formal program?" "Will a college accept an alternative education?" "Does it matter since he might just start with community college courses sometime within the next four years and will then have a college transcript so schools might not care so much about what he did or didn't do for 'high school'?" "Why do some colleges STILL claim a student, even with an associates degree, needs a high school diploma?" "Does it matter because my son wants art school, and there are plenty of commercial art schools that do not care about this stuff?" "In the end, won't companies hire him based much more on his portfolio, and his ability to express himself in writing and in person, rather than on the college he attended or what his grades were in art school?"
And so it goes, the spiraling questions that whirl and twirl and knot up your neck, shoulders and brain.
If I STOP THE MADNESS a second, I know that the bottom line or point of all of these questions is, "How do I do this right?" It's the age-old question parents ask, no matter whether their children are in private, exclusive schools or in the "worst" school districts in America. It's what parents ask as they decide to enroll their children in lessons of whatever sort. It's what they consider as they sign their shy kid up for theatre to "bring him out," or register their child for basketball because she can't be convinced to come inside from the hoop in the driveway and makes every shot she throws.
It's not even doing it right, but doing it right for their particular child. I mean, "right" for a certain shy kid might mean theatre lessons do help him come out from a shell, while for another shy kid, the lessons are torture. The first child might be "brought out" and become a newscaster, musician, actor, teacher, speaking before crowds regularly. The second child might suffer through it and then find his career in a lab one day, working mostly with glass tubes and vials and interacting only with one person at a time. The first child's memories of theatre are ones he will talk about with co-workers, years he'll credit to his parents for his success. The second child's memories will be buried deeply and when he has his own shy child, he will argue with his spouse about not forcing their shy child into such public displays. He'll cite his success in science and the lab and his pain from those days on the stage as reasons to "not do that to my own kid."
This scenario has many analogies, of course.
As I consider these myriad paths and options for high school and education, I remind myself that my anxiety over it all stems from wanting "the best" for my children so they are "happy" and "successful" in their adult lives. What is best, anyway? Is it "best right now" or "best in the future?" How do I tell what will be best for the future? What is happiness and success? Aren't these defined and applied differently by each individual person?
When, as parents, we claim we want our children's lives free of conflict and disappointment, for what are we really asking? Do we mean it? What if our lives had never held discouraging news or rejection or turmoil? What kind of people would we be if we never had any hardship? When we see characters in film who are portrayed as not really having faced much adversity, we harbor ill-will toward them, and we relish in their final, whether it's their first or not, failure in the film. We cheer for the underdog, right? What kind of people would our children be if they never faced failure, difficulty or disappointment? What if every college to which they applied accepted them? Then, once ensconced in some "ideal" place, they had only wonderful professors and never struggled with a single course. What if upon graduation, they were hired by the first company to which they applied for a job, a job they wanted? Then, as the years passed, they were never overlooked for a promotion, always got raises no matter the economy, and got pregnant on the first try. No one would tolerate them, that's what would become of our children! Everything would be so perfect that if they got the wrong sandwich at lunch one time, they'd be reduced to a teary-eyed whiner for whom no one else would have empathy of any kind.
If you've seen The Social Network, do you feel any compassionate emotion toward the Winklevoss twins? Even if you're a follower of the Dalai Lama, you might find it a reach to feel for their loss at the Olympics in rowing. You'd justify your lack of empathy with the thought, "Who gives a crap? They are rich, have Harvard degrees, family connections, and every opportunity in the world. They lost a rowing race? Big flippin' deal!" Even if you felt an inkling of empathy over their actual loss, you'd quickly think, "It's likely disappointing for them, but it's certainly not the end of their world. They've got LOTS toward which to look forward!"
Even this lengthy self-pep-talk does nothing to relieve the question streaming and screaming through my head, "THAT'S ALL WONDERFUL BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR KIDS RIGHT NOW AND WOULDN'T YOU WISH UPON THEM THE PROBLEMS FACED BY THE WINKELVOSS TWINS OVER SOME OTHER TROUBLE YOU ARE WORRIED THEY MIGHT HAVE?"
This is the dilemma of parenting, we wish our children have a better world than we, and yet we want them to know hardship because it teaches us to value what we have. Like Mac/Apple products, kids don't come with instruction manuals. You have to "log on" to parenting and try things out to see whether they work or not. The scary part is that we can't "reset to factory settings" if we mess up...
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